CHAPTER VII

I. SIMPLICITY AND SYMPATHY ESSENTIAL TO GENUINE CHARACTER

Greatness of mind, valued as worth while in historical characters, has always been characterized by simplicity and sympathy, especially as interested in children and in those without means for the needs of life. Lincoln said pityingly of the poor that the Lord surely loved them because he had made so many.

That Lincoln understood children and could talk to them is shown in his visit to Five Points Mission, then the most miserable spot in all the poverty-stricken sections of New York City. No one knows why he went there, alone and unannounced. Perhaps, knowing what was the lowest possible poverty in the frontier forests, he wanted to see what it was in the midst of the greatest wealth in America.

The manager of the Mission, seeing a stranger, in the rear of the house, who had been such an earnest listener to their exercises, asked him if he would like to speak a few words to the children.

We can hardly imagine his feelings as he arose to speak to those suffering little ones, so like his own hard childhood and yet subject to such different causes and conditions.

Feeling that he had used up his time, after speaking a few minutes, he stopped but they urged him to go on. Several times he ended his talk, but every time they cried out so persistently for him to go on that he spoke to them long over time.

No one knew who he was, but so impressive had been what he said that one of the teachers caught him at the door, begging to know his name. He replied simply, "Abraham Lincoln of Illinois."

Adversity only made Lincoln stronger. In the midst of defeat he was at his best. In the midst of great moral success, in the profound trials of his country, his heart was mild and gentle as a child, and his eyes misty with supreme dreams of beauty and peace to lessen the suffering of humanity.

Once when Lincoln was speaking for Fremont, a brazen voice in the audience roared out above his own, "Is it true, Mr. Lincoln, that you came into the state barefoot and driving a yoke of oxen?"

The interruption had come in the midst of his strongest argument and was intended to throw him off of his subject.

His reply came back with a bound that it was true and he believed he could prove it by at least a dozen men in the audience more respectable than the speaker. Then he seemed inspired by the question into a vision of this country as the home of the free and the land of opportunity.

In a great burst of eloquence, that carried the people with him, he showed how oppression had injured the oppressor as much as the oppressed, even as slavery had injured the master as it did the slave.

"We will speak for freedom and against slavery," he said, "as long as the Constitution of our country guarantees free speech, until everywhere on this wide land the sun shall shine, and the rain shall fall, and the wind shall blow upon no man who goes forth to unrequited toil."

This was before he had spoken in New York, where his speech at the Cooper Institute awoke the people of the Eastern States to realize that an intellectual political giant had at last come out of the West.

II. NEARING THE HEIGHTS OF A PUBLIC CAREER

Lincoln's long struggle to know and to be worth while culminated at last in a political career. The good opinion of associates grew into the favorable friendship of his neighbors and that confidence widened to the community, then to the political district and so on.

In this age when thousands of dollars, and, in some instances, many hundred thousands of dollars used for campaign expenses is a common occurrence, it is interesting to read how Lincoln managed such things. He was elected four times to the Illinois legislature. One time the Whigs made up two hundred dollars to pay his campaign expenses. After the election he returned one hundred and ninety-nine dollars and twenty-five cents, to be given back to the subscribers, in which he explained, "I did not need the money. I made the canvass on my own horse; my entertainment, being at the house of friends, cost me nothing; and my only outlay was seventy-five cents for a barrel of cider, which some farm hands insisted I should treat them to."

The history of Lincoln's political battles belongs to those who would comment on his part in public affairs. We are interested here in a moral consideration of what built him up to a life used in the preservation of his nation, the intimate personal interests of his wonderful story, and how he stands as an ideal character of American manhood.

It is therefore sufficient for us to pass over the great political struggles that proved him to be the "Giant of the West," and begin with him on the way to the White House.

Lincoln was not exactly as the prophet without honor in his own country, for he was beloved wherever he was known, but his neighbors were struck with surprise when he was nominated to be President of the United States.

One fine old gentleman, recently settled in Springfield from England, who had brought his old country ideas of propriety with him, was covered with astonishment.

"What!" he exclaimed, "Abe Lincoln nominated for President of the United States! A man that buys a ten-cent beefsteak for his breakfast, and carries it home himself! How is it possible!"

Lincoln's vision of himself, expressed during a debate with Douglas, was not much more hopeful. Ponder over these words in which Lincoln with mingled humor, pathos and insight contrasted his own appearance with that of his adversary in the famous debates:

"There is still another disadvantage under which we labor.... It arises out of the relative positions of the two persons who stand before the State as candidates for the Senate. Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians of his party ... have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships and Cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor lean, lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle alone."

But the people were in earnest. It was realized by all that the fundamental interests of American progress were in the midst of a great crisis. They needed a reliable man and Lincoln was that man.

Campaign songs are usually very flat reading after the campaign is over, but they were then the carriers of the enthusiasm for a great cause.

The song sung in the state nominating-convention at Springfield, Illinois, had for its first verse and chorus the following lines:

"Hark! Hark! a signal gun is heard, Just beyond the fort; The good old Ship of State, my boys, Is coming into port, With shattered sails and anchors gone, I fear the rogues will strand her; She carries now a sorry crew, And needs a new commander.

Chorus

"Our Lincoln is the man! Our Lincoln is the man! With a sturdy mate From the Pine-Tree State, Our Lincoln is the man!"

III. SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF MOMENTOUS TIMES

Reference to a few of his speeches, made before his election to the presidency, will give a clear idea of his political Americanism, to which was entrusted the definition and the destiny of the greatest democracy in the world.

The Illinois legislature of 1854, by the union of Whigs and Know-Nothings, indorsed him for senator and sent a committee to notify him. The Know-Nothings were especially strong on the slogan of "America for Americans," and wanted to shut out immigration.

In the reply to the delegation or committee of notification, he said, "Who are the native Americans? Do they not wear the breech-clout and carry a tomahawk! Gentlemen, your principle is wrong. It is not American. For instance, I had an Irishman named Patrick working my garden. One morning I went out to see how Pat was getting along.

"'Mr. Lincoln,' he said, 'what d'ye think of these Know-Nothing fellers?' I explained their ideas and asked him if he had been born in America."

"'Faith, to be sure,' Pat replied, 'I wanted to be, very much, but me mother wouldn't let me. It's no fault of mine.'"

Lincoln and Pat thus together believed that every baby, born anywhere on earth, is a good American until its mind is moulded into some man-made shape.

Referring to the thirteen original colonies and what they stood for, he said, "These communities by their representatives in old Independence Hall said to the world of men: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' This was their lofty and wise and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures. In their enlightened belief nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the race of men then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They created a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages."

Among the many familiar quotations from these great speeches that made him known to the nation may be mentioned a few that should never be forgotten.

* * * * *

"Let none falter who believes he is right."

"Let us have faith that right makes might."

"Freedom is the last, best hope of earth."

"Disenthrall ourselves, then we shall save ourselves."

"Come what will, I'll keep my faith with friend and foe."

"For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like."

"I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday."

"No man is good enough to govern another without the other's consent."

"Would you undertake to disprove a proposition in Euclid by calling Euclid a liar!"

"Familiarize yourself with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them."

* * * * *

In pioneer days it was very common for individuals to conclude any personal controversy by resort to the settlement of "fist and skull," and, on the far frontier of the Wild West, the convincing evidence that brought peace was often the quickest and most skillful use of the gun.

We are now in that pioneer day and wild-west age of nations whose "fist and skull" arguments and wild-west "gun-play" must end. This is what Lincoln thought of it in the midst of the Civil War. It was written to the Springfield convention.

"Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such an appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost."

It is interesting here, as he came up out of the darkness into the dawn of his supreme humanity, to know what the greatest men of his times thought of him, when that great day of human service closed down over him, in the martyrdom of assassination. It is not eulogy, but an estimate of values in a personality, and as appreciation of righteousness exalting a man into an ideal of his age.

Lord Beaconsfield, addressing the House of Commons, said, "In the life of Lincoln there is something so homely and so innocent that it takes the subject, as it were, out of the pomp of history, and out of the ceremonial of diplomacy. It touches the heart of nations, and appeals to the domestic sentiments of mankind."

John Stuart Mill, one of the most distinguished philosophers of the last century, speaks in his writings of Lincoln as "The great citizen who afforded so noble an example of the qualities befitting the first magistrate of a free people, and who, in the most trying circumstances, won the admiration of all who appreciate uprightness and love freedom."

D'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation, wrote,

"While not venturing to compare him to the great sacrifice of Golgotha, which gave liberty to the captive, is it not just to recall the word of the apostle John (I John 3:16): 'Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.' Among the legacies which Lincoln leaves to us, we shall all regard as the most precious his spirit of equity, of moderation, and of peace, according to which he will still preside, if I may so speak, over the destinies of your great nation."

IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF GREAT TRAGEDY

As we all now know, there was never a more fearless man than Abraham Lincoln, but so bitter and so threatening were his enemies that it was believed by his friends that the Presidency should not be endangered by taking any chances as to his assassination on the way to Washington, for his inauguration. Open boasts were widely made that he would never be inaugurated. Assassination was especially threatened if he should pass through Baltimore, and it was thought best by the managers of his transportation that it should not be known when he passed through Baltimore.

Evidence was uncovered that a band of sworn assassins, headed by a man calling himself Orsini, was to throw the train from the track somewhere between Philadelphia and Baltimore, and then do their monstrous deed. If this failed, they were to mingle with the crowds about the carriage and at the first chance assassinate him, by discharging pistols at him and then throwing hand grenades. In the confusion they expected to make their escape to a vessel awaiting them in the harbor.

The plot was defeated by the managers of the journey sending Lincoln back to Philadelphia from Harrisburg, while all who might be watching him as spies for the plotters thought him to be asleep in a Harrisburg hotel. At Philadelphia he was placed on board a night train for Washington, where he arrived safely the next morning.

It was here at Baltimore, where there was such opposition to the preservation of the Union, that a delegation was some time later sent to Lincoln, demanding that no more troops pass through Maryland. Lincoln replied that the troops had to go to their destination, and, since they could neither go under nor over Maryland, they would have to go through it. Another delegation demanded that all hostilities should cease, and the controversy be left in the hands of Congress, otherwise seventy-five thousand men would oppose any more troops going through Maryland.

President Lincoln assured them that hostilities would not cease until the rebellion was ended, and that he supposed they had room on the soil of Maryland to bury seventy-five thousand men.

This unequivocal language ended such conferences and deputations.

These stupendous difficulties crowding upon Lincoln in the opening of the war, the opposition of powerful men, and the chaos into which the country had been thrown by the slavery agitation are subjects for political history, and were the trying out of the great soul which seemed to have been built up for that purpose from every experience in the living of men.

General Scott had charge of the inaugural ceremonies and the baffled conspirators, scattered by the police, left their hideous work to be done for a no less monstrous purpose four years later.

V. THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF A MAN TRANSLATED INTO THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF A NATION

Lincoln, in his speeches before the beginning of the war, cleared the public mind as to the fundamental issues and made it plain that the first sublime task was to save the Union. In a vague manner all men knew that the establishment of a national slave-labor absolutism in the South meant the development of an aristocratic slave-made oligarchy that would cause perpetual war, or, otherwise, bring about the slave-holding mastery of America. Perhaps no clearer illustration of his mission, as he saw it, is in evidence than may be taken from one of the many characteristic incidents. While en route to Washington for his first inauguration the train conveying Mr. Lincoln came to a temporary stop at Dunkirk, N. Y., and an old farmer in the crowd surrounding the train shouted:

"Mr. Lincoln, what are you going to do when you get to Washington?"

Reaching for one of the little flags that decorated the train, he held it aloft and said:

"By the help of Almighty God and the assistance of the loyal people of this country I am going to uphold and defend the Stars and Stripes."

The preservation of the Union, regardless of all the turmoil and clamor on other issues, was the one clear-sighted object of Lincoln. It is quite true that up to the beginning of the war there was little sentiment in the North for the abolition of slavery. It was the beginning of war that crystalized resentment against slave-holding power, because it was thus capable of destroying the union in the furtherance of its own dominion. But never was a nation more divided into mutually injurious confusions. It is always so in democracies where every one thinks, talks and acts. Authority was regarded as tyrannical and Lincoln soon became widely berated as a despot. But his patience and devotion never swerved. He had already experienced the life-long lessons of holding true. The situation is well represented in the way General McClellan treated Lincoln. He began to show contempt for his commander-in-chief by causing Lincoln to wait outside like any other caller, and once he went to bed ignoring Lincoln's call.

General McClellan seemed to believe himself so much greater than Lincoln that he more and more publicly ignored the President. When the mistreatment became notorious, Lincoln replied, "I will hold McClellan's horse if he will only bring success."

"On to Richmond," was the cry of the nation, but McClellan remained preparing in what was bitterly called "masterly inactivity."

Lincoln said one day sadly, "McClellan is a great engineer, but his special talent is for a stationary engine."

One of the popular songs of the time, reflecting the bitterness of the seemingly interminable delay, has for its first and last stanzas the following:

"All quiet along the Potomac, they say, Except now and then a stray picket Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro, By a rifleman hid in the thicket.

"His musket falls slack; his face, dark and grim, Grows gentle with memories tender, As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep, For their mother, may Heaven defend her."

Washington's struggle and patience against adversities and confusions, through his long career as leader in the making of the Union, was doubtless an ever present example and consolation to Lincoln in the no less stupendous task of preserving the Union.

Laboulaye, the French Statesman says, "History shows us the victory of force and stratagem much more than of justice, moderation and honesty. It is too often only the apotheosis of triumphant selfishness. There are noble and great exceptions; happy those who can increase the number, and thus bequeath a noble and beneficent example to posterity. Mr. Lincoln is among these. He would willingly have repeated, after Franklin, that 'falsehood and artifice are the practice of fools, who have not wit enough to be honest.' All his private and all his political life was inspired and directed by his profound faith in the omnipotence of virtue."

VI. SOME HUMAN INTERESTS MAKING LIGHTER THE BURDENS OF THE TROUBLED WAY

Great minds always see a ridiculous aspect in the midst of every human crisis, even as Franklin did in the signing of the Declaration of Independence when he said, "We must all hang together or we will all hang separately."

The President on a certain occasion was feeling very ill and he sent for the doctor, who came and told him that he had a very mild form of smallpox.

"Is it contagious?" he asked.

"Yes, very contagious," replied the doctor.

A visitor was present who was very anxious to be appointed to a certain office. On hearing what the doctor said, the visitor hastily arose.

"Don't be in a hurry, sir," said Lincoln, as if very well intentioned toward him.

"Thank you, sir, I'll call again," said the retreating office seeker, as he vanished through the door.

"Some people," said Lincoln, laughing at the hurried exit of his friend, "do not take kindly to my Emancipation Proclamation, but now I am happy to believe I have something that everybody can take."

Once, when Charles Sumner called upon him, he found Lincoln blacking his boots.

"Why, Mr. President," he exclaimed, "do you black your own boots?"

With a vigorous rub of the brush, the President replied,

"Whose boots did you think I blacked?"

The way Lincoln answered unjustified people is illustrated in his response to a delegation asking the appointment of a certain man to be commissioner to the Sandwich Islands. After praising his qualifications for the place, they urged the plea of his bad health.

The President said, "Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that there are eight other applicants for that place, and they are all sicker than your man."

Lincoln, in the great receptions, often heard flattering remarks that had been made short so as to be delivered quickly. But his apt replies were always equal to the remark. On one occasion, as the handshakers came by, an elderly gentleman from Buffalo said, "Up our way we believe in God and Abraham Lincoln." To which the President replied as he took the next hand, "My friend, you are more than half right."

Somewhat similar is a noble reply of Lincoln to some over-zealous religious friends which has become justly famous. A clergyman, heading a delegation with one of the many immature and injudicious appeals, said sadly, "I hope, Mr. Lincoln, that the Lord is on our side."

"I am not at all troubled about that," was the instant reply, "for I know that the Lord is always on the side of right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that this nation and I should be on the Lord's side."