ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Every American may be presumed to be familiar with the external facts of
Abraham Lincoln's early life,--the rude cabin, the shiftless father, the
dead mother's place filled by the tender step-mother; the brief
schooling, the hungry reading of the few books by the fire-light; the
hard farm-work, with a turn now of rail-splitting, now of flat-boating;
the country sports and rough good-fellowship; the upward steps as
store-clerk and lawyer. But the interior qualities that made up his
character and built his fortune will bear further study.
He was composed of traits which seemed to contradict each other. In a
sense this is true of everyone. Dr. Holmes says (in substance): "The
vehicle in which each one of us crosses life's narrow isthmus between
two oceans is not a one-seated sulky, but an omnibus." Sometimes, as
depicted in that wonderful parable, _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, one
inmate ejects the others. But in Lincoln the various elements were
wrought as years passed by into harmony.
He was prized among his early companions as a wit and story-teller. The
women complained because at their parties all the men were drawn off to
hear Abe Lincoln's stories. When he came to be a public speaker, he
feathered the shafts of his argument with jest and anecdote. The vein of
humor in him was rich and deep; it helped him through the hard places.
When as President he announced to his cabinet the Emancipation
Proclamation, he first refreshed himself by reading to them a chapter
from Artemus Ward.
His early growth was in rough soil, and some of the mud stuck to
him,--his jests were sometimes broad. But if coarse in speech he was
pure in life, and neither the rancor of political hate nor the research
of unsparing biographers ever charged him with an unchaste act.
Along with this rollicking fun he had a vein of deepest melancholy. In
part it was temperamental. The malarial country sometimes bred a strain
of habitual depression. His mother was the natural daughter of a
Virginia planter, and had the sadness sometimes wrought by such
pre-natal conditions; it was said she was never seen to smile. Lincoln's
early years had hardships and trials, over many of which he triumphed,
and triumphed laughing; but there were others for which there was
neither victory nor mirth. Some of his early letters of intimate
friendship (as given in Hay and Nicolay's biography), show a singular
capacity for romantic affection, and gleams of hope of supreme
happiness. But death frustrated this hope, and the disappointment
brought him to the verge of insanity. In his domestic life,--it was an
open secret,--he had some of the experience which disciplined Socrates.
Perhaps we go to the root of his sadness if we say that in his deepest
heart he was a passionate idealist, and by circumstances he was long
shut out from the natural satisfaction of ideality. His partner Herndon
said of him, "His melancholy dripped from him as he walked."
Out of these experiences he brought a great power of patience and a
great power of sympathy. These armed him for his work. He became
invincible against the perversities and follies of men, and the blows of
fate. He ripened into a tenderness such as prompted him, when burdened
with cares beyond measure, to give a sympathetic hearing to every mother
who came to the President with the story of her boy's trouble.
To take another brace of qualities, he was at once a powerful fighter
and an habitual peace-maker. His long, gaunt, sinewy frame, and his
tough courage, made him a formidable antagonist, but it was hard to
provoke him to combat. Lamon,--whose biography is a treasury of good
stories, sometimes lacking in discretion, but giving an invaluable
realistic picture,--relates an encounter with the village bully, Jack
Armstrong. The "boys" at last teased Lincoln into a wrestling match, and
when his victory in the good-natured encounter provoked Jack to unfair
play, Abe shook him as a terrier shakes a rat. Then he made peace with
him, drew out the better quality in him; and the two reigned "like
friendly Cæsars" over the village crowd, Abe tempering Jack's
playfulness when it got too rough, and winning the boys to kindly ways.
In that day and region, men were very frank about their religious
beliefs and disbeliefs. The skepticism or unbelief which lies unspoken
in the hearts of a multitude of men,--silent perhaps out of regard to
public opinion, perhaps from consideration for mother or wife--found
free and frequent utterance in the West, long before Robert Ingersoll
gave it eloquent voice. Lincoln, though we have called him an idealist
at heart, habitually guided himself by logic, by hard sense, and by such
evidence as passes in a court of law. He was one of the class to whom
books like Tom Paine's _Age of Reason_ appealed strongly. In early life
he wrote a treatise against Christianity. A politic friend to whom he
showed his manuscript put it in the stove, but the writer was not
changed in his opinions. To Christianity as a supernatural revelation he
never became a convert, but the belief in "a Power that makes for
righteousness" grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength.
With deepening experiences, the awe and mystery of life weighed heavily
on him. When travelling on circuit, his days spent in law-cases,
diversified with sociability and funny stories, he would sometimes be
seen in the early morning brooding by the fire-place with hands
outspread, and murmuring his favorite verses,--a soliloquy on the
mournfulness and mystery of life: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal
be proud!"
In his early youth he read eagerly and thoroughly such few books as came
in his way. Later, his taste for reading seemed to grow less. He had a
keen instinct for reality, and perhaps he found little in books that
satisfied him. For poetry and philosophy he had small aptitude, and in
science he had no training. What books he read he seemed to digest and
get the pith of. Once, made suddenly conscious by defeat of his lack of
book-culture, he took up Euclid's geometry, and resolutely studied and
re-studied it. Doubtless that helped him in the close logic which often
characterized his speeches. The strength of his speeches lay in their
logic, their close regard to fact, their adaptation to the plain people
of whom he was one, their homely illustrations, and, as the years
developed him, an appeal to some high principle of duty. His chief
library was men and women. From them, and from his own experience, he
drew the elements of his politics, history, philosophy.
He had the ambition natural to a man of high powers. With all his genial
sociability, he was in a way self-centered. His associates often thought
him,--and Lamon shares the opinion--not only moody and meditative, but
unsocial, cold, impassive; bent on his own ends, and using other men as
his instruments. Partly we may count this as the judgment of the crowd
to whom Lincoln's inner life was unimaginable. He shared their social
hours, and then withdrew into thoughts and feelings and purposes which
he could share with no one. Doubtless, too, he was in fault for some of
that neglect of the small courtesies and kindnesses which besets men
whose own thoughts fascinate them too strongly. There is a graphic
touch, in the story of his love affairs, of a girl who rejected his
advances because she had seen him on a hot day walk up a hill with a
woman and never offer to relieve her of the baby she was carrying.
As a lawyer he won more than ordinary success, making good his lack of
erudition by shrewdness and knowledge of human nature. It was observed
that he always tried a case honestly and fairly; that he was not fond of
controversy, and always preferred to settle a case out of court; that he
never argued well or strongly unless his conviction was fully on his
client's side; that, if unconvinced himself, he simply brought forward
the proofs which fairly counted on his side, and left the decision to
others; and that he was so little attentive to gain that, although he
became one of the leading lawyers of Illinois, he never accumulated much
money.
His fairness as a lawyer, and his integrity in politics, won his popular
nickname of "Honest Abe." Perhaps honesty, in its fullest sense, was his
central quality. He was always true to the truth as he saw it--true in
thought and word and deed. One feels in his printed speeches that he is
trying to see and to say things as they are. He had not the aid of the
mystic's vision, in which the moral universe is revealed in such
splendor that to accept and obey it is pure joy. But he saw and felt and
practiced the homely obligations of honesty and kindness. His education
came largely as at successive epochs there were disclosed to him new
heights of moral significance in the life of the nation; and as fast as
such disclosures came to him he set himself to obey them with absolute
loyalty.
His conscience was not of the self-contemplating and self-voicing kind.
He was chary of words about duty. It has been alleged that the typical
New Englander is afflicted with "a chronic inflammation of the moral
sense." Such a malady does exist, though many a New Englander is bravely
free from it, while it is not unknown in Alaska or Japan. From such an
over-conscientious conscience, and from its incidents and its
counterfeits, there is bred a redundancy of verbal moralising. That was
not a foible of Lincoln. The sense of moral obligation underlies his
weightier utterances, as the law of gravitation underlies scientific
demonstrations,--not talked of, but assumed.
Lincoln's political career gave high promise at the start. He seemed to
have the qualities for success,--ambition, shrewdness in managing men,
power as a speaker, integrity which won general confidence, ideals not
too high above the crowd. Yet his success was so moderate that in
contrasting himself with Senator Douglas, at the outset of their debate
in 1858, he declared that, "With me the race of ambition has been a
failure,--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success."
There were reasons for it: Douglas had given himself without reserve to
his personal advancement, and Lincoln had been hampered by regard for
other men and for larger ends. After one term in Congress as a Whig,
1847-8, he retired in deference to the fashion of "rotation" between
localities. When roused to new activity by the anti-Nebraska campaign in
1854, he was the favorite candidate of his party for the senatorship;
but seeing that the knot of men who held the balance of power were
gravitating to the other side, he insisted on withdrawing in favor of
Lyman Trumbull, as a stronger candidate, who accordingly won the day.
Before the revival of the slavery issue, there had been nothing in the
old-time Whig and Democratic contests to appeal to the deeper elements
in Lincoln's nature, and personal ambition alone was not strong enough
to push him to eminence. Though he could handle men skillfully, he had a
distaste for the petty arts of the politician's trade. "Politics," he
said, "is the combination of individual meannesses for the general
good." And he had small relish for the game, until "the general good"
loomed clear and large.
His attitude on slavery was typical of the men at the North who were at
once humane and regardful of the established order. He gave his general
position, in homely and graphic fashion, in a letter to his old friend,
Joshua F. Speed, of Kentucky, in 1855. This was at the time he referred
to when he wrote: "I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise roused me again." To Speed he wrote: "I
acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the Constitution in
regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted
down and caught, and carried back to their stripes and unrequited toils;
but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841, you and I had together a
tedious low-water trip in a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You
may remember, as well as I do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the
Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with
irons. That sight was a continued torment to me; and I see something
like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not
fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and
continually exercises, the power of making me miserable. You ought
rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do
crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the
Constitution and the Union. I do oppose the extension of slavery,
because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no
obligations to the contrary."
It was this strong regard for the established law of the land which set
the moderate anti-slavery men apart from the Abolitionists of the
extreme type. And up to this time, Lincoln, though hostile to slavery,
had not been especially concerned as to the nation's dealing with it.
But now came the opportunity and call to resist its extension into the
territories, and with the response to that call came the sense that a
great contest was impending between right and wrong, between the good of
the many and the selfishness of the few.
Lincoln had close at hand a friend to spur him on. His law-partner,
William H. Herndon, was an enthusiastic radical in politics and
religion. He was an Abolitionist, and a follower of Theodore Parker. He
had long plied Lincoln with Parker's sermons and with anti-slavery
literature. When in 1856 Herndon and his friends began to organize to
support armed resistance in Kansas, Lincoln remonstrated with them
successfully. Then came the parting of the ways,--Republican, Democrat,
or Know-nothing? The Illinois Abolitionists threw themselves heartily
into the Republican movement. At its first State convention, at
Bloomington, Lincoln was the great figure. The faithful Herndon, his
missionary zeal rewarded at last by such a convert, describes in glowing
language the speech of Lincoln,--which so carried him away that after
trying for fifteen minutes to take notes as usual, he threw away his
pencil. "Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had simply argued the
slavery question on grounds of policy,--on what are called the
statesman's grounds,--never reaching the question of the radical and the
eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born; he had the
fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm
unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with an inspiration; he
felt justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies,
remarkably deep for him, burst forth, and he stood before the throne of
the eternal Right, in presence of his God, and then and there unburdened
his penitential and fired soul. This speech was fresh, new, genuine,
odd, original; filled with fervor not unmixed with a divine enthusiasm;
his head breathing out through his tender heart its truths, its sense of
right, and its feeling of the good and for the good. If Lincoln was six
feet four inches high usually, at Bloomington he was seven feet, and
inspired at that."
But the prairie fire was slow to light. Five days after the convention,
Herndon and Lincoln got up a ratification meeting in Springfield. There
were posters, illuminations, a band of music,--and at the appointed
hour, one man in the hall besides Lincoln and Herndon! Lincoln took the
platform, began with words half-sad, half-mirthful, and concluded: "All
seems dead, dead, dead; but the age is not yet dead; it liveth as sure
as our Maker liveth. Under all this seeming want of life and motion, the
world does move nevertheless. Be hopeful. And now let us adjourn, and
appeal to the people."
The prairie caught fire at last. The Republicans carried Illinois that
autumn for Fremont. Two years later, Lincoln and Douglas traversed the
State in their famous series of joint debates. The main issue was
slavery in the territories; the background was the general attitude of
the white man toward the negro. Douglas held that the whole business was
a question for white men only. If they wanted slavery in any Territory,
let them have it. If they did not want it, let them keep it out--unless
the Supreme Court forbade. Lincoln summed up this "popular sovereignty"
doctrine: "If one man wants to make another man a slave, a third man has
no right to prevent him!" His position was that the nation's duty was to
hold the common domain for freedom, and that this was the business of
Congress. Douglas constantly twitted Lincoln with belief in negro
equality. This Lincoln disclaimed; he did not believe in the negro's
equality with the white man; did not believe in making him a voter or a
juror; but because an inferior, had a negro no rights? Lincoln's
anti-slavery position was very moderate; in reply to Douglas's
challenge, he disclaimed any disposition to agitate against the fugitive
slave law; as to practical restriction, he had nothing to urge except
exclusion from the territories. Here he was emphatic, and he protested
earnestly against Douglas's "not caring whether slavery was voted up or
voted down."
The best test which the debate gave of his quality was the memorable
passage in which he declared his conviction that "A house divided
against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot
permanently endure half slave and half free." In this he rose above his
wonted level, and spoke with a prophet's forecast. He read this passage
in advance to a group of the party leaders. Though, after this bold
opening, the speech was only a calm and weighty argument that the
interest of slavery was being deliberately and systematically promoted
by all branches of the Democracy,--yet all, except Herndon, were alarmed
at this passage, and besought Lincoln to withhold it. But he answered
soberly and half-mournfully that it expressed his full conviction, and
he would face defeat rather than suppress it. In the immediate result,
it injured his cause; a general comment of Republicans, through the
campaign, says Herndon, was "Damn that fool speech!"
Douglas won the Legislature and the senatorship, though Lincoln won the
popular majority. When he was asked how he felt about his defeat, he
answered: "I feel as the boy did when he stubbed his toe,--he was too
big to cry, and it hurt too bad to laugh!" The country at large, which
had closely watched the debate, forgot him for two years. Early in 1860
he was invited to lecture in New York. He was not regarded as a
Presidential candidate; and when he appeared,--in clothes full of
creases from his carpet-bag, with no press copy of his speech and not
expecting the newspapers to report it--he was such a figure as to his
audience in Cooper Institute seemed to give little promise. But he
carried them with him completely, and the next morning the seven-column
report in the _Tribune_ told the country that in this man there was a
new force to reckon with. The speech ranks with the great historical
orations of the country. The first part was a careful review of the
position which the signers of the Constitution took in their individual
capacity as to the right of Congress to regulate or exclude slavery from
the territories. He showed by specific proof that of the thirty-nine
signers twenty-one voted definitely on various occasions for
Congressional Acts which did so exclude or regulate slavery; and that of
the remaining eighteen almost all were known to have held the same
opinion. This was a masterly refutation of the claim of Douglas and the
Democracy that the fathers of the nation were on their side as to the
territorial question. Lincoln then passed to a broader view, and
inquired: What can we do that will really satisfy the South? Every word
is sober, temperate, well-weighed. The South, he showed, is really
taking very little interest now in the Territories. It is excited about
the John Brown raid, and accuses the Republican party of responsibility
for that. But not a single Republican was implicated in the raid--not
one. You, said Lincoln, addressing the South--interpret your
constitutional rights in a different way from what we do, and say if we
do not admit your interpretation,--if we elect a Republican
president,--you will break up the Union. But this is simply the
highwayman's plea. What, then, can we Republicans do to satisfy the
South? We must not only let them alone, but somehow convince them that
we do let them alone. In a word, this and this only will convince them;
we must cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.
And this must be done thoroughly,--done in acts as well as in words.
Silence will not be tolerated; we must place ourselves avowedly with
them. "Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced,
suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in
politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and
return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our
Free-State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from
all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe
that all their troubles proceed from us."
Thus he concludes: "If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand
by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of
those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied
and belabored,--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground
between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should
be neither a living man nor a dead man,--such as a policy of 'don't
care' on a question about which all true men do care,--such as Union
appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing
the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous, to
repentance,--such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay
what Washington said and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be
slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened
from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to
ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith,
let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."
In behalf of the South, Jefferson Davis, at about this time, presented
in the Senate, as their ultimatum, a set of resolutions. These called
for the recognition of slave-property as an indefeasible right of
territorial settlers, entitled to congressional protection; for the
enforcement of the fugitive slave law, and the repeal of the "personal
liberty laws" by which it was hindered or nullified in many States; and
in general, for the rebuke of all anti-slavery agitation. This was an
exact equivalent of Lincoln's interpretation of the South's demand; the
North must say that slavery is right, and act accordingly. And this was
indeed an ultimatum, with the distinct intimation: "This, or we dissolve
the Union."