Part 7

Edward Everett, who was looked upon as the most eloquent of living Americans, was the orator of the occasion. The invitation to Lincoln was an afterthought.

Yet who can remember anything of the two hours’ polished speech of Everett, and who can forget a sentence of the two hundred and sixty-five words which Lincoln spoke almost before his hundred thousand listeners realized the dignity and imperishable beauty of his utterance?

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, 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.”

Even after that Lincoln offered pardon to every one who would return to the old allegiance, save the leaders of the rebellion. His heart cried out to the bleeding South.

Yet his head was steady, and when he put the sword of the nation into the hands of Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan to help him; when the army swept all before it, and when, after reviewing Grant’s forces in front of grim Petersburg, Lincoln called for half a million fresh soldiers, he had the wit and shrewdness to silence Horace Greeley’s senseless clamor for peace negotiations by writing to the officious editor:

“If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you; and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall at the least have safe conduct with the paper (and without publicity if he chooses) to the point where you shall have met him. The same if there be two or more persons.”

After his second election to the Presidency, and while pressing his generals on to the end, Lincoln continued to show how free was his soul from bitterness toward the South. The climax came in his second inaugural speech, when a million soldiers were executing his orders in the field. It was the last, supreme outpouring of his great and gentle soul before peace came in the surrender at Appomattox, to be followed by his own bloody death at the hands of a fanatic.

Those who saw him on the day of his second inauguration say that he was thinner and more wrinkled than ever. His face had a ghastly, gray pallor. There was an expression of indescribable mourning in his eyes. After speaking for some time to the crowd there came a strangely beautiful look into his wasted features as he drew himself to his full height and raised his hands high. Then came that matchless outburst which is repeated by hundreds of thousands of American schoolboys every year:

“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 bondsman’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.”

After he was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s theater on April 14, 1865, Lincoln never spoke again. He had seen the stars and stripes raised in Richmond. He had seen the end of human slavery on the American continent. The nation was one again. But he was to speak no deathbed message. It was all in that last great speech: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

For hours they stood about him as he lay moaning or struggling for breath, his wife, his Cabinet officers, his pastor, secretary and doctors. At daybreak the troubled look vanished from his face. There was absolute stillness, followed by a trembling prayer by the pastor.

“Now he belongs to the ages,” said the deep voice of Secretary Stanton.

* * * * *

No, while Lincoln lives in the heart of the nation, it is idle to think that the Republic can be corrupt or cowardly.

There were less than nine millions of Americans when he was born. These have become almost ninety millions. The national wealth has grown to more than a hundred billions of dollars. The flag he defended now flies over the Philippines, Hawaii and Porto Rico. The law-resisting millionaire, the “captain of industry” and the “tariff baron” have taken the place of the slaveholder.

Yet the love of Lincoln deepens with increasing years; and a century after his birth in a Kentucky log cabin, and nearly forty-four years after his martyrdom, the American people answered the charge that they had outlived their early ideals by the tribute they paid to the memory of their humblest-born, plainest, most beloved leader and President.

_Set up, Electrotyped and Printed at_ THE OUTING PRESS DEPOSIT, NEW YORK

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to the corresponding illustrations.

This book does not have a Table of Contents.

Page 3: Transcriber removed redundant book title.