CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY CONSIDERATIONS

I. A PERSONAL LIFE AND ITS INTEREST TO AMERICANS

"America First" has probably as many varieties of meaning and use as "Safety First." It means to every individual very much according to what feelings it inspires in him of selfishness or patriotism. We are inspired as we believe, and, to be an American, it is necessary to appreciate the meaning and mission of America.

American history is composed of the struggle to get clear the meaning of American liberty. Through many years of distress and sacrifice, known as the Revolutionary War, the American people freed themselves from un-American methods and masteries imposed on them from across the sea. Out of that turmoil of minds came forth one typical leader and American, George Washington. But we did not yet have clear the meaning of America, and through yet more years of even worse suffering, involving the Civil War, we freed ourselves from the war-making methods and masteries entrenched within our own government. Out of that political turmoil of minds appeared another American, Abraham Lincoln, whose life represents supremely the most important possibilities in the meaning and ideal of America. To know the mind-making process that developed Washington and Lincoln is to know not only the meaning but also the mission of America.

Every American child and every newcomer to our shores is in great need to understand clearly and indisputably their interest in American freedom, as being human freedom and world freedom, if they are to realize and fulfill their part as Americans.

The American vision of moral freedom and social righteousness can in no way be made clearer than in studying the process of development that individually prepared Washington and Lincoln to be the makers and preservers of a developing democracy for America and for the American mind of the world.

Lincoln's early life has interest and meaning only for those who are seeking to understand the pioneer political principles, fundamental in character and civilization, out of which could develop a mind and manhood equipped for the greatest and noblest of human tasks. To take his "backwoods" experiences and their comparatively uncouth incidents, as interesting merely because they happened to a man who became famous, is to miss every inspiration, value and meaning so important in building his way as man and statesman. To read the early incidents of Lincoln's life for the isolated interest of their being the queer, peculiar or pathetic biography of a notable character has little that is either inspiring or informing to a boy in the light of present experiences and methods of living. Indeed, many social episodes of pioneer customs are seemingly so trivial or coarse, in comparison, as to detract in respect from a boy's ideal of the historical Lincoln.

The pioneer frontier was the social infancy of a new meaning for civilization. Its lowly needs of humble equality were the first social interests of Lincoln, and the wonderful story of his life in that place and time, if told as merely historical happenings, incidentally noticeable only because they happened to Lincoln, becomes more and more frivolous and disesteeming in interest to boyhood, and to the general reader, as current social customs develop away beyond those times. This is why such strained efforts have been made to give the incidents of his social infancy a pathetic interest, or some other sympathetic appeal, where everything was so unromantic, industrious, simple, enjoyable and faithful to the earth.

Those lowly years were sacred privacy to him. He knew there was nothing in them for a biographer, and he said so. His experience is valuable only in showing how it developed a man. True enough, the biographically uninteresting trivialities of his early years were not from him but from his environment. This is proven from the fact that two wider contrasting environments are hardly possible than those of Washington and Lincoln, and yet out of them came the same model character and supreme American.

II. THE PROCESS OF LIFE FROM WITHIN

Standard authorities have already fully recorded Lincoln's biography and its historical environment. There yet remains the far more difficult, delicate and consequential message from generation to generation, so much needed in patriotic appreciation, to interpret his rise from those vanished social origins, in order that there may be a just valuation of his life by American youth.

The schoolboy learns with little addition to his ideals, or to his patriotism, or humanity, when he reads of a person, born in what appears to be the most sordid and pathetic destitution of the wild West, at last becoming a martyr president. The scenes in the making of Lincoln's life run by too fast in the reading for the strengthening life-interest to be received and appreciated. The human process of Lincoln's youth, with its supreme lesson of patience and labor and growth, is lost in considering the man solely as a strange figure of American history. If that life can be separated enough from the political turmoil so as to be seen and to be given a worthy interpretation, there is thus a service that may be worth while for the American youth.

Heroes have been made in many a historical crisis and they represent some splendid devotion to a single idea of human worth, but Lincoln's heroism was the far severer test of a hard struggle through many years. He came near encountering every discouragement and in mastering every difficulty that may befall any American from the worst to the best, and from the lowliest to the most responsible position.

The poet has expressed these valuations arising through the frailties and vicissitudes of his long, tragic struggle in the following lines:

"A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears; A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers; A homely hero born of star and sod; A Peasant Prince; a Masterpiece of God."

Lincoln's life has much more for American youth than the adventure-story of a backwoods boy of pioneer days on his unknown way to be a hero of American history. What Lincoln thought he was and what he made out of his relations with those around him are only incidental to the inspiring patience with which he kept the faith of high meaning within him, and the labor with which he strove on until his ideal came clear as one of the supreme visions of humanity.

Every really ambitious American boy asks himself the question, How did he do it? The probably correct answer is that he didn't do it. He made himself the right man and the right people did it.

We do not now hear so much of Lincoln as the "fireplace" student, because that word no longer carries so pathetic a vision as it did to the American boy. "Lincoln the railsplitter" has almost disappeared from the phrases of patriotic eulogy for this great American, because the task and significance of railsplitting no longer bear the force of meaning that they did to the boys of Civil-War days. This means that, if the American boy is to receive any inspiration from the early life of Lincoln, there must be achieved some new and more significant form of interpretation from the making of his life and character.

Even the strong description of Edwin Markham becomes more figurative than concrete in its illustration more poetic than material, when he says,

"He built the rail-pile as he built the state, Pouring his splendid strength through every blow, The conscience of him testing every stroke, To make his deed the measure of a man."

III. A LIFE BUILT AS ONE WOULD HAVE THE NATION

Lincoln's life may be prized as much in what he did for himself as in what he did for his country, because in the course of our interest they mean the same and become the same. He has shown to every American boy that the right desire, no matter what the circumstances and conditions, will invariably lead along the right way to the successful life, because the successful character is a successful career for a successful humanity. Very clearly one thing is sure, he was wonderfully successful in finding the right thing to do and in finding the right way to do it. That is what humanity wants and such a man is the human ideal. Accordingly, Lincoln's personal moral development, apart from his historical public career, is an introductory story inspiring an interest for the patriotic study of his statesmanship and the fundamental principles of American life.

Any boy or girl can appreciate the events that entered into the making of Lincoln's mind and character, but only a student of statesmanship and history can read beyond this and appreciate the almost superhuman task which Lincoln carried through to the extinction of slavery and the preservation of the United States of America.

In that view we are not here writing the biography or history of Lincoln the Statesman, nor of Lincoln the War President, for that work has already been exhaustively and nobly done, but to give the inspiring meaning of his experiences from which arose the boy and man representing above all others the meaning and mission of Americans and America.