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Abraham Lincoln 
 
 A ifemnrtai Atorcsa 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR 
 
 THE EXTENSION OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING, 
 
 IN WITHERSPOON HALL, 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 
 
 FEBRUARY 12, 1909 
 
 By 
 ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 President of Lafayette College 
 
 * 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 1909 
 

 i — -... 
 
 
University Extension Society 
 
 ICittroltt (Etftttaanj Hating 
 
 Friday Afternoon, February 12, 1909 
 
 at 3 o'clock 
 
 in wltherspoon hall 
 
 Chairman, MR. ISAAC H. CLOTHIER 
 
 PROGRAM 
 
 Prayer Rev. Robert Johnston 
 
 Introductory Remarks by the Chairman 
 
 Keller's American Hymn 
 
 Glee Club of the University of Pennsylvania 
 
 " Memories of Lincoln " (Whitman) 
 
 Mr. Llewellyn Powys of Cambridge University 
 
 Kipling's Recessional 
 
 Glee Club of the University of Pennsylvania 
 
 The Gettysburg Address Mr. Isaac H. Clothier 
 
 Lowell's Tribute to Lincoln (Commemoration Ode) 
 
 Dr. J. Duncan Spaeth of Princeton University 
 
 Address on Lincoln 
 
 President E. D. Warfield of Lafayette College 
 
 America 
 
 Glee Club of the University of Pennsylvania and Audience 
 
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY 
 MR. ISAAC H. CLOTHIER, CHAIRMAN. 
 
 HAVING accepted, perhaps without due meditation, 
 the duty of this hour, I approach its performance 
 with extreme diffidence and distrust, growing out 
 of a profound appreciation of the vastness of the subject, 
 and the dignity and solemnity of the occasion. 
 
 This day marks the rounded century since the birth of 
 the greatest American. It seems almost inconceivable that 
 Abraham Lincoln passed from life a half-century ago, — 
 lacking seven years — at the early age of fifty-six, nowadays 
 scarcely accounted as the full maturity of ripened man- 
 hood. As I look into the faces of this gathering of 
 earnest men and women, I realize there is a small minority 
 here who, like myself, remember seeing the great President 
 in person, but to the large majority he is but an historic 
 character, something already immense and increasing in 
 stature as the years go by, but he is not, nor can he be a 
 close personal presence as we always think of those, our 
 contemporaries, whom we saw and loved in life. Since 
 Lincoln died there has come into existence, especially 
 during the last twenty-five years, a vast literature concern- 
 ing him, surpassed in volume, perhaps, only by the cele- 
 brated Napoleonic literature relating to one prodigy of 
 human genius, — utterly divorced from conscience, — and 
 including the history of Europe during an eventful period; 
 and this literature has been the growth of three-quarters of 
 a century. I cannot hope to add a single line of value to 
 the Lincoln literature, but as one of the rapidly narrowing 
 circle who saw Abraham Lincoln in the flesh, perhaps my 
 
own most limited but intensely real recollections may find 
 a place this centenary day. 
 
 I first heard of him when I was a youth, in 1858, when 
 the memorable debate took place during the canvass for 
 the Illinois Senatorship between him and Stephen A. 
 Douglas. The former was almost unknown outside of his 
 own State of Illinois, but his opponent was justly esteemed 
 a giant in debate, having met and worsted in the arena of 
 the United States Senate the other giants of those days, 
 who, even though his superiors in intellectual equipment 
 and scholarly statesmanship, dreaded his wonderful mental 
 agility and his almost unequaled skill as a ready debater. 
 The unknown backwoods lawyer, lacking as he came to 
 manhood, even an ordinary common school education, 
 seemed in advance like a baby in his hands, but with 
 straightforward, plain honesty of speech, devoid of rhetori- 
 cal skill or the trained debater's subtlety, to the astonish- 
 ment of the nation he overcame his distinguished opponent, 
 and was crowned victor by the nation and the world! 
 From this time he was a national figure, though for some 
 time longer little known personally outside his own State. 
 In February, i860, he came to New York by invitation, 
 and all the chief men of the metropolis crowded Cooper 
 Institute to see this new great man, the uncouth giant of 
 the West. S 
 
 As Joseph H. Choate, then a young man, tells us of 
 that evening : 
 
 " It was a great audience, including all the noted men- 
 all the learned and cultured — of his party in New York: 
 editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants, critics' 
 They were all very curious to hear him. His fame as a 
 powerful speaker had preceded him. When Mr. Bryant 
 presented him, on the high platform of the Cooper Insti- 
 tute, a vast sea of eager upturned faces greeted him, full of 
 intense curiosity to see what this rude child of the people 
 
 6 
 
was like. He was equal to the occasion. When he spoke 
 he was transformed ; his eyes kindled, his voice rang, his 
 face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. 
 For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow 
 of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery 
 were severely simple. What Lowell called ' The grand 
 simplicities of the Bible,' with which he was so familiar, 
 were reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at orna- 
 ment or rhetoric, without parade or pretence, he spoke 
 straight to the point. If any came expecting the turgid 
 eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have 
 been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his utter- 
 ances. It was marvelous to see how this untutored man, 
 by mere self discipline and the chastening of his own 
 spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his 
 own way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity. 
 That night the great hall, and the next day the whole city, 
 rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he 
 who had come as a stranger departed with the laurels of a 
 great triumph." 
 
 That year, i860, was eventful in the history of the 
 nation ; the great slavery contest had been on for many 
 years, and was then approaching its historic culmination, 
 when the institution went down in fire and blood. The 
 Republican party, born four years before, was by the inex- 
 orable logic of events coming to its own ; the question was, 
 who should be its standard bearer during the crucial period 
 in the life of the nation on which we were about to enter. 
 
 The Republican Convention met in June, and a half- 
 dozen prominent Republicans were placed in nomina- 
 tion, including Mr. Seward, Mr. Chase, Mr. Bates, Judge 
 McLean, and Mr. Lincoln, but the contest was really only 
 between Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln. All eyes were fixed 
 on the former, the undoubted leader of his party, the great 
 statesman of the period; and as his opponent had only just 
 
 7 
 
come into the national attention, the nomination of Mr. 
 Seward was regarded almost a certainty, and to the worldly- 
 wise no other result seemed reasonable. But mighty, though 
 unseen forces were silently working, and the hand of God 
 was leading the nation. On the third ballot, this man from 
 the lowest order of the people, was named the standard 
 bearer to the astonishment of the world, and the solemn 
 march of events proceeded. That political campaign can 
 never be forgotten by those who are privileged to remember 
 it. The " Wide- Awakes " were organized all over the 
 North and marching by tens of thousands, with lanterns 
 and uniforms, were precursors of the armed regiments that 
 a few months later sprang into existence at Lincoln's call to 
 take part in the great conflict of the century. 
 
 Then came the election (how proud I was to cast my 
 first vote, and for Abraham Lincoln), and in due course the 
 inauguration. Mr. Lincoln arrived in Philadelphia on 
 February 21st, on his way to Washington. At the home 
 of a friend, on Sixteenth Street above Chestnut, I saw him 
 pass in an open barouche, and I remember the surprise 
 with which I saw the newly-grown whiskers on the face 
 which up to that time had always been closely shaven. He 
 stood in the barouche as he passed, and removed his hat, 
 and I had a deliberate and impressive view of his tall 
 figure and most expressive countenance, which I have never 
 forgotten. That night he stayed at the Continental Hotel, 
 and the news came to him of his proposed assassination in 
 Baltimore. Next morning at 6.30 I was at the Ninth 
 Street door of the hotel when he came out with the com- 
 mittee and took his seat in an open barouche on his way to 
 raise the flag at Independence Hall. A cordon of police 
 surrounded the carriage, but I succeeded in obtaining a place 
 w here I walked shoulder to shoulder with one of the officers, 
 exactly opposite, and only a few feet from his person. I 
 walked down Chestnut Street observing him carefully, and 
 
 8 
 
listening to his scant conversation till at Sixth Street I was 
 crowded out of my place. The procession rounded the 
 corner, and the party alighted and passed through Inde- 
 pendence Square, and soon appeared on the platform in 
 front of Independence Hall. I stood as near as the great 
 crowd permitted, and saw him plainly and watched him 
 carefully in the delivery of his short address, and his 
 raising of the flag. 
 
 I never saw him again in life. 
 
 Four years and two months after I saw his great 
 funeral which seemed to include the whole nation, as it 
 proceeded from city to city on its way to the tomb at 
 Springfield, Illinois. The day after its arrival in Phila- 
 delphia, his body lay in state in Independence Hall, and I 
 was privileged to have rather a deliberate view. In that 
 four years, he who was at the time of his election almost 
 despised by the so-called great men of the day, had grown 
 to be truly a historic figure, beside which the then great 
 men of the times became pigmies by comparison. As 
 Stanton, who had a few years before greatly undervalued 
 him, said with deep emotion, after watching all night at his 
 bedside, and just after the breath had left his body : 
 He belongs now to the ages. 
 
 And again, 
 
 There lies the greatest master of men the world has 
 ever known. 
 
 I said at the outset ot my remarks, that Abraham 
 Lincoln is esteemed the first American. No one would 
 undervalue the name of Washington, truly the Father of 
 his Country, and his place in history and in the minds of 
 all Americans cannot be filled by any other. But Wash- 
 ington was not of the people ; he came of a distinguished 
 ancestry and into an inheritance of wealth, culture, and 
 exceptional opportunity. We have for him — and our 
 
 9 
 
posterity must always have — a reverential admiration, not 
 unmixed with awe, but in which affection can scarcely be 
 said to have a place, and we must ever regard him as a 
 severely majestic, unapproachable figure. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln was of the mold of the common 
 people. 
 
 The color of the ground was in him, the red earth, 
 The tang and odor of the primal things. 
 
 When we review his extraordinary career, and the 
 history of the nation at that time, can we believe otherwise 
 than that a special Providence surrounded him and this 
 nation in that wonderful epoch ? A backwoodsman, with- 
 out even a common school education, homely of feature 
 and ungainly in person, with everything in appearance 
 against him, he came to the front in a great national crisis 
 and shamed the trained statesmanship and the scholarly 
 culture of the period with his inexorable logic and his 
 command of the purest English, some extracts from which 
 will be read on this occasion, and which are among the 
 finest specimens of our English prose. These marvelous 
 expressions came not from the scholarly and cultured 
 Sumner, or Phillips, or Motley, with generations of culture 
 behind them, nor from the President of Harvard Uni- 
 versity, but from the rail-splitter, trained amid the roughest 
 surroundings, who, notwithstanding, proved to be the 
 genius of common sense and the embodiment of the 
 American conscience of the period. 
 
 Conway said of one of Emerson's sentences, that it 
 " was like the hand of God upon his shoulder." May we 
 not say of some of Lincoln's immortal phrases, that they 
 were the warning voice of God stirring the conscience of 
 the nation, as for instance — "If slavery is not wrong, 
 nothing is wrong." A moral and philosophical argument 
 in eight words. 
 
 10 
 
George William Curtis, speaking of Wendell Phillips 
 at Fanueil Hall, said : "It was that greatest of oratorical 
 triumphs when a supreme emotion lifted the orator to 
 adequate expression. Three such scenes are illustrious in 
 our history — Patrick Henry's electrical defiance of George 
 the III., in the Continental Congress; Wendell Phillips in 
 Fanueil Hall, and Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg — three, 
 and there is no fourth. They transmit, unextinguished, 
 the torch of an eloquence which has aroused nations and 
 changed the course of history." 
 
 The occasion is an inspiration, but with the program 
 before us, for me to extend unduly, would be without 
 excuse. 
 
 The years and the decades have passed, " without haste 
 and without rest," and now the second century dawns. 
 Through its course the American people must cherish with 
 pride and deep emotion the remembrance of the mighty 
 triumph and the mighty sacrifice with which the name of 
 the great emancipator will be forever blended, and the robust 
 example which the first American must remain to the young 
 men of America, while the memory of his life and death are 
 cherished by the nation; and will that not be until the now 
 great Republic, — the hope of mankind — unmindful of its 
 glorious mission in the world, and disregarding the precious 
 lesson of Abraham Lincoln's life, shall forfeit its birthright 
 and its costly regeneration, and unworthily lose its place 
 among the nations of the earth ? May that time never 
 come. 
 
 ii 
 
MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 By ETHELBERT D. WARFIELD, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 HOW inscrutable are the ways of Providence, and 
 who can foretell the destiny of men ? Who 
 could have dreamed that the child who, on the 
 twelfth of February, 1809, was born in the barrens of 
 Kentucky, of illiterate parentage, poor and in the humblest 
 walk of life, would grow up to be not only a leader of 
 men ; not only the emancipator of oppressed and suffering 
 millions ; not only the guardian and conservator of our 
 national union; but one who should combine in himself 
 all these lofty destinies and be the very embodiment of 
 one of the purest, noblest and most unselfish movements 
 which have been recorded upon the pages of human 
 history ? Who should become all this, without for a 
 moment losing the marks of his origin ; without ceasing 
 to be the man of the people : without seeking, or even 
 wishing to cut the ties which bound him to the people 
 from whom he sprang, and to whom he never ceased to 
 belong ? And that a great nation, bound together through 
 the wisdom of his statesmanship, would celebrate the one 
 hundredth anniversary of his birth ? 
 
 In the form and character of Abraham Lincoln there 
 was nothing of the hero of romance : but there was much 
 of the hero of every day life. There was nothing to catch 
 the imagination, no beauty of person, no grace, no wealth 
 poured out by the lavish hand of nature or of art : but 
 
 !3 
 
much to seize the intellect and lay hold upon the heart in 
 the quiet, genial, melancholy man who loved his country 
 better than his life. 
 
 I need not tell again his story. Born in Kentucky, 
 taken to Indiana in his childhood, thence to Illinois, for a 
 time a flatboatman on the Mississippi, then the keeper of 
 a country store, doing all that he did with his might, active, 
 alert, interested in everything which went on about him, 
 quick to learn, ready to apply all that he learned to the 
 problems constantly presented by life in a new state in 
 times of great excitement. One by one he shook off the 
 shackles which bound him, first the link of contentment 
 with the life of narrow struggle for mere existence ; then 
 that of illiteracy ; then that of poverty ; till at last strong 
 in the consciousness of a growing manhood he began to 
 make an impression on his friends and neighbors and to 
 give the first proof of his power to lead men. One thing 
 however it is worth while to note : Lincoln was a self 
 educated man ; by which I do not mean that he was an 
 uneducated man, but that he was educated, and that he 
 educated himself. We are told with what difficulty he 
 obtained books ; and with what devotion he toiled over 
 them. Happily the greatest of books fell early into his 
 hands, captivated his mind and glorified his literary style. 
 We are told also with what pains he practised composi- 
 tion. When he had no paper, planing bits of shingle he 
 wrote essays upon them. He himself tells us how he 
 sought to express himself in the fewest possible words in 
 order that he might get as much as possible upon his 
 shingle. A good training this; training in those important 
 principles of composition — brevity, conciseness, directness. 
 Not only so but he studied the influence of what he wrote 
 upon others, reading his compositions to them, committing 
 them and delivering them as speeches, and also speaking 
 extempore in the field and about the village store, always 
 
 H 
 
 
carefully noting the effect of what he said upon his hearers. 
 Again and again when he saw anything which struck him 
 he wrote down comments upon it, little moral homilies 
 upon his companions, and their ways, upon the virtues and 
 vices which appeared in the rural community where he 
 lived ; essays brief as those of Bacon : less eloquent, less 
 elegant, less elevated than those famous essays, but sharing 
 with them their greatest excellences, brevity and insight. 
 In this school he learned two things : to know himself and 
 to know his fellow men. Only a class it is true, the plain 
 men and women of America, but the reservoir of power in 
 a democratic country. First and last he proved how well 
 he understood them and how capable he was of leading 
 them to the performance of a great and glorious work. 
 It was not till the summer of 1858 that Lincoln 
 attracted national notice. From the date of the repeal 
 of the Missouri Compromise, prohibiting slavery north 
 of 36 deg. 30' north latitude, there had been a steady 
 pro-slavery reaction. The Dred Scott case had deeply 
 accentuated this. The South was desperately in earnest. 
 The North having temporized seemed more and more 
 likely to give way. Of the northern men who favored a 
 policy of laissez /aire with respect to the South's peculiar 
 institution no one after the President was more prominent, 
 not even he was so notable, as Stephen A. Douglas of 
 Illinois. Douglas had been a leader in the reactionary 
 step of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, he was now a bold and 
 unscrupulous defender of its policy, and as a candidate for 
 re-election to the Senate in the winter of 1858 he truckled 
 to the South and its demand of "room for slavery." 
 Lincoln was by general consent brought forward by the 
 Republicans of Illinois to oppose Douglas. Debates 
 were arranged between the two champions and attracted 
 the deepest interest throughout the land. Douglas was a 
 dangerous antagonist. Possessed of high qualities of mind, 
 
 l 5 
 
and a most forcible speaker; he possessed also, and used 
 without scruple, all the arts of the politician. No one 
 played with more skilled hand upon popular prejudices ; 
 no one more shrewdly preached peace, peace, where there 
 was no peace ; no one was more capable of making the 
 worse appear the better cause. But he found in Lincoln 
 one who was scarcely less a master of assemblies and even 
 more a master of the hearts of men, not however on 
 account of an equal mastery of the art of chicane, but 
 through his "brave, old wisdom of sincerity." Indeed 
 his imperturbable good nature, his quiet force of character, 
 his stern, rough-hewn loyalty, already began to change 
 the noble policy he espoused, from a mere moral sentiment 
 to a bugle blast calling men to action. In the very first 
 speech of the campaign Lincoln declared in words of 
 prophetic import: "A house divided against itself cannot 
 stand. I believe that this government cannot endure 
 permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect 
 the Union to be dissolved: I do not expect the house to 
 fall: but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It 
 will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the 
 opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it 
 and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief 
 that it is in course of ultimate extinction or its advocates 
 will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in 
 all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South." 
 Such language though not uncommon for the past thirty 
 years on the passionate lips of Calhoun and his South 
 Carolina constituents, though not unknown to the more 
 impassioned advocates of abolition in the North, was 
 new in the calm assertion of policy of a clear-headed, 
 unsensational northern politician. It brought upon him 
 the fiercest assaults of his political opponents and awoke 
 doubt and fears in the breasts of many of his own party. 
 From that day the die was cast. From that day the 
 
 16 
 
problem grew more and more clear in its statement, and 
 always more and more closely approximated Lincoln's 
 statement. With him it was never to be first and before 
 all else a struggle for emancipation : but a struggle for a 
 Union freed from the great cause of dissension. With 
 him it was never to be a struggle for Union only, but 
 Union with liberty. 
 
 Abolitionists might distrust and oppose him, conserva- 
 tive, reactionary, pro-slavery, union men might refuse his 
 lead ; but he never faltered, though he often went forward 
 with infinite patience. He held the famous sentiment of 
 Jackson: "The Union: it must be preserved ;" and not 
 less the great language which Jefferson made use of in the 
 Declaration of Independence, "all men are created equal, 
 are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
 rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness : " and held them in the spirit of Webster 
 who in his reply to Hayne had declared the sentiment 
 of every true American heart — " Liberty and Union, now 
 and forever, one and inseparable." 
 
 There was nothing of the rhetorician in his utterances. 
 It was their almost judicial calmness which made them 
 seem so rash to conservatives. It was their air of decisive 
 finality which made the abolitionists of the extremer views 
 conclude that he was unfitted to be their standard bearer. 
 As the summer of i860 approached it looked as though 
 he was the choice of no party or faction because he had so 
 confidently chosen the via media. But when the conven- 
 tion met in Chicago for the nomination of a Republican 
 candidate for the Presidency it was obvious to all men that 
 the time was ripe for the Republican party. How could 
 the golden opportunity best be seized. Lincoln, the man 
 who had chosen the via media ; Lincoln, the man who had 
 spoken boldly, but never rashly ; Lincoln, the man whom 
 some doubted because he was too characterless to have 
 
 17 
 

 bitter enemies, whom others wanted because he would be a 
 conservative man at the head of a radical party — received 
 the nomination on the third ballot, because as men said, he 
 was " available." The South was stirred by it. This was 
 the man who had forced Douglas by the overwhelming 
 power of his denunciation of the proslavery attitude to 
 take a position which had destroyed him in the South : 
 if he could lead the pliant and politic Douglas thus far, 
 how far would he lead the antislavery northern men, how 
 far would he not go under the urging of the impatient 
 abolitionists. Neither party knew the man they had to 
 deal with : he did not himself dream of the splendid 
 heights of manhood and statesmanship to which he was to 
 climb before his work should be accomplished. 
 
 He took one step at a time. Infinite patience was 
 united to absolute sincerity. Courage was joined in happy 
 wedlock with conscience. One step at a time and not one 
 backward. 
 
 The country realized as '60 darkened to its close that 
 the long dreaded crisis was at hand. The inevitable conflict 
 which Calhoun had preached, almost as a crusade, for a 
 generation, was at hand. Men doubted if the ties which 
 bound state to state could survive the shock. Philosophers, 
 with sage assumption, told of the instability of republics ; 
 historians ransacked the records of the past and produced 
 endless lists of false analogies to support the theories of 
 the philosophers ; jurists pronounced the constitution 
 fundamentally feeble ; politicians met in conventions 
 threatening dire things if the tool of antislavery fanaticism 
 should be elevated to the presidency ; self satisfied patriots 
 wept and wrung their hands that men should dream of 
 placing a "mountebank," a "mere western joker," in the 
 chair of the chief executive in such a crisis. 
 
 It was a time to try men's souls. There was no lack 
 of men who wanted to save the country. There was only 
 
 18 
 
a lack of those who saw clearly how to do it. Many 
 thought they saw the way. Doctrinaires, blind leaders of 
 the blind. When was there ever a lack of quacks with 
 nostrums fitted for every emergency ? calculated to correct 
 the finances, to abolish poverty, and to introduce peace 
 among parties ? Lincoln was not one of these wiseacres. 
 He said plainly that he did not see just how the country 
 was to be saved, but there was a way, and he was ready to 
 try to find it. 
 
 It is not for us to criticise the men who stood abashed 
 before the problem. Men as wise, as brave, as loyal as 
 we, faltered and failed. The specious pleas of Douglas 
 satisfied many ; the middle way of Bell seemed safe and 
 sure to many a loyal Fabian ; the courtly Breckinridge, 
 manly, earnest, eloquent, seemed to the Southern mind 
 not only loyal, but right; in such company was it necessary 
 to follow the gaunt figure of the Illinois leader? What 
 did he know of statesmanship ? What experience had he 
 to fit him to take the helm in such a gale ? Yet the storm 
 gathered round him. There was something so blunt and 
 straightforward about him that the South went into a 
 frenzy at his candidacy. This was no Don Quixote riding 
 a joust at windmills. This man was in deadly earnest and 
 somehow he had gotten the world to recognize this, and 
 not only so, but that this was a time to be in earnest. 
 Having lost their favorite analogy for abolitionists, the 
 South now sought to call him for the servant instead of 
 the master, Sancho Panza ! Perhaps after all, in the 
 homely, practical philosophy of that much misunderstood 
 character there was a touch much akin to the genius of 
 this new birth of the crude West. How it should fit the 
 occasion remained to be seen. 
 
 Meanwhile vituperation was winning him notice and 
 giving him more and more importance in the campaign. 
 The reaction towards pro-slavery views which had begun 
 
 i9 
 
in 1854 gradually spent itself and the counter movement, 
 which made slow progress at first, advanced with tremendous 
 force in i860 and culminated on November 6th when it 
 became evident that Lincoln by some subtle alchemy 
 had welded the sundered factions in the North into a 
 triumphant party. 
 
 For a time the country seemed to stand aghast at what 
 it had done. In the South the news of his election was 
 like a tocsin of war. South Carolina fulfilled her threat 
 of years standing, which the country had come to think 
 but a cry of "wolf." The national government was 
 paralysed. The disaffected states one by one began to 
 wheel into line. What was the spell of this baleful 
 conjurer at the mere whisper of whose coming a great 
 nation fell into ruins ? 
 
 It was mere panic terror. That there were men high 
 in his party who wanted to destroy slavery root and 
 branch was true. It was also true that these men did 
 not believe that Mr. Lincoln could be counted on in 
 this work, — certainly not for immediate action. But his 
 election, such was the declaration of South Carolina, "was 
 a menace to the South's peculiar institution." A menace? 
 Had not higher things than this been menaced and the 
 country left unshattered ? Had not personal liberty been 
 menaced by the institution of slavery ? Had not peace 
 and good government been menaced by South Carolina on 
 account of the tariff act of 1828 ? Was not the integrity 
 of the Union, surely a higher and a dearer possession than 
 a few slaves were they men or chattels, menaced by her 
 ordinances of secession itself? Yet they declared that this 
 " western attorney " was a menace to this great country ; 
 and asked if it were not better that he should die than 
 that the country should be imperiled. Men asked this 
 question with compressed lips and gleaming eyes. News- 
 papers asked it with fiery threats. But those who asked 
 
 20 
 
were plainly more intent on hurrying on the work of 
 disintegration than ot staying it. The calm, thoughtful 
 man on whom the work of restoring each shattered column 
 to its former place, of maintaining each staunch one where 
 it stood, of preserving our national temple in all its 
 unspoiled symmetry, took no heed of threats, but waited 
 patiently his time. 
 
 How his great heart must have bled as he saw the 
 disintegration going on with not a hand raised to stop 
 it. His task was being made harder every day by the 
 feebleness of Buchanan's administration. Like a tiny 
 stream eating through the levees which hold the great 
 Mississippi in bounds the little thread of disunion senti- 
 ment spread. The little trickling stream fast became a 
 broad destroying flood. How long would it take till all the 
 South should be submerged? Think of the man sitting 
 at his home waiting, waiting, till he could legally spring 
 forward to fill the breach and check the torrent ! 
 
 The scene naturally suggests the last days of the 
 Roman Republic. The picture which Cicero has left us in 
 his letters of the way he sat and watched the swift decay 
 of his beloved country, the hopeless attitude of the con- 
 servatives, the patient hopefulness of the few who had they 
 but a leader ready might have saved the state. Pompey 
 was as futile as our own ineffectual President. The party 
 of order waited then when it might have struck. Lincoln 
 and his party might have struck when they waited. But 
 he was as sagacious as he was patient. It was eternal law ; 
 not merely civil, but moral law, for which he stood. He 
 could wait for years, he could endure anything, rather than 
 sully the great principle of " liberty under law," whose 
 champion he was. 
 
 Amid breathless excitement the eventful day drew on. 
 Threats and curses fell thicker and thicker upon him. 
 Offers of escort from various military organizations came 
 
 21 
 
to him. But he disregarded the one and declined the 
 other. He was still a private citizen. He would travel 
 alone and protected only by conscious rectitude of purpose 
 in the serene contempt which the earnest feel for bluster 
 and braggadocio. The whole country watched with breath- 
 less excitement his progress to Washington. Every loyal 
 breast breathed a sigh of relief when the oath of office was 
 taken and the affairs of the nation were safely in his hands. 
 His inaugural address with its simplicity, seriousness, and 
 impression of resolute purpose created the greatest confi- 
 dence in the North. It was received with derisive mockery 
 in the South — " Whom the gods would destroy, they first 
 make mad." 
 
 With a cabinet representing no faction, with a broad 
 declaration of an earnest intention to maintain both the 
 constitution and the Union in their entirety, Lincoln 
 began the four years of his terrible struggle with over- 
 whelming odds. 
 
 As we look back upon those years we do not see how 
 wofully hopeless the struggle was now and again ; we do 
 not see how nearly alone the President stood. It was ap- 
 parent from the outset that he was to be the tool of no party 
 and of no faction. His immense personality rose slowly 
 but surely above the surging crowd of lesser men. Men 
 struggled to hold him back, men struggled to push him 
 forward ; men chafed at his delay, men cried out against his 
 precipitancy ; men denounced him as false to his promises, 
 as Machiavellian in his duplicity. Unaffected by it all he 
 strode forward to his goal. It seems incredible to us now 
 that he should have been so misunderstood, opposed, 
 thwarted, even by his closest advisers. But gradually men 
 saw the master in him and so soon as this was clearly seen 
 he became powerful for good. The weight of care and 
 responsibility was thenceforth never to be lifted from his 
 shoulders. What wonder then that he should grow into 
 
 22 
 
the type of man we know ; deliberate, patient, self- 
 contained, given at times to long periods of thoughtful 
 silence, deeply tinged with melancholy. Those who were 
 near to him tell us that he was wont at times to sit for 
 hours absorbed in thought, looking neither to the right nor 
 to the left. And yet through it all, no hasty act broke the 
 serene dignity of his life, no unmeasured word revealed 
 the over burdened spirit, he moved with the unswerving 
 certainty of one of nature's forces to his goal. 
 
 No man in the world's history ever passed through so 
 great a crisis with more simple, unpretentious manliness. 
 Men watched his progress with ever increasing wonder and 
 admiration. Day by day he revealed new qualities. Fresh 
 problems constantly confronted him, inherently difficult 
 and often rendered almost impossible of successful solution 
 by the want of unity in his supporters. But each demand 
 upon him seemed to create the power to meet it. He 
 grew in resources almost hourly. Like the athlete in train- 
 ing, his powers of mind took on a new strength with each 
 exertion. Thus was revealed his wonderful reserves of 
 mental and moral power. No one dreamed how much 
 power he possessed. Nor would it have been natural if 
 they had. Lincoln said of himself: "I claim not to have 
 controlled events, but confess plainly that events have con- 
 trolled me." Had he tried to control the events of those 
 stormy years it would have made ruin inevitable. All he 
 could hope to do was to meet each problem as it presented 
 itself with the utmost resources which he could command 
 and direct it as far as possible. He battled bravely with 
 each and all ; he often had to be content with only half 
 what he strove for, but he made no concessions. 
 
 No episode in his career has been so misunderstood 
 as his management of the slavery question. Even many 
 who are well content with the result cannot to this day 
 see the plain practical logic of events which controlled his 
 
 2? 
 
policy in this matter. The position which he took in the 
 first inaugural recognized the right of property in the 
 slaves of the South, the legality of the fugitive slave 
 legislation, and seemed to place him in accord with the 
 views of the Union men of the border states. Personal 
 pledges too were given that he had no thought of destroy- 
 ing property in slaves. These pledges were generally 
 conditional and those to whom they were given never 
 fulfilled their part, but they did not refrain for that reason 
 from casting stones at him. That his declared policy was 
 his actual policy there is no just ground to doubt. That 
 he afterwards abandoned it does not prove the contrary. 
 The captain who is forced under stress of weather to cast 
 his cargo overboard does not thereby prove that when he 
 left port he meant to abandon it. In '61 there was 
 enough to do without assailing outright the possession of 
 slaves ; the urgent demand was to stop the extension of 
 slavery in the territories, a task, which a wise man might 
 well think enough for present thought. And Mr. Lincoln 
 was not the man to anticipate. True, he was utterly without 
 fear; ready to undertake whatever was necessary; blind 
 some thought to the real peril; but pacification without 
 sacrifice of principle was his first aim. 
 
 To this generation it seems that the day had fully come 
 for the axe to be laid to the root of the tree ; that no 
 greater evil than a patched up truce, leaving the great 
 issue unsettled could have happened to the country. But 
 the prayer "Give peace in our time, O Lord," is a very 
 natural petition and one to which the heart of every lover 
 of his country will respond with a deep amen ! So there 
 were few Union men in 1 86 1 who would not have been 
 glad to have had peace on the basis of the status quo. So 
 well was this understood that the South did not believe 
 that the North would fight at all. At a conference of 
 Confederate officers held early in 1 86 1 the duration of 
 
 24 
 
hostilities was discussed and Robert Toombs declared that 
 in six weeks the North would abandon the struggle. 
 When Basil Duke, then a young officer from Missouri, 
 afterwards a dashing General of Cavalry, " the brains of 
 Morgan's command," ventured to question this view he 
 was heard with amazement and derision. 
 
 Lincoln delayed long. He sternly repressed unsanc- 
 tioned acts of emancipation by army officers. At last 
 when emancipation came, it came when it could be justified. 
 The armies had rallied from defeat and were generally 
 victorious ; the Confederates after ample warning had per- 
 sisted in resistance to regularly constituted authority ; the 
 act itself is amply justifiable as a war measure. The 
 methods of its execution are above criticism. 
 
 The justness of the destruction of any kind of property 
 in time of peace by an amendment to the Constitution 
 might be doubted — if the right of ownership in that 
 property were fundamentally wrong and injurious to the 
 Republic it ought not to be doubted. Such was the form 
 in which the proposition must have eventually come before 
 the country had not the South precipitated the conflict. 
 It is written " that he who taketh the sword shall perish by 
 the sword." The administration accepted the appeal, the 
 arbitrament according to all the rules of war was regularly 
 determined. 
 
 If any objection can be found to the action of the 
 President it can only be from that class from which I 
 spring, the Southern Union slaveholders. I thank God 
 that my father and grandfathers while yielding to the evil 
 of the social order in which their lives were cast consistently 
 opposed it, and actively favored emancipation. To such 
 men it might have seemed as if they were being punished 
 for the sins of others ; how much more true is it to say 
 that it was their privilege to surrender so much for their 
 fatherland. 
 
 '5 
 
The country has not only long ago acquiesced, but 
 joyfully acquiesced, in this part of Lincoln's work. There 
 can be little doubt that when History sets her seal upon it, 
 it will be that of highest approval. 
 
 While the war was going on, with alternation of the 
 bitterness of defeat and the pain of triumph over brethren ; 
 while the slavery problem was being cautiously worked 
 out ; one of the most serious complications of foreign 
 affairs which we have ever had to face was demanding the 
 utmost diplomacy. France and England, partly misunder- 
 standing, partly misconstruing, wholly ready to profit by 
 our misfortunes, hung about our shores. We were fully 
 occupied at home, it seemed as if they might treat us as 
 they would. By a judicious mingling of boldness with 
 prudence ; by decision in action coupled with the utmost 
 discretion and moderation in speech ; Lincoln weathered the 
 storm and placed us in a condition to demand as a powerful 
 and once more united nation that reparation which we had 
 declared we should seek. The outside world — perhaps 
 unconscious of the immensity of the tasks at home — have 
 agreed in pronouncing the diplomatic triumphs of this ad- 
 ministration the most admirable of Lincoln's achievements. 
 
 While Lincoln was still alive Lowell compared him to 
 Henry IV. of France — Henry of Navarre. He said of 
 Henry, "that he was as full of wise saws and modern 
 instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the 
 thoughtful, practical, human, and thoroughly earnest man, 
 around whom the fragments of France were to gather them- 
 selves till she took her place again as a planet of the first 
 magnitude in the European system." To my mind the 
 comparison is more specious than real. And it fails most 
 in just this point. Henry gave way to outside pressure, 
 sacrificed principle to policy, a great cause to personal 
 advantage. Henry, indeed, consolidated France politically, 
 but it was a triumph of the lower element the fruits of 
 
 26 
 
which his grandson reaped when he repealed the edict of 
 Nantes. Henry, indeed, built up a great and splendid 
 dynasty for himself but at the cost of building it on the 
 sands, and when the French and Spanish Bourbons seemed 
 to have their heads in the skies the winds smote upon 
 them and the result is known and read of all men. It was 
 as if Lincoln had yielded to the slave interest, had accepted 
 that condition of which he earlier spoke and saved the 
 Union, all slave, old and new, North and South. Men 
 might have hailed him as the preserver of his country : 
 men might have lived happily for a generation, for a cen- 
 tury, in a country so saved : but what would have been the 
 legacy to posterity? No, the likeness, even heightened as 
 it was, two years after Lowell wrote, by the analogy of 
 Henry's death by the dagger of Ravailliac in " the deep 
 damnation of his taking off," is rather a striking contrast. 
 Lincoln, wavering never, climbed higher by devotion to a 
 loftier principle than he dreamed of. His legacy to his 
 country is a united people purged of the great cause of 
 dissension — all free. Think for a moment what France 
 might have become if Henry had spent his great energies 
 in securing full freedom to Protestantism, instead of mere 
 toleration ; and had won not only that, but had succeeded 
 in leaving a France wholly, permanently, gloriously Prot- 
 estant. France might never had had a Richelieu or a 
 Mazarin ; a Vendome or a Grand Monarch ; but she 
 would have been spared a Voltaire and a Rousseau ; a 
 Robespierre and a Marat ; and all the wretched ruthless- 
 ness which sprang from that rabble devil-born rioting in 
 the most terrible of revolutions. 
 
 The greatest loss which as a people we are to experience 
 in connection with Mr. Lincoln is the fading knowledge of 
 the man as he actually was. To idealize him is to miss the 
 lesson of his life. His birth, origin, self-education, home- 
 liness of language, broad humor, were his very self. His 
 
 27 
 
serene trust in God was as characteristic and not less his 
 want of confidence in Man. Good old Puritan Calvinism, 
 sprung, not out of the teaching of men, but out of the 
 teaching of nature and the promptings of his own heart. 
 
 His genial humour was an immense power. It warmed 
 his personal relations with men ; it softened the Doric 
 sternness of his mind ; it gave point and apt illustration to 
 a policy which rose in itself above his advisers as well as 
 his critics ; it was a shield to shelter half accepted truths 
 from too close scrutiny, to protect a half developed policy 
 from criticism at the wrong moment. 
 
 Perhaps there is no more pertinent example of this 
 than his famous reply to the Confederate emissaries at Old 
 Point Comfort. He declined to treat for peace with the 
 Confederate government. It had no legal existence. He 
 was only willing to deal with the states and receive them 
 back to their allegiance as the first step to negotiations. 
 The emissaries entered into a lengthy and didactic dis- 
 cussion of the relation of the question to constitutional 
 law, and finally said : " There is a precedent for treating 
 with rebels in arms, Charles I. having done so." Lincoln 
 at once replied, " I do not very particularly recall the case 
 cited : but I do recall that Charles I. lost his head." 
 
 He was a man of the people and his career is the 
 highest expression of the possibilities of popular govern- 
 ment. As was to be expected, a certain homely penetra- 
 tion, good nature, and hard-headed sense were among his 
 equipment. It was the extraordinary breadth and balance 
 of these powers which was so remarkable. Men of the 
 people have frequently possessed a pungent, epigrammatic 
 oratory but rarely touched with the tenderness which tempts 
 to tears. This Lincoln possessed in the highest degree. 
 His inaugurals are full of power. They go to the mind 
 with a force that depends on nothing except the justness 
 and truth of their statements. They do not so much 
 
 28 
 
arouse enthusiasm, as stir the heart with a passion akin 
 to sorrow. In his immortal address at Gettysburg he 
 rises to a height which no other American orator has 
 attained. It is epic in its fresh unpretentious strength, it 
 speaks to the heart, not through figures and tropes, but in 
 its own language and directly. Read this speech and then 
 compare it with the funeral oration of Pericles, that splendid 
 monument of Attic eloquence, and how much more soul 
 stirring are the simple words of the American. The adorn- 
 ments of the golden period of Greek rhetoric become tawdry 
 in comparison ; they seem the tinsel of the tongue, not the 
 beaten gold of the heart's full utterance. Compare it with 
 Edward Everett's well nigh forgotten oration, to which it 
 was meant to be but a "grace before meat" — and we see 
 that the highest oratory is the expression of the feelings of 
 the heart rather than the outgoings of the intellect. Let 
 Lincoln's name be forgotten, let his memory become a tale 
 that is told, and in some distant day let some unexpecting 
 hand unearth this oration and his second inaugural address 
 and men will wonder what mighty heart pulsed out such 
 tender words ; what brain conceived thoughts of such simple 
 grandeur. If our children are taught this brief oration, 
 they will not let his memory die or his name be effaced 
 from the roll of the good and great. 
 
 If we compare Lincoln with those about him we see 
 how he rises above them ; how he seems to dominate them 
 because of his complete understanding of the relative 
 importance of the problems of his age. When we contrast 
 him with those opposed to him we begin to understand 
 how great he was. One contrast is forced upon anyone 
 who considers whence he sprang and to what height he 
 climbed. He and Jefferson Davis were both born in 
 Kentucky in 1808 and 1809. Both removed from Ken- 
 tucky in childhood, Davis going to the Southwest, Lincoln 
 to the Northwest. Both served in the Black Hawk war, 
 
 29 
 
Davis as an officer in the regular army, Lincoln in the 
 volunteers. Both were presidential electors in 1844, 
 Davis voting for Polk and the extension of slavery, 
 Lincoln for Henry Clay and the principles of progress. 
 Both were elected to Congress, the one in 1845, tne other 
 in 1846. Davis was inaugurated as President of the 
 Confederacy February 8, 1861, Lincoln as President of the 
 United States March 4, 1861. The details of such a com- 
 parison are too many to be more than suggested here. How 
 character rises above station ; conscience above ambition ! 
 
 Set over against him by a strange destiny was another 
 who seemed to possess as a birthright all that Lincoln 
 accomplished. Born in Kentucky, the descendent of 
 statesmen, rising step by step along the natural path of 
 political distinction, in the Legislature, in Congress, in 
 the chair of the Vice-President, John Cabell Breckinridge 
 stood face to face with Abraham Lincoln as his competitor 
 for the highest office in the gift of the people. The one 
 Kentucky looked upon as the true heir — Isaac the son of 
 promise — the other as Ishmael, child of the bond servant. 
 The courtly Breckinridge, possessing every virtue which 
 the nation delighted to honor, possessing every quality 
 deemed necessary to produce a perfect statesman, the 
 confidence and affection of all who knew him in private 
 life, the admiration and good will even of his opponents 
 in public life, handsome, courageous, eloquent; seemed to 
 cast completely in the shadow that gaunt, ungraceful, 
 uncouth brother who had wandered away from the old 
 Kentucky home, who had delved in the virgin Western 
 soil until he had become stained with its clay and marked 
 with its ague fits, until he had come to love a fact rather 
 than a figure of rhetoric, to value truth above tradition, 
 and morality rather than political success. 
 
 As they faced each other, there seemed no room for 
 rivalry ; there seemed no possibility that having come 
 
 3° 
 

 along the paths which they had followed hitherto any 
 man should turn away from that noble and attractive 
 figure to embrace the views of his ungainly countryman. 
 But nature sometimes sets her stamp of greatness on 
 uncouth forms. The highest greatness with her transcends 
 the graceful proportions and regular arrangements which 
 are so pleasing to the well trained eye. Breaking away 
 from all set rule she now and again raises to the very 
 highest place one who possesses a spell which men call 
 genius, but which God loves as truth. Love for a 
 kinsman cannot blind me to the fact that he was wrong ; 
 that he committed himself to the maintenance of an evil, 
 which God had decreed should be blotted from the face 
 of the earth ; while Lincoln with the power of profound 
 conviction, and the vision of a true seer, took God for his 
 helper and truth for his guide and led a perplexed people 
 to the only conclusion consistent with righteousness and 
 consonant with human progress. 
 
 The vulgar mind delights in men of a single quality, 
 and when it finds men of breadth and height, richly en- 
 dowed by nature and nobly fashioned by circumstance, 
 insists upon appraising them in a single phrase. But great 
 men have atmosphere, that subtle indefinable quality which 
 we call personality, that fine reserve which makes them at 
 once the delight and the riddle of their time. Men do not 
 know how to anticipate what they are going to do, because 
 they cannot see with their eyes. Men cannot estimate 
 what they did, because they only comprehend part of the 
 plan and part of the performance. We may oftentimes be 
 satisfied with the broken fragments of such men's per- 
 formances and so men delight to fasten upon Lincoln's 
 patriotism, his humanity, his humor, or any other of a half 
 dozen conspicuous qualities. Forgetful for a time that he 
 possessed other qualities as noble and as enobling. 
 
 None of these is more engaging than his compassion. 
 
 3 1 
 
Nor is it more often illustrated than in his frequent pardon- 
 ing of deserters. Real as the compassion, the human 
 sympathy, the kindness of heart that prompted him to 
 these acts was, a large public policy lay behind them. He 
 could hardly have withstood Mr. Stanton's severe criticism 
 and open opposition, and the violent antagonism of the 
 regular army, unless this had been the case. He well 
 recognized that so dreadful a struggle taxing to the utmost 
 the resources of the people, demanding volunteers and 
 unpopular drafts, could not be carried through by drastic 
 measures. It was necessary that the people should realize 
 that the bitter business of the war was being done at as 
 cheap a price as possible, and a wise and generous recog- 
 nition that the homesick boy was not of much value in the 
 camp as a soldier, and might be of a great value in the 
 home, especially after he had recovered his moral tone, was 
 a shrewd estimate of popular feeling, as well as a noble 
 concession to the human heart. 
 
 And indeed Mr. Lincoln knew how to reach the human 
 heart. Sometimes he traveled the king's highway — as in 
 the Gettysburg address — right to the castle gates and sum- 
 moned it as a rightful lord ; sometimes he loitered by the 
 winding way leading to the postern opened by jest and 
 story, as when he read immediately before proposing to his 
 cabinet his Emancipation Proclamation a humorous chapter 
 from Artemus Ward. Sometimes he passed through the 
 secret gate of sympathy and tears, as in his immortal letter 
 to Mrs. Bixby. Always he found entrance where he would, 
 even at last into the heart of Southern men and women, 
 when his sympathy for an oppressed and enslaved race was 
 transferred to a war-worn and exhausted people whose cup 
 of bitterness he would fain sweeten with a just peace and a 
 generous reconstruction. 
 
 That he possessed in full measure the saving gift of 
 humor sometimes obscures the fact which he forcibly 
 
 3 2 
 
asserted for himself that he was no mere joker. " I believe," 
 he said, " I have a popular reputation of being a story 
 teller, but I do not deserve the name in its general sense, 
 for it is not the story itself but its purpose or effect that 
 interests me. I often avoid a long and serious discussion 
 by others, or a laborious explanation on my own part, by a 
 short story that illustrates my point of view. So the 
 sharpness of a refusal or the edge of a rebuke may be 
 blunted by an appropriate story so as to save wounded 
 feeling and yet serve the purpose. No, 1 am no simple 
 story teller, but story telling as an emolient saves me very 
 much friction and disturbance." 
 
 A man who plays both with laughter and with tears upon 
 the cords of the human heart must be careful to keep his 
 own heart in tune, responsive to every noble impulse. That 
 Lincoln did this is the common testimony. The strongest 
 evidence that can be given of this is his magnanimity, the 
 largeness of mind which enabled him to make those who had 
 been his political rivals his cabinet advisers, and to tolerate 
 the bureaucratic manner of Mr. Stanton. The same quality 
 appears in his dealing with Horace Greeley and the New York 
 Tribune, and the radical members of Congress. It finds 
 perhaps its fullest expression in his dealing with his two great 
 ministers who would fain have been his rivals. We stand 
 aghast to-day at the infatuation which prompted Seward to 
 submit his "thoughts for the President's consideration" on 
 the ist of April, 1861. Nothing could better illustrate the 
 way in which the men who were close to him had as yet 
 failed to take his measure. A violent man would have 
 immediately dismissed the secretary. A weak man would 
 have sought an opportunity of ridding himself of so uncom- 
 fortable a companion. Lincoln proved his greatness by the 
 quiet and courageous policy which retained the man in his 
 position and taught the cabinet officer his place. Not less 
 conspicuous was the generosity which at a subsequent time, 
 
 33 
 
after Chase had been obliged to retire from the cabinet 
 because of his extraordinary want of judgment and loyalty, 
 led Lincoln to offer him the greatest office in the gift of the 
 President. There are few men in the history of the world 
 who could have done so magnanimous an act as to appoint 
 Mr. Chase to the Chief Justiceship of the Supreme Court 
 of the United States when he was an avowed rival and a 
 disgraced minister, and it only adds to the nobility of the 
 deed that the appointment was an act as patriotic as generous, 
 for there was no one better fitted to discharge the duties of 
 that great office. This act proved Mr. Lincoln to be truly 
 magnanimous. This noble word has not always had exactly 
 the same significance, but it has always expressed qualities 
 of mind and heart which our great President conspicuously 
 possessed. Lord Bacon gave us a measure for a man when 
 he said : " Magnanimity no doubt consisteth in contempt of 
 peril, contempt of profit, and in meriting of the times wherein 
 one liveth." And no man ever more perfectly filled that 
 measure. 
 
 I shall not dwell upon that dreadful hour which brought 
 death swift, unlooked for, to close a half finished career. 
 God who governs the destinies of men is inscrutable in his 
 providence. Humanly speaking Lincoln's work was but 
 begun. He alone had the grasp to hold the problems of 
 reconstruction in his mighty hand : he alone could hope to 
 pass through the dark days of doubt and jealousy and pain, 
 wisely and well. No man ever died more inopportunely. 
 No man has been more missed out of the counsels of the 
 nation than he. I know it has been the custom to take a 
 different view. Some have said that he saved his fame in 
 passing away, because he was unequal to the task before 
 him ; more appreciative critics have said that no future 
 " could copy fair his past." To my mind he had hitherto 
 but been fighting his way to a congenial sphere of work. 
 For the work before him was congenial, fitted to his peculiar 
 
 34 
 
powers of mind, and had his hand but been upon the helm 
 the war echoes which long lingered in the hill country of the 
 Carolinas, by the silent bayous of the Mississippi, and in the 
 wild forests of Arkansas, had soon been lost in one universal 
 jubilee. Our country is one. His fame is the possession 
 of no state or section. To the white man of Carolina and 
 Louisiana his labors brought a blessing quite as much as to 
 the black man. Another generation will surely see this. 
 
 The words with which President Lincoln closed his 
 immortal address at Gettysburg may well constitute for us 
 a sacred trust. "We highly resolve that they shall not 
 have died in vain ; that this nation under God shall have a 
 new birth of freedom and that government of the people, 
 by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the 
 earth." This new birth of freedom included a serene trust 
 in the good providence of God, an abiding faith in the 
 Union as free and making free, a courageous confidence in 
 the ability of all men without regard to race or color to 
 profit by free institutions, and a firm purpose that the black 
 man established in his rights to life and liberty should be 
 guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness. We may 
 well count it a specific charge to us to see that the black 
 man, no longer slave or freedman, but free born and with 
 free born aspirations shall share the privileges of this great 
 people once more united in prosperity under the good provi- 
 dence of God. It is for us to see that his ignorance is 
 replaced through systematic education, that his passions are 
 subdued by moral training, that his capacities of mind and 
 heart are called into activity by a generous sympathy, and 
 that his manhood is challenged by a helpfulness worthy of 
 the man who gave his life that this Union might be all free. 
 The way of the cross has for us no rational explanation. 
 As Whittier says: 
 
 The healing of his seamless robe 
 Is by our beds of pain. 
 
 35 
 
If we would triumph with Him, we must also suffer with 
 
 Him. 
 
 The assassin dropped into the alembic the last bitter drop. 
 The subtle alchemy of fellowship and love has made of that 
 bitter draught the tonic of a new patriotism. 
 
 We may not be able to explain, but our poets have 
 enabled us in some measure to understand the blow that 
 blasted forty million hopes. No one has caught the agony 
 too deep for tears as Whitman has. But after the bitterness 
 of his cry it is to Isaiah that we who have entered into the 
 fruitage of his life must turn for an interpretation. 
 
 O Captain ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 
 The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we 
 
 sought is won ; 
 The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all 
 
 exulting, 
 While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim 
 
 and daring; 
 But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 
 O the bleeding drops of red, 
 Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
 Fallen cold and dead. 
 
 O Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 
 Rise up,— for you the flag is flung— for you the bugle 
 
 trills ; 
 For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths — for you the 
 
 shores a-crowding, 
 For you they call, the swaying mass— their eager faces 
 
 turning ; 
 Here Captain ! dear father ! 
 This arm beneath your head ! 
 It is some dream that on the deck 
 You've fallen cold and dead. 
 
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and 
 
 still ; 
 My father does not feel my arm he has no pulse nor 
 
 will ; 
 The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed 
 
 and done ; 
 From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object 
 
 won -, 
 Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells ! 
 But I with mournful tread, 
 Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
 Fallen cold and dead. 
 
 " Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God. Speak 
 ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her, that her warfare is 
 accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, for she hath received of 
 the Lord's hand double for all her sin." 
 
 37 
 
KETTESLINUS, PHILADELPHIA 
 
 

 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 A Memorial Address