Class. 
 
 Book 
 
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 "ABRAHAM LINCOLN" 
 
 AN ORATION BY 
 
 THE REV. SAMUEL J. SKEVINGTON 
 
 DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF 
 
 The Lincoln Centennial Celebration 
 
 Y. M. C. A. HALL, NYACK - ON - HUDSON 
 
 FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12th, 1909 
 
"ABRAHAM LINCOLN" 
 
 AN ORATION BY 
 THE REV. SAMUEL J. SKEVINGTON 
 
 DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF 
 
 The Lincoln Centennial Celebration 
 
 AT 
 
 Y.M.CA. HALL, NYACK - ON - HUDSON 
 
 FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12th, 1909 
 
 Issued by a Few Citizens of Nyack-on-Hudson who 
 are Lovers of the Memory of Abraham Lincoln 
 
 JOURNAL OFFICE 
 1909 
 
44££&Ia!££&- 
 
 fW 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 "There was a man sent from God whose name was" 
 Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 On the 1 2th day of the second month of the year 1 809, 
 the birth year of a peculiarly brilliant galaxy of great lights, 
 among whom were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edgar Allan 
 Poe and Alfred Tennyson, stars of the first magnitudes in 
 the firmament of poetry; Chopin and Mendelssohn, master 
 workmen in the charmed world of music; Charles Darwin, 
 the great pioneer of modem science ; William Ewart Glad- 
 stone, the Grand Old Man of British statesmanship, and 
 Samuel Francis Smith, the humble author of the immortal 
 national hymn, "My Country 'Tis of Thee"; just one hun- 
 dred years ago to-day was born the noblest and grandest 
 of them all, the Great American, the incarnation of the 
 spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the embodiment 
 of the new Democracy, the preserver of the Union, the 
 emancipator of the negro slave, the first of the hallowed 
 trinity of America's presidential martyrs. The "Immortals" 
 among the sons of men are strangely few, but though no star 
 came down to twinkle its prophetic homage over the rude 
 log-cabin, and no angel-song floated on the wintry air, and 
 none of the wise men in the east so much as dreamed that 
 a kingly man was likely to be born in the rugged and un- 
 
courtly West, the whole world recognizes to-day that he 
 who was born of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, in the lonely clear- 
 ing of the Kentucky forests, was destined by high heaven to 
 be enshrined in the topmost circle of the temple of humanity, 
 among the sublimest of the sons of men. 
 
 It remains for coming generations to trace the stream 
 of heredity through the humble lines of his known ancestry 
 to the yet hidden springs of his towering grandeur, but for 
 the present he stands before us a man of the soil, a mysteri- 
 ous enigma like unto Melchizedek, to be explained by noth- 
 ing that we know, either of his blood or his training. He is 
 the one great man and mystery and miracle of the Nineteenth 
 Century. 
 
 His mother — his "angel-mother," as he called her — to 
 whom, like every other man who ever becomes worth while, 
 he owed more than to any other human being, was a woman 
 of marked gentleness, intelligence and piety. Though she 
 succumbed to the rigors and hardships of her pioneer life 
 before the boy had spanned his first decade, she had already 
 impressed deep upon his sensitive spirit the love of truth and 
 justice, the integrity of heart, and the reverence for God and 
 things divine, that remained with him, conspicuous charac- 
 teristics, to the end of his days. Some years later, when 
 his honest and humble father married Sarah Bush Johnson, 
 the son of Nancy Hanks was blessed by the helpful sym- 
 pathy and ministering love of a second mother. 
 
 His school life was of the scantiest; he was the graduate 
 of no scholastic institution, but all his days he was a brilliant 
 
student in the university of hard work and hard knocks. But 
 he loved to read, and what is worth more, and alas! much 
 more rare, he loved to think; he thought more than he read, 
 and though his books were few, his study of them was so 
 thorough that it more than compensated for the scantiness of 
 his library resources. He had extraordinary qualities of 
 mind. From a boy he could never tolerate the hearing of 
 that which he could not understand, and accepted every 
 "dark saying" as a challenge to be fought out to a clear un- 
 derstanding. Once on the trail of an idea, there was no rest 
 of mind until it was not only fairly caught, but completely 
 mastered, until, in his own words, he had "bounded it north 
 and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it 
 west." 
 
 His was that vision of mind that pierced through the ex- 
 ternals, the surface matters, and gripped the foundation 
 facts and eternal principles, and then his was the power to 
 express them in words so simple and phrases so clear that, 
 like Him who spake as never man spake, "the common peo- 
 ple heard him gladly," and understood. 
 
 He may have lacked some things the schools could have 
 given, but Nature had endowed him with the highest order 
 of an uncommon commodity that no school could supply — 
 the grace of common sense. His was "the wisdom without 
 learning" to such a degree that Jeff Davis declared he had 
 "more common sense than any man in America," and 
 Lowell called him "the incarnation of the common sense of 
 the people." 
 
In moral character he was unmarred, clean and pure, 
 and uncontaminated by a single vice. There are no dark 
 and dismal passages in his life over which the mantle of 
 charity need be thrown to hide any ugly unseemliness. He 
 could have said, with Spurgeon, the sainted preacher, "You 
 may write my life across the sky. I have nothing to con- 
 ceal." Living in a ruggedly honest but roughly uncultured 
 civilization, among a people given to much drinking and 
 loud swearing, with a strange nazaritism he held himself 
 aloof from both, never so much as tasting intoxicating liquor 
 and never soiling his lips with profane speech. 
 
 At the age of 19, after a childhood and youth cheerless 
 enough, he emerged from the shadows of the Kentucky for- 
 ests, as the pilot of his father's prairie schooner, transport- 
 ing the family to the new home in Indiana, giving little prom- 
 ise of becoming and doing what the oncoming years were to 
 unfold of glorious character and heroic deed. 
 
 Soon after having helped his father to comfortably settle 
 in the still newer home in Macon County, Illinois, to which 
 the Lincolns had emigrated two years after their Indiana 
 settlement, Abraham, now having reached the years of man- 
 hood, announced his intention of leaving home in quest of 
 his own independent fortune. Going to New Salem, he 
 made an inauspicious beginning by buying a business on 
 notes, failing, and retiring, with nothing for his trouble but 
 a little experience and a considerable debt, from which it 
 took him some time to extricate himself, but which he paid to 
 the last cent. 
 
Then he turned his hand to land surveying, becoming 
 deputy county surveyor, and also held the office of post- 
 master, carrying the weekly mail in his hat, and delivering 
 it as he chanced to meet those to whom the letters might be 
 addressed. In connection with his administration of this un- 
 important federal office an incident is chronicled which is 
 most significant as an illustration of his scrupulous honesty. 
 During his incumbency the post office at New Salem was 
 discontinued, and by some oversight the balance of cash on 
 hand, which amounted to sixteen or eighteen dollars, was 
 not called for. Then having taken up the study of law, he 
 removed to Springfield, where he tasted some of the bitterest 
 poverty of his life, being compelled again and again to bor- 
 row from his friends that he might have the bare necessities 
 of life. But when, one fine day, a government official un- 
 expectedly called for that long-forgotten post office balance, 
 the young law student calmly walked over to his boarding 
 house and came back with an old blue sock, in which were 
 found the identical silver and copper coins that had been 
 paid him for postage, and footing up cent for cent to the 
 exact amount of the draft. In the face of penniless poverty 
 and the humiliating necessity of borrowing, he had never 
 touched the trust funds in his care, even though seemingly 
 forgotten by the Government for several years. No wonder 
 they called him "Honest Abe." 
 
 In the meantime he was training his mind and studying 
 law, and while he never became one of the great lights of 
 the legal fraternity, he did become a successful jury lawyer, 
 
as honest and faithful to truth and justice in his professional 
 as he ever was in his private life. 
 
 In 1 834 he was elected to the State Legislature, trudging 
 on foot the hundred miles to and from Vandalia, which was 
 then the capital of Illinois ; and after having served four terms 
 and declining further re-election, in 1 846 he was sent to the 
 National Congress. Declining the offer of the Governorship 
 of the Territory of Oregon, which would, in all seeming 
 probability, have changed the whole current of his life, and 
 not impossibly of the whole nation, Lincoln dropped out of 
 politics and applied himself to the practise of the law. But 
 in 1 854 the slumbering giant was aroused. The time for 
 which a far-seeing Providence had planned and prepared 
 him was now at hand. The iniquitous Dred Scott decision 
 of Judge Taney, the Missouri Compromise, and the "squatter 
 sovereignty" policy championed and advocated by Senator 
 Douglas, of Lincoln's own State; the excitement attending 
 the ever increasing business of the so-called "Underground 
 Railway," the imperious demands of the slave-holding South 
 for the protection and expansion of what they called the 
 "divine institution," the impassioned attacks of the New Eng- 
 land abolitionists on what they called the "sum of all vil- 
 lainies," and the gathering clouds of the irrepressible con- 
 flict that could no longer be doubted or delayed, all this 
 formed a condition that needed and called Abraham Lincoln 
 to the mission of his life, 
 
 In the greatest intellectual duel on the stage of our polit- 
 ical history since Webster and Hayne crossed their Damas- 
 
 8 
 
cus blades in the U. S. Senate, Lincoln fought Douglas on 
 the fundamental issue of human freedom, taking higher and 
 bolder ground than had ever yet been assumed by any 
 American statesman. 
 
 It was now that he made his immortal utterance, "A 
 house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the 
 Government cannot endure permanently half slave and 
 half free." 
 
 That brave and heroic stand cost him a seat among the 
 Senators of his time, but it gave him a throne among the 
 immortals of all time. 
 
 Lacking in the personal charms and graces of the orator, 
 but with able and impressive speech, of equal beauty and 
 simplicity, blood earnestness and force of logic, he stood and 
 plead for the life of his country and the liberty of her 
 four million swarthy slaves, as Demosthenes plead for 
 Athens and Cicero for Rome and Burke for India, and 
 while Douglas won the election, the verdict of the nation 
 awarded the moral and intellectual victory to Lincoln, and 
 the aroused people rallied to his standard, and crowned his 
 brow with the proudest laurel that any free man ever wore. 
 They recognized him as the man of the hour, as we now 
 recognize him as the man of the century and one of the few 
 men of the ages, the man "sent from God." 
 
 The American principle was on trial for its life. The 
 fate of the great Republic, dedicated from its birth by the 
 immortal Declaration of Independence, and the heroic blood 
 of the Revolutionary fathers, to the proposition of human 
 
freedom and self-government, standing for the dignity of 
 manhood and the sovereignty of the soul, was trembling in 
 the balance. 
 
 In 1 860 the issue of the political campaign was centered 
 on what the Continental Congress declared to be a self-evi- 
 dent truth, "that all men are created equal; that they are en- 
 dowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, 
 that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
 ness." On this rock of eternal truth the might of some men 
 and the rights of all men were predestined from all eternity 
 to come together with a clash and a crash. Aristocracy and 
 Democracy, the spirit of the past and the spirit of the future, 
 were preparing to cross swords in a mortal combat, fighting 
 for the mastery, not only of this land of the West, but of 
 the whole world. It was not only a national, but a human 
 crisis. 
 
 In that hour, the people, the people nearest the soil, the 
 common people, turned away from the idol of the party, 
 W. H. Seward, the ripe scholar, eminent lawyer, wise states- 
 man and experienced diplomat, one of the most able and 
 distinguished among the Governors of this great Empire 
 State, and chose for their leader and standard bearer the 
 untried giant of the West, electing Abraham Lincoln as 
 the sixteenth President of the United States. 
 
 To many this choice seemed to cast serious doubt on the 
 wisdom of popular government, on the ability of the people 
 to select and elect their leaders with sagacity and safety. 
 Placing in the White House the child of the log-cabin, tra- 
 
 10 
 
versing the whole social life of the nation and bringing from 
 the obscurest obscurity of the bottom to the dazzling glare 
 of the top this plain man of the people was surely a bold 
 and daring move. But the people had faith in him, as he 
 had boundless faith in them, and time and events abundantly 
 proved that this time, at least, "Vox Populi" was also 
 "Vox Dei," 
 
 But it was no very exhilarating condition of affairs that 
 greeted the new President when he quietly entered the cap- 
 ital city during the night to escape the murderous plots 
 against his life. 
 
 He was hated by the slave-holders of the South because 
 he opposed the rights of slavery in new territory, repudiated 
 by the Abolitionists of the North because he recognized the 
 legal rights of existing slavery under the Constitution, and 
 distrusted by the leaders of his own party because he was to 
 them too much of an unknown quantity to have won their 
 confidence. When, on the fourth of March, 1861, he stood 
 forth to take over the reins of government, he found the Con- 
 federacy an established fact, with civil and military equip- 
 ment, the United States treasury empty, the army scattered 
 and impotent, the federal forts and arsenals seized, treason 
 stalking defiant and unrebuked in Washington, the South 
 determined to secede, and the North paralyzed with doubts 
 and fears. 
 
 It was a day of supreme tension, but standing, robed in 
 the simplicity and sublimity of his conscious mission, calm 
 and fearless amid the frenzy of passion and the dread of 
 
 11 
 
tragedy, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office, and read 
 his first inaugural message, preaching with great force and 
 feeling, weighty argument and winsome pleading, the "Gos- 
 pel of the Union," appealing to the "better angels" of the 
 nation to face the problems calmly and solve the difficulties 
 peacefully. 
 
 And as he stands there, in the initial hour of his presi- 
 dential career, let us note the appearance of the man. Six 
 feet four inches in height, slender, but sinewy and of great 
 muscular strength, he was a man of very marked physique; 
 but it was his face, "half Roman and half Indian" in its 
 cast of features, that stamped itself on the memory as one 
 never to be forgotten. A massive head, wide brow, strong 
 nose, full lips and most remarkable dark grayish brown eyes, 
 deep set, with a far-away look, and an inexpressible sadness 
 when in repose, but capable of sparkling mirth when his 
 abounding sense of humor wooed them from their melan- 
 choly depths, and of such gentleness that they were declared 
 to be "the kindest eyes ever placed in human head." It 
 was a wonderful face, seamed with care and steeped in sad- 
 ness, yea, the saddest face of his race, but a face so full 
 of soul that we can easily understand the expression of the 
 woman who came from his presence saying, "They told me 
 that he was an ugly looking man, but he is the handsomest 
 man I ever saw in my life." His handsome heart transfig- 
 ured his unhandsome face. 
 
 But he soon had enough to bear on that great sympa- 
 thetic heart to seam and shadow a less expressive counte- 
 
 12 
 
nance than his, for with the firing of the first shot on Fort 
 Sumter, on the 1 2th of April, 1 86 1 , the country was 
 plunged into all the horrors of the Civil War. Barring his 
 few weeks of military service in 1832 at the time of the 
 Black Hawk Indian war, the new presidential Commander- 
 in-Chief of the Army and Navy was not like Washington, 
 Jackson, Harrison and Taylor before him, and Grant, 
 Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley and Roosevelt after 
 him, a man of war, more or less trained and experienced in 
 the arts of armed conflict; he was pre-eminently a man of 
 peace, but nevertheless his was the master-spirit and master 
 hand throughout the longest, bloodiest and most Titanic 
 struggle of our history. 
 
 What Washington did for the founding of the Union, 
 Lincoln did for the preservation of the Union. The one 
 broke the thirteen colonies away from the tyranny of Eng- 
 land, established them in the independence of the "United 
 States", and weaved their symbolic red and white stripes into 
 one flag; the other set himself against the disruption of that 
 Union, and gave mind and heart, love and life to the 
 keeping of every star in the blue of that flag. 
 
 The Northern side of the Civil War (in which these ven- 
 erable patriots bore their honorable and heroic part) was 
 fought in the defense of the unity and integrity of the 
 nation. 
 
 Of this conflict Lincoln was the very center, and to it he 
 contributed what only a Lincoln could. 
 
 To the cause of the Union he gave the inspiration of an 
 
 13 
 
unbounded faith in the Tightness of its foundation principle, 
 and of an unfaltering hope that even in the darkest of the 
 many dark days never despaired that ultimately right would 
 prove its might, and that God would give the victory to 
 those who fought on the divine side of the question of human 
 liberty. 
 
 To the cause of the Union he consecrated his genius of 
 leadership, interpreting the issue of the conflict to the intelli- 
 gence of the people, appealing for support to the heart of 
 the people, and winning for the beloved cause the good will 
 of the people. 
 
 In the service of the Union, this champion of freedom, a 
 stranger to the love of power for power's sake, with whom 
 presidential honors were forgotten in presidential sorrows, 
 developed into the greatest and most successful executive and 
 ruler this or any other free people ever had. 
 
 In the service of the Union he manifested greater political 
 astuteness than Thurlow Weed, greater diplomatic skill and 
 judgment than William H. Seward, and greater oratorical 
 powers and resources than Edward Everett. 
 
 It was the cause of the Union that inspired his thought 
 and clothed his words with their sublimest dignity and beauty 
 and power, as in his first inaugural when with such patience 
 and pathos he plead with the passionate South, and in his 
 second inaugural, the briefest but noblest and loftiest of all 
 presidential inaugurals, when his great, burdened soul 
 breathed out over the nation, and the world, the sweetly sol- 
 emn fervor of his piety, and the mournfully tender pathos of 
 
 14 
 
his patriotism, and at Gettysburg, on the blood-consecrated 
 battlefield, when he rose to an exaltation of utterance un- 
 equalled in the history of American eloquence save by Pat- 
 rick Henry at Williamsburg and Wendell Phillips at Fan- 
 euil Hall, and always it was the cause of the Union that 
 inspired, and to the cause of the Union that he offered the 
 sublimest effluence of his heart and mind and lip. 
 
 It was to serve and save the Union, not to please the rad- 
 ical abolitionist, or gratify his own conviction of the injus- 
 tice of negro slavery, that he issued the emancipation procla- 
 mation which liberated an enslaved race and broke the back 
 of the Rebellion. 
 
 And it was while wrestling with God for the cause of the 
 Union that he was led into the richest depths of his religious 
 experience. His state papers are full of a noble faith in 
 God; indeed, some of them read like passages from the old 
 prophets, but when he first became President his religious 
 convictions were dull and hazy, and his religious life was 
 weak and uncertain, but the burdens of the imperiled and 
 suffering Union that well nigh crushed him to the earth, 
 drove him again and again to his knees before God with the 
 consciousness of the utter insufficiency of human wisdom 
 and human power to cope with his problems and carry his 
 heart-breaking load. It was not through the tall and stately 
 gateway of reasoning, but through the lowly portals of service 
 and self-sacrifice, service and self-sacrifice for the cause of 
 the Union, that he was led from the low lands of troublous 
 
 15 
 
doubt to the high lands of triumphant faith and rejoicing 
 experience. 
 
 He was the touchstone of the Union, around him a mil- 
 lion men fought the bloodiest warfare of the century ; around 
 him Union and disunion grappled in a deadly struggle; 
 around him four million swarthy slaves dropped their fet- 
 ters and arose in the liberty and dignity of their common 
 humanity. 
 
 And after four years of hourly martyrdom, he emerged 
 at last, the towering giant of the age, triumphantly vindi- 
 cated by a re-election at the polls, victoriously vindicated by 
 the final success of the conquering Grant and the boys in 
 blue, divinely vindicated by the coming of peace and the 
 abiding unity and integrity of the Union, and 'round the 
 world and up into the very heavens flashed the glad, glorious 
 message that the Star Spangled Banner in triumph still 
 waved, o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 
 
 The war was over. The Rebellion was crushed. The 
 Union was saved. The negro was free. The tattered but 
 triumphant Stars and Stripes of Old Glory were flying over 
 a reunited people; and peace, an honorable and magnani- 
 mous peace was spreading its white wings over the battle- 
 scarred land, and the many shadowed homes of both the 
 blue and the gray. 
 
 And out of it all, towering above the giants of the camp, 
 and the giants of the council, was the "man sent from God 
 whose name" was Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 "With malice towards none, with charity for all," the 
 
 16 
 
great-souled President, full of gentleness and goodness, en- 
 shrining in his God-touched heart "the greatness of real 
 goodness, and the goodness of real greatness," the man who 
 could say, "I never knowingly planted a thorn in any human 
 heart," the man whose unfathomable depths of sympathy 
 made him the great burden bearer of his people, the Ameri- 
 can man of sorrows, the man who walked through the 
 streets of Richmond, the captured capital of the foe, not 
 jubilant and vain-glorious with the sense of Northern vic- 
 tory, but with a bleeding heart suffering with the sufferings 
 of the South; the man who could say, "I have not suffered 
 for the South, I have suffered with the South" ; that man 
 now turned his wide open arms and heart to welcome the 
 South back to the old home like a brother beloved, and 
 stooped to cheer and caress and lift the suffering and sor- 
 rowing brother as he sat wrapped in tattered and blood-be- 
 spatter ed gray, disconsolate amid the smoldering ashes of his 
 homes and hopes, and out of those ashes, into which, wound- 
 ed to death, it had been flung, the expiring serpent of human 
 slavery darted its poisoned fangs, and in the writhing of its 
 death agonies, it wounded and slew the gentlest, kindest, 
 noblest, greatest and sublimest leader and lover the Ameri- 
 can people ever had. 
 
 It was not the South, O! lay it not to the charge of the 
 American citizen soldiers who fought in gray, lay it not over 
 against the door of the chivalry of Virginia or the knight- 
 hood of her confederate states, lay not that monstrous sin 
 on the heart of the people ; that was not the deed of defeated 
 
 17 
 
patriotism; it was the culminating crime of expiring tyranny; 
 it was not the spirit of the South, it was the spirit of slavery 
 that slew the noble Lincoln; it was the feudal spirit of the 
 Middle Ages, expiring on the free soil of this blood-bought 
 Republic, which in its dying hour gathered and spent its 
 last breath in one climactic act of vengeance against the man 
 who was the embodiment of the free spirit of the coming 
 ages and whom high heaven had commissioned to banish 
 slavery from this land of freedom. 
 
 It was on the night of the 14th of April, 1865, that the 
 passion-possessed and deluded Booth sent the fatal bullet 
 crashing on its terrible mission of death and disaster, and 
 though the light of the morning of another day dawned over 
 the stricken nation before his departure, he for whom the 
 many millions mourned never saw it, for without regaining 
 consciousness here he opened his eyes there in the beauteous 
 land of eternal light and everlasting peace at twenty-two 
 minutes past seven on the morning of the fifteenth. 
 
 Ah! and who shall say that, with all its horror and its 
 mystery, in some slight degree akin to that of Calvary, his 
 death was not the fitting crown of his life! Two hundred 
 thousand heroes, in answer to his call, had laid down their 
 lives to defend that flag and purge it of its stain, and when 
 safe and secure, free and pure, it was at last unfurled over 
 a re-united country, and the great task was done, he bowed 
 and lay himself down beside the humblest of the boys in 
 blue, crowning his four years of living martyrdom with the 
 sacrifice of his life on the altar of his country. 
 
 18 
 
Eclipsing the joy of returning peace, this fateful cloud 
 cast a dark shadow over the whole land. The nation was 
 bathed in tears, and draped in mourning, while the grief of 
 the emancipated slaves was sublimely pathetic, and through- 
 out the world the note of sympathy and sorrow found full- 
 ness of expression. The great President was shot. Abra- 
 ham Lincoln was dead. 
 
 Paying our homage to his memory, let us not deify the 
 man and rob him of his humanity, for Lincoln was not only 
 very much a man, but very, very human, and it is the very hu- 
 manness of the man that is the basis of the eternal glory of 
 the man. It is as a man, a man of the people, a man of the 
 common people, that the memory of his name, and the fame 
 of his life, and the influence of his words and works come to 
 us as one of the richest legacies of our national past. But 
 none the less, like Moses, the Hebrew, and Paul, the Jew, 
 and Columbus, the Genoese, and Luther, the German, and 
 Cromwell, the Briton, and Washington, the first American, 
 Abraham Lincoln was God's man for a chosen task, the 
 only man of the century who could have stood, like a mod- 
 ern Atlas, supporting the columns of the Union, not on his 
 shoulders, but on his heart. 
 
 Aside from the saving of the Union, the supreme achieve- 
 ment of President Lincoln, and what he himself called "the 
 great event of the Nineteenth Century," was the emancipa- 
 tion of the American negro. For years he had felt the in- 
 justice and inconsistency of human slavery in a republic 
 founded on human freedom, and had long prophecied that it 
 
 19 
 
was doomed to die. As early as 1 838 in the Legislature of 
 Illinois he had gone on record as its implacable foe, and it 
 was his attitude toward slavery that made him President. 
 But he was not a radical; he was constitutionally conserva- 
 tive. He recognized that under the Constitution slavery had 
 certain legal rights, and he condemned the inflammatory 
 methods of the Abolitionists. He would have much pre- 
 ferred a gradual and compensated emancipation, as was 
 actually wrought out under his leadership in the District of 
 Columbia in 1 862, and as England had done some years 
 before throughout her vast colonial empire, but it was not 
 to be ; the sword had been lifted by the hand of slavery, and 
 it was the sword that was to fall back into the heart of 
 slavery. 
 
 Convinced of its wisdom and necessity by the vicissitudes 
 of the war and the checkered fortunes of the Union, he 
 issued his Proclamation of Emancipation on the first of 
 January, 1 863, adding a worthy companion to the other two 
 superlative American documents, the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence and the Constitution of the United States, and 
 from that day no man of whatsoever race or color has ever 
 breathed the breath of a slave beneath the ample folds of 
 the American flag, and Abraham Lincoln has taken his 
 place among the sons of men as the Great Emancipator. 
 
 He is not only the Great American, but the great man of 
 the Nineteenth Century; he is not only a national figure, but 
 a world hero, a masterpiece of humanity; and not only has 
 his own proud people haloed him in glory, but all races of 
 
 20 
 
free men unite to do him honor and accord him a conspicu- 
 ous place among the immortals. 
 
 And while art has built its monuments and painted its 
 canvasses, and literature has woven its crown of immortelles 
 to enshrine him for our own and future times, and while to- 
 day countless hearts echo the prayer of the negro, "God 
 Bless Marse Linkum," we may not forget that the challenge 
 of his memory is to something higher and nobler than the 
 carving of stone, the mixing of colors, the making of fine 
 sentences, or even the offering of pious petitions; it is a 
 challenge to the loftiest patriotism and the noblest brother- 
 hood, a love of God and Country, and a love of fellow- 
 man that shall rise over and above the littleness of selfish- 
 ness, and pour out on the altar of God and Country and our 
 common Humanity the divinest libation of our hearts and 
 lives. 
 
 As in his immortal speech on the battlefield of Gettys- 
 burg, he called, so in his hallowed memory to-day he calls, 
 that we, the living, shall dedicate and consecrate ourselves 
 to the yet unfinished tasks remaining before us, highly re- 
 solving 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. 
 That is the meaning and the challenge of Abraham Lincoln 
 to the manhood, the patriotism of our day and generation, 
 and well may we pray — 
 
 "Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget" — 
 
 21 ' *-' 
 
and sing with devout spirits and patriotic hearts around the 
 altar of our God, and the shrine of our country: 
 
 "Our fathers' God, to Thee, 
 Author of Liberty, 
 
 To Thee we sing; 
 Long may our land be bright 
 With freedom's holy light; 
 Protect us by Thy might, 
 
 Great God, our King. 
 
 22 
 
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