CHAPTER XXX.

Abraham Lincoln and the Work of Emancipation.

[=Washington and Lincoln=]

Among the men who have filled the office of President of the United States two stand pre-eminent, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, both of them men not for the admiration of a century but of the ages, heroes of history whose names will live as the chief figures among the makers of our nation. To the hand of Washington it owed its freedom, to that of Lincoln its preservation, and the name of the preserver will occupy a niche in the temple of fame next to that of the founder. But our feeling for Lincoln is different from that with which we regard the "Father of his Country." While we venerate the one, we love the other. Washington was a stately figure, too dignified for near approach. He commanded respect, admiration and loyalty; but in addition to these Lincoln commands our affection, a feeling as for one very near and dear to us.

[=A Great Man and His Critics=]

[=The Character of Lincoln=]

The fame of Lincoln is increasing as the inner history of the great struggle for the life of the nation becomes known. For almost two decades after that struggle had settled the permanence of our government, our vision was obscured by the near view of the pygmy giants who "strutted their brief hour upon the stage;" our ears were filled with the loud claims of those who would magnify their own little part, and, knowing the facts concerning some one fraction of the contest, assumed from that knowledge to proclaim the principles which should have governed the whole. Time is dissipating the mist, and we are coming better to know the great man who had no pride of opinion, who was willing to let Seward or Sumner or McClellan or any one imagine himself to be the guiding spirit of the government, if he were willing to give that government the best service of which he was capable. We see more clearly the real greatness of the leader who was too slow for one great section of his people, and too fast for another, too conservative for those, too radical for these; who refused to make the contest merely a war for the negro, yet who saw the end from the beginning, and led, not a section of his people, but the whole people, away from the Egyptian plagues of slavery and disunion, and brought them, united in sentiment and feeling, to the borders of the promised land. We are coming to appreciate that the "Father Abraham" who in that Red Sea passage of fraternal strife was ready to listen to every tale of sorrow, and who wanted it said that he "always plucked a thistle and planted a flower when he thought a flower would grow," was not only in this sense the father of his people; but that he was a truly great statesman, who, within the limits of human knowledge and human strength, guided the affairs of state with a wisdom, a patience, a courage which belittle all praise, and make him seem indeed a man divinely raised up, not only to set the captive free, but in order that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

[=Lincoln's First Experience of Slavery=]

It is not our purpose to tell the story of Lincoln's boyhood--his days of penury in the miserable frontier cabins of his father in Kentucky and Indiana, his struggles to obtain an education, his pitiful necessity of writing his school exercises with charcoal on the back of a wooden shovel, his efforts to make a livelihood when he had become a tall and ungainly, but strong and vigorous, youth, his work at farming, rail-splitting, clerking, boating, and in other occupations. A journey on a flat-boat to New Orleans gave him his first acquaintance with the institution of slavery, with which he was thereafter to have so much to do. Here he witnessed a slave auction. The scene was one that made a deep and abiding impression on his sympathetic mind, and he is said to have declared to his companion, "If I ever get a chance to hit that institution, _I'll hit it hard_." Whether this is legend or fact, it is certain that he did get a chance to hit it, and did "hit it hard."

Difficult as it was to obtain an education on the rude frontier and in the extreme poverty in which Lincoln was reared, he succeeded by persistent reading and study in making himself the one man of learning among his farming fellows, and one who was not long content with the occupations of rail-splitting, flat-boating, or even that of keeping country store, which he tried without success. He was too devoted to his books to attend very carefully to his business, which left him seriously in debt, and he soon chose the law as his vocation, supporting himself meanwhile by serving as land surveyor in the neighboring district.

[=In the Illinois Legislature=]

Lincoln's political career began in 1834, when his neighbors, who admired him for his learning and ability, elected him to represent them in the Illinois legislature. His knowledge was only one of the elements of his popularity. He had acquired a reputation as a teller of quaint and humorous stories; he was a champion wrestler, and could fight well if forced to; and he was beginning to make his mark as a ready and able orator. In the legislature he became prominent enough to gain twice the nomination of his party for speaker. His principal service there was to advocate a system of public improvements, whose chief result was to plunge Illinois deeply in debt. A significant act of his at this early day in his career was to join with a single colleague in a written protest against the passage of resolutions in favor of slavery. The signers based their action on their belief that "the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy." It needed no little moral courage to make such a protest in 1837 in a community largely of southern origin, but moral courage was a possession of which Lincoln had an abundant store.

[=Lincoln as a Lawyer=]

In the meantime Lincoln had been admitted to the bar, and in 1837 he removed to Springfield, where he formed a partnership with an attorney of established reputation. He became a successful lawyer, not so much by his knowledge of law, for this was never great, as by his ability as an advocate, and by reason of his sterling integrity. He would not be a party to misrepresentation, and more than once refused to take cases which involved such a result. He even was known to abandon a case which brought him unexpectedly into this attitude, making in his first case before the United States Circuit Court the unusual statement that he had not been able to find any authorities supporting his side of the case, but had found several favoring the opposite, which he proceeded to quote.

The very appearance of such an attorney in any case must have gone far to win the jury; and, when deeply stirred, the power of his oratory, and the invincible logic of his argument, made him a most formidable opponent. "Yes," he was overheard to say to a would-be client, "we can doubtless gain your case for you; we can set a whole neighborhood at loggerheads; we can distress a widowed mother and her six fatherless children, and thereby get for you the six hundred dollars to which you seem to have a legal claim, but which rightfully belongs, it appears to me, as much to the woman and her children as it does to you. You must remember that some things legally right are not morally right. We shall not take your case, but will give you a little advice for which we will charge you nothing. You seem to be a sprightly, energetic man; we would advise you to try your hand at making six hundred dollars in some other way."

[=In the United States Congress=]

In 1846 he accepted a nomination to Congress and was triumphantly elected, being the only Whig among the seven representatives from his state. As a member of the House his voice was always given on the side of human freedom, he voting in favor of considering the petitions for the abolition of slavery and supporting the doctrines of the Wilmot proviso, which opposed the extension of slavery to the territory acquired from Mexico.

As yet Lincoln had not made a striking figure as a legislator. He was admired by those about him for his sterling honesty and integrity, but his name was hardly known in the country at large, and there was no indication that he would ever occupy a prominent position in the politics of the nation. It was the threatened repeal of the Missouri Compromise, in 1854, an act which would open the western territory to the admission of slavery, that first fairly wakened him up and laid the foundation of his remarkable career. The dangerous question which Henry Clay had set aside for years, but which was now brought forward again, absorbed his attention, and he grew constantly more bold and powerful in his denunciation of the encroachments of the slave power. He became, therefore, the natural champion of his party in the campaigns in which Senator Douglas undertook to defend before the people of his state his advocacy of "squatter sovereignty," or the right of the people of each territory to decide whether it should be admitted as a slave or a free state, and of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, by which the "Missouri Compromise" was repealed.

[=The Great Lincoln and Douglas Debate=]

The first great battle between these two giants of debate took place at the State Fair at Springfield, in October, 1854, Douglas made a great speech to an unprecedented concourse of people, and was the lion of the hour. The next day Lincoln replied, and his effort was such as to surprise both his friends and his opponents. It was probably the first occasion in which he reached his full power. In the words of a friendly editor: "The Nebraska bill was shivered, and like a tree of the forest was torn and rent asunder by the hot bolts of truth.... At the conclusion of this speech every man and child felt that it was unanswerable."

But it was the campaign of 1858 that made Lincoln famous. In this contest he first fully displayed his powers as an orator and logician, and won the reputation that made him President. Douglas, his opponent, was immensely popular in the West. His advocacy of territorial expansion appealed to the patriotism of the young and ardent; his doctrine of popular sovereignty was well calculated to mislead shallow thinkers; and his power in debate was so great that he became widely known as the "Little Giant." But he found a worthy champion of the opposite in Abraham Lincoln, who riddled and ventilated many of his specious arguments, and succeeded in inducing him to make a statement that proved fatal to his hopes of the Presidency.

[=Douglas's Fatal Answer=]

When Lincoln proposed to press upon his opponent the question whether there were lawful means by which slavery could be excluded from a territory before its admission as a state, his friends suggested that Douglas would reply that slavery could not exist unless it was desired by the people, and unless protected by territorial legislation, and that this answer would be sufficiently satisfactory to insure his re-election. But Lincoln replied, "I am after larger game. If Douglas so answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this." Both predictions were verified. The people of the South might have forgiven Douglas his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution of Kansas, but they could not forgive the promulgation of a doctrine which, in spite of the Dred Scott decision (a Supreme Court decision to the effect that a master had the right to take his slave into any state and hold him there as "property"), would keep slavery out of a territory; and so, although Douglas was elected and Lincoln defeated, the Democracy was divided, and it was impossible for Douglas to command southern votes for the presidency.

[=Lincoln Takes His Stand=]

The campaign had been opened with a speech by Lincoln which startled the country by its boldness and its power. It was delivered at the Republican convention which nominated him for Senator, and had been previously submitted to his confidential advisers. They strenuously opposed the introduction of its opening sentences. He was warned that they would be fatal to his election, and, in the existing state of public feeling, might permanently destroy his political prospects. Lincoln could not be moved. "It is _true_" said he, "and I _will_ deliver it as written. I would rather be defeated with these expressions in my speech held up and discussed before the people than be victorious without them." The paragraph gave to the country a statement of the problem as terse and vigorous and even more complete than Seward's "irrepressible conflict," and as startling as Sumner's proposition that "freedom was national, slavery sectional." "A house divided against itself," said Lincoln, "cannot stand. I believe 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 expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the farther spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states,--old as well as new, North as well as South."

[=The "Champion of Freedom"=]

Never had the issues of a political campaign seemed more momentous; never was one more ably contested. The triumph of the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," in the Kansas-Nebraska bill, had opened the territories to slavery, while it professed to leave the question to be decided by the people. To the question whether the people of a territory could exclude slavery Douglas had answered, "That is a question for the courts to decide," but the Dred Scott decision, practically holding that the Federal Constitution guaranteed the right to hold slaves in the territories, seemed to make the pro-slavery cause triumphant. The course of Douglas regarding the Lecompton Constitution, however, had made it possible for his friends to describe him as "the true champion of freedom," while Lincoln continually exposed, with merciless force, the illogical position of his adversary, and his complete lack of political morality.

[=Lincoln's Views on the Slavery Question=]

Douglas claimed that the doctrine of popular sovereignty "originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose upon his own responsibility." But Lincoln declared with great solemnity: "No; God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to take his choice. On the contrary, God did tell him that there was one tree of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of death." The question was to him one of right, a high question of morality, and only upon such a question could he ever be fully roused. "Slavery is wrong," was the keynote of his speeches. But he did not take the position of the abolitionists. He even admitted that the South was entitled, under the Constitution, to a national fugitive slave law, though his soul revolted at the law which was then in force. His position, as already cited, was that of the Republican party. He would limit the extension of slavery, and place it in such a position as would insure its ultimate extinction. It was a moderate course, viewed from this distance of time, but in the face of a dominant, arrogant, irascible pro-slavery sentiment it seemed radical in the extreme, calculated, indeed, to fulfill a threat he had made to the governor of the state. He had been attempting to secure the release of a young negro from Springfield who was wrongfully detained in New Orleans, and who was in danger of being sold for prison expenses. Moved to the depths of his being by the refusal of the official to interfere, Lincoln exclaimed: "By God, governor, I'll make the ground of this country _too hot for the foot of a slave_."

Douglas was re-elected. Lincoln had hardly anticipated a different result, and he had nothing of the feeling of defeat. On the contrary, he felt that the corner-stone of victory had been laid. He had said of his opening speech: "If I had to draw a pen across my record, and erase my whole life from sight, and I had one poor gift or choice left as to what I should choose to save from the wreck, I should choose that speech, and leave it to the world unerased."

[=The Cooper Institute Speech=]

The great debate had made Lincoln famous. In Illinois his name was a household word. His stand for the liberty of the slave was on the lips of the advocates of human freedom through all the country. Deep and widespread interest was felt in the East for this prairie orator, and when, in 1860, he appeared by invitation to deliver an address in the Cooper Institute, of New York, he was welcomed by an audience of the mental calibre of those who of old gathered to hear Clay and Webster speak.

It was a deeply surprised audience. They expected to be treated to something of the freshness, but much of the shallowness, of the frontier region, and listened with astonishment and admiration to the dignified, clear, and luminous oration of the prairie statesman. It is said that those who afterwards published the speech as a campaign document were three weeks in verifying its historical and other statements, so deep and abundant was the learning it displayed.

[=A Tour in New England=]

He had taken the East by storm. He was invited to speak in many places in New England, and everywhere met with the most flattering reception, which surprised almost as much as it delighted him. It astonished him to hear that the Professor of Rhetoric of Yale College took notes of his speech and lectured upon them to his class, and followed him to Meriden the next evening to hear him again for the same purpose. An intelligent hearer spoke to him of the remarkable "clearness of your statements, the unanswerable style of your reasoning, and especially your illustrations, which are romance and pathos, fun and logic, all welded together." Perhaps his style could not be better described. He himself said that it used to anger him, when a child, to hear statements which he could not understand, and he was thus led to form the habit of turning over a thought until it was in language any boy could comprehend.

[=The Rail-splitter Made President=]

It is not necessary to tell in detail what followed. Lincoln had attained the high eminence of being considered as a suitable candidate for President, and when the Republican Convention of 1860 met in Chicago, he found himself looked upon as the man for the West. Seward was a prominent candidate, but his candidacy sank before that of the choice of the westerners, who were roused to a frenzy of enthusiasm when some of the rails which Lincoln had split were borne into the hall. He was nominated on the third ballot amid the wildest acclamations. In the campaign that followed Lincoln and Hamlin were the triumphant candidates, winning their seats by a majority of fifty-seven in the electoral college. The poor rail-splitter of Illinois had lifted himself, by pure force of genius, to be President of the United States of America. From that time forward the life of Abraham Lincoln is the history of the great Civil War. His task was such as few men had ever faced before. The mighty republic of the West, the most promising experiment in self-government by the people that the world had ever known, seemed about to end in failure. No man did more to save it from destruction and start it on its future course of greatness and renown than this western prodigy of genius and rectitude.

Mr. Lincoln called to his cabinet the ablest men of his party, two of whom, Seward and Chase, had been his competitors for the nomination, and the new administration devoted itself to the work of saving the Union. Every means was tried to prevent the secession of the border states, and the President delayed until Fort Sumter had been fired upon before he began active measures for the suppression of the rebellion and called for seventy-five thousand volunteers.

[=The Great Question of the Civil War=]

The great question, from the start, was the treatment of the negro. The advanced anti-slavery men demanded decisive action, and could not understand that success depended absolutely upon the administration commanding the support of the whole people. And so Mr. Lincoln incurred the displeasure and lost the confidence of some of those who had been his heartiest supporters, by keeping the negro in the background and making the preservation of the Union the great end for which he strove. He repeatedly declared that, if he could do so, he would preserve the Union _with slavery_, and further said, "I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even _tried_ to preserve the Constitution, if, to save slavery or for any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country and Constitution, all together." Only when it became evident that the North was in accord with him in his detestation of slavery did the President venture to strike the blow which was to bring that perilous system to an end.

[=The Proclamation of Emancipation=]

In the dark days of 1862, when the reverses of the Union arms cast a gloom over the North, and European governments were seriously considering the propriety of recognizing the Confederacy, it seemed to Mr. Lincoln that the time had come, that the North was prepared to support a radical measure, and that emancipation would not only weaken the South at home, but would make it impossible for any European government to take the attitude toward slavery which would be involved in recognizing the Confederacy. Action was delayed until a favorable moment, and after the victory of Antietam the President called his cabinet together and announced that he was about to issue the Proclamation of Emancipation. It was a solemn moment. The President had made a vow--"I promised my God," were his words--that if the tide of invasion should be mercifully arrested, he would set the negro free. The final proclamation, issued three months later, fitly closes with an appeal which indicates the devout spirit in which the deed was done: "And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God."

The question of slavery was only one of the many with which Lincoln had to contend. Questions of foreign policy, of finance, of the conduct of the war, of a dozen different kinds pressed upon him for solution, while dissensions in his cabinet and incompetence in the army made his task anything but a pleasant one. His personal advisers, Stanton, Seward, Chase, and others, were strong and able men, but above them was a stronger man, who held firmly in his own hands the reins of government, and would not yield them to any of his ambitious subordinates, nor change his fixed policy at the bidding of irresponsible critics and fault-finders.

[=Lincoln and the "Plain People"=]

[=An Able Diplomatist=]

Upon what Lincoln called "the plain people"--the mass of his countrymen--he could always depend, because he, more than any other political leader in our history, understood them. Sumner, matchless advocate of liberty as he was, distrusted the President, and was desirous of getting the power out of his hands into stronger and safer ones. But suddenly the great Massachusetts senator awoke to the fact that he could not command the support of his own constituency, and found it necessary to issue an interview declaring himself not an opponent, but a supporter, of Lincoln. The President's grasp of questions of state policy was, indeed, stronger than that of any of his advisers. The important dispatch to our minister in England, in May, 1861, outlining the course to be pursued towards that power, has been published in its original draft, showing the work of the Secretary of State and President Lincoln's alterations. Of this publication the editor of the _North American Review_ says: "Many military men, who have had access to Lincoln's papers, have classed him as the best general of the war. This paper will go far toward establishing his reputation as its ablest diplomatist." It would be impossible for any intelligent person to study the paper thus published, the omissions, the alterations, the substitutions, without acknowledging that they were the work of a master mind, and that the raw backwoodsman, not three months in office, was the peer of any statesman with whom he might find it necessary to cope. He was entirely willing to grant to his secretaries and to his generals the greatest liberty of action; he was ready to listen to any one, and to accept advice even from hostile critics; and his readiness made them think, sometimes, that he had little mental power of his own, and brought upon him the charge of weakness; but, as the facts have become more fully known, it has grown more and more evident that he was not only the "best general" and the "ablest diplomatist," but the greatest man among all the great men whom that era of trial brought to the rescue of our country.

[=The Assassination of Lincoln=]

And when the end came, after four years of desperate conflict; when Lee had surrendered and the work of saving the Union seemed complete; when the liberator was made, by the assassin's hand, the martyr to that great cause which he had carried to its glorious termination, a depth of pathos was added to our memory of America's noblest man, insuring him a fame that was worth dying for, that crown of human sympathy which lends glory to martyrdom.

The story of the end need hardly be told. On the evening of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot by a half-crazed sympathizer with the South, John Wilkes Booth. The President had gone, by special invitation, to witness a play at Ford's Theatre, and the assassin had no difficulty in gaining entrance to the box, committing the dreadful deed, and leaping to the stage to make his escape. The story of his pursuit and death while resisting arrest is familiar to us all. Mr. Lincoln lingered till the morning, when the little group of friends and relatives, with members of the cabinet, stood with breaking hearts about the death-bed.

[=The Grief of the People=]

Sorrow more deep and universal cannot be imagined than enveloped our land on that 15th of April. Throughout the country every household felt the loss as of one of themselves. The honored remains lay for a few days in state at Washington, and then began the funeral journey, taking in backward course almost the route which had been followed four years before, when the newly-elected President went to assume his burdens of his high office. Such a pilgrimage of sorrow had never been witnessed by our people. It was followed by the sympathy of the whole world until the loved remains were laid in the tomb at Springfield, Illinois. Over the door of the state house, in the city of his home, where his old neighbors took their last farewell, were these lines:

"He left us borne up by our prayers; He returns embalmed in our tears."

[=A Man of Melancholy and of Wit=]

Abraham Lincoln was in every way a remarkable man. Towering above his fellows, six feet four inches in height, his giant figure, with its inclination to stoop, of itself attracted attention. While possessed of gigantic strength, he was diffident and modest in the extreme. The expression of his face was sad, and that sadness deepened as the war dragged on and causes for national depression increased. Melancholy was hereditary with him, and it is doubtful if his mind was ever free from a degree of mental dejection. On certain occasions he was almost overwhelmed by it. Yet with all this he was one of the readiest inventors and gatherers of amusing stories, which were inimitable as told by him. He opened the cabinet meeting in which he announced his purpose to issue the Emancipation Proclamation by reading to his dignified associates a chapter from Artemus Ward. His jokes were usually for a purpose. He settled more than one weighty question by the wit of a homely "yarn," that told better than hours of argument would have done. A signal illustration of his method is the telling aphorism by which he once settled the question of changing the generals in command: "It is a bad plan to swap horses crossing a stream."

His gift of expression was only equaled by the clearness and firmness of his grasp upon the truths which he desired to convey; and the beauty of his words, upon many occasions, is only matched by the goodness and purity of the soul from which they sprung. His Gettysburg speech will be remembered as long as the story of the battle for freedom shall be told; and of his second inaugural it has been said: "This was like a sacred poem. No American President had ever spoken words like these to the American people. America never had a President who found such words in the depth of his heart." The following were its closing words, and with them we may fitly close this imperfect sketch:

[=The Great Gettysburg Oration=]

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword; as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."