When you asked me to deliver the Inaugural Address on this occasion,
I recognized that I owed this compliment to the fact that I was the
official representative of America, and in selecting a subject I
ventured to think that I might interest you for an hour in a brief study
in popular government, as illustrated by the life of the most American
of all Americans. I therefore offer no apology for asking your attention
to Abraham Lincoln—to his unique character and the part he bore in
two important achievements of modern history: the preservation of the
integrity of the American Union and the emancipation of the colored
race.
During his brief term of power he was probably the object of more abuse,
vilification, and ridicule than any other man in the world; but when he
fell by the hand of an assassin, at the very moment of his stupendous
victory, all the nations of the earth vied with one another in paying
homage to his character, and the thirty-five years that have since
elapsed have established his place in history as one of the great
benefactors not of his own country alone, but of the human race.
One of many noble utterances upon the occasion of his death was that in
which ‘Punch’ made its magnanimous recantation of the spirit with which
it had pursued him:
“Beside this corpse that bears for winding sheet
The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?
...................
“Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen
To make me own this hind—of princes peer,
This rail-splitter—a true born king of men.”
Fiction can furnish no match for the romance of his life, and biography
will be searched in vain for such startling vicissitudes of fortune,
so great power and glory won out of such humble beginnings and adverse
circumstances.
Doubtless you are all familiar with the salient points of his
extraordinary career. In the zenith of his fame he was the wise,
patient, courageous, successful ruler of men; exercising more power than
any monarch of his time, not for himself, but for the good of the people
who had placed it in his hands; commander-in-chief of a vast military
power, which waged with ultimate success the greatest war of the
century; the triumphant champion of popular government, the deliverer
of four millions of his fellowmen from bondage; honored by mankind as
Statesman, President, and Liberator.
Let us glance now at the first half of the brief life of which this was
the glorious and happy consummation. Nothing could be more squalid and
miserable than the home in which Abraham Lincoln was born—a one-roomed
cabin without floor or window in what was then the wilderness of
Kentucky, in the heart of that frontier life which swiftly moved
westward from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, always in advance of
schools and churches, of books and money, of railroads and newspapers,
of all things which are generally regarded as the comforts and even
necessaries of life. His father, ignorant, needy, and thriftless,
content if he could keep soul and body together for himself and his
family, was ever seeking, without success, to better his unhappy
condition by moving on from one such scene of dreary desolation to
another. The rude society which surrounded them was not much better. The
struggle for existence was hard, and absorbed all their energies. They
were fighting the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating savage.
From the time when he could barely handle tools until he attained his
majority, Lincoln’s life was that of a simple farm laborer, poorly clad,
housed, and fed, at work either on his father’s wretched farm or hired
out to neighboring farmers. But in spite, or perhaps by means, of this
rude environment, he grew to be a stalwart giant, reaching six feet four
at nineteen, and fabulous stories are told of his feats of strength.
With the growth of this mighty frame began that strange education which
in his ripening years was to qualify him for the great destiny that
awaited him, and the development of those mental faculties and moral
endowments which, by the time he reached middle life, were to make him
the sagacious, patient, and triumphant leader of a great nation in the
crisis of its fate. His whole schooling, obtained during such odd times
as could be spared from grinding labor, did not amount in all to as much
as one year, and the quality of the teaching was of the lowest possible
grade, including only the elements of reading, writing, and ciphering.
But out of these simple elements, when rightly used by the right man,
education is achieved, and Lincoln knew how to use them. As so often
happens, he seemed to take warning from his father’s unfortunate
example. Untiring industry, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and
an ever-growing desire to rise above his surroundings, were early
manifestations of his character.
Books were almost unknown in that community, but the Bible was in
every house, and somehow or other Pilgrim’s Progress, AEsop’s Fables,
a History of the United States, and a Life of Washington fell into his
hands. He trudged on foot many miles through the wilderness to borrow an
English Grammar, and is said to have devoured greedily the contents of
the Statutes of Indiana that fell in his way. These few volumes he read
and reread—and his power of assimilation was great. To be shut in with
a few books and to master them thoroughly sometimes does more for the
development of character than freedom to range at large, in a cursory
and indiscriminate way, through wide domains of literature. This youth’s
mind, at any rate, was thoroughly saturated with Biblical knowledge and
Biblical language, which, in after life, he used with great readiness
and effect. But it was the constant use of the little knowledge which he
had that developed and exercised his mental powers. After the hard
day’s work was done, while others slept, he toiled on, always reading or
writing. From an early age he did his own thinking and made up his own
mind—invaluable traits in the future President. Paper was such a scarce
commodity that, by the evening firelight, he would write and cipher
on the back of a wooden shovel, and then shave it off to make room for
more. By and by, as he approached manhood, he began speaking in the rude
gatherings of the neighborhood, and so laid the foundation of that art
of persuading his fellow-men which was one rich result of his education,
and one great secret of his subsequent success.
Accustomed as we are in these days of steam and telegraphs to have every
intelligent boy survey the whole world each morning before breakfast,
and inform himself as to what is going on in every nation, it is hardly
possible to conceive how benighted and isolated was the condition of the
community at Pigeon Creek in Indiana, of which the family of Lincoln’s
father formed a part, or how eagerly an ambitious and high-spirited boy,
such as he, must have yearned to escape. The first glimpse that he ever
got of any world beyond the narrow confines of his home was in 1828, at
the age of nineteen, when a neighbor employed him to accompany his son
down the river to New Orleans to dispose of a flatboat of produce—a
commission which he discharged with great success.
Shortly after his return from this his first excursion into the outer
world, his father, tired of failure in Indiana, packed his family and
all his worldly goods into a single wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen, and
after a fourteen days’ tramp through the wilderness, pitched his camp
once more, in Illinois. Here Abraham, having come of age and being now
his own master, rendered the last service of his minority by ploughing
the fifteen-acre lot and splitting from the tall walnut trees of the
primeval forest enough rails to surround the little clearing with a
fence. Such was the meagre outfit of this coming leader of men, at the
age when the future British Prime Minister or statesman emerges from the
university as a double first or senior wrangler, with every advantage
that high training and broad culture and association with the wisest and
the best of men and women can give, and enters upon some form of public
service on the road to usefulness and honor, the University course being
only the first stage of the public training. So Lincoln, at twenty-one,
had just begun his preparation for the public life to which he soon
began to aspire. For some years yet he must continue to earn his daily
bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no means, no home,
no friend to consult. More farm work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a
village store, the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a
flatboat of his own contriving, a pilot’s berth on the river—these were
the means by which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he
was twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public
recognition.
The Black Hawk war broke out, and, the Governor of Illinois calling for
volunteers to repel the band of savages whose leader bore that name,
Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain by his comrades, among whom he
had already established his supremacy by signal feats of strength and
more than one successful single combat. During the brief hostilities
he was engaged in no battle and won no military glory, but his local
leadership was established. The same year he offered himself as a
candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the polls. Yet
his vast popularity with those who knew him was manifest. The district
consisted of several counties, but the unanimous vote of the people
of his own county was for Lincoln. Another unsuccessful attempt at
store-keeping was followed by better luck at surveying, until his horse
and instruments were levied upon under execution for the debts of his
business adventure.
I have been thus detailed in sketching his early years because upon
these strange foundations the structure of his great fame and service
was built. In the place of a school and university training fortune
substituted these trials, hardships, and struggles as a preparation for
the great work which he had to do. It turned out to be exactly what
the emergency required. Ten years instead at the public school and the
university certainly never could have fitted this man for the unique
work which was to be thrown upon him. Some other Moses would have had to
lead us to our Jordan, to the sight of our promised land of liberty.
At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Legislature of
Illinois, and so continued for eight years, and, in the meantime,
qualified himself by reading such law books as he could borrow at
random—for he was too poor to buy any to be called to the Bar. For
his second quarter of a century—during which a single term in Congress
introduced him into the arena of national questions—he gave himself up
to law and politics. In spite of his soaring ambition, his two years
in Congress gave him no premonition of the great destiny that awaited
him,—and at its close, in 1849, we find him an unsuccessful applicant
to the President for appointment as Commissioner of the General Land
Office—a purely administrative bureau; a fortunate escape for
himself and for his country. Year by year his knowledge and power, his
experience and reputation extended, and his mental faculties seemed to
grow by what they fed on. His power of persuasion, which had always been
marked, was developed to an extraordinary degree, now that he became
engaged in congenial questions and subjects. Little by little he rose to
prominence at the Bar, and became the most effective public speaker in
the West. Not that he possessed any of the graces of the orator; but his
logic was invincible, and his clearness and force of statement impressed
upon his hearers the convictions of his honest mind, while his broad
sympathies and sparkling and genial humor made him a universal favorite
as far and as fast as his acquaintance extended.
These twenty years that elapsed from the time of his establishment as
a lawyer and legislator in Springfield, the new capital of Illinois,
furnished a fitting theatre for the development and display of his great
faculties, and, with his new and enlarged opportunities, he obviously
grew in mental stature in this second period of his career, as if
to compensate for the absolute lack of advantages under which he had
suffered in youth. As his powers enlarged, his reputation extended,
for he was always before the people, felt a warm sympathy with all that
concerned them, took a zealous part in the discussion of every public
question, and made his personal influence ever more widely and deeply
felt.
My brethren of the legal profession will naturally ask me, how could
this rough backwoodsman, whose youth had been spent in the forest or
on the farm and the flatboat, without culture or training, education or
study, by the random reading, on the wing, of a few miscellaneous law
books, become a learned and accomplished lawyer? Well, he never did.
He never would have earned his salt as a ‘Writer’ for the ‘Signet’,
nor have won a place as advocate in the Court of Session, where the
technique of the profession has reached its highest perfection, and
centuries of learning and precedent are involved in the equipment of a
lawyer. Dr. Holmes, when asked by an anxious young mother, “When should
the education of a child begin?” replied, “Madam, at least two centuries
before it is born!” and so I am sure it is with the Scots lawyer.
But not so in Illinois in 1840. Between 1830 and 1880 its population
increased twenty-fold, and when Lincoln began practising law in
Springfield in 1837, life in Illinois was very crude and simple, and so
were the courts and the administration of justice. Books and libraries
were scarce. But the people loved justice, upheld the law, and followed
the courts, and soon found their favorites among the advocates. The
fundamental principles of the common law, as set forth by Blackstone
and Chitty, were not so difficult to acquire; and brains, common sense,
force of character, tenacity of purpose, ready wit and power of speech
did the rest, and supplied all the deficiencies of learning.
The lawsuits of those days were extremely simple, and the principles of
natural justice were mainly relied on to dispose of them at the Bar
and on the Bench, without resort to technical learning. Railroads,
corporations absorbing the chief business of the community, combined
and inherited wealth, with all the subtle and intricate questions they
breed, had not yet come in—and so the professional agents and the
equipment which they require were not needed. But there were many highly
educated and powerful men at the Bar of Illinois, even in those early
days, whom the spirit of enterprise had carried there in search of fame
and fortune. It was by constant contact and conflict with these that
Lincoln acquired professional strength and skill. Every community and
every age creates its own Bar, entirely adequate for its present uses
and necessities. So in Illinois, as the population and wealth of the
State kept on doubling and quadrupling, its Bar presented a growing
abundance of learning and science and technical skill. The early
practitioners grew with its growth and mastered the requisite knowledge.
Chicago soon grew to be one of the largest and richest and certainly
the most intensely active city on the continent, and if any of my
professional friends here had gone there in Lincoln’s later years, to
try or argue a cause, or transact other business, with any idea that
Edinburgh or London had a monopoly of legal learning, science, or
subtlety, they would certainly have found their mistake.
In those early days in the West, every lawyer, especially every court
lawyer, was necessarily a politician, constantly engaged in the public
discussion of the many questions evolved from the rapid development
of town, county, State, and Federal affairs. Then and there, in this
regard, public discussion supplied the place which the universal
activity of the press has since monopolized, and the public speaker who,
by clearness, force, earnestness, and wit; could make himself felt on
the questions of the day would rapidly come to the front. In the absence
of that immense variety of popular entertainments which now feed the
public taste and appetite, the people found their chief amusement in
frequenting the courts and public and political assemblies. In either
place, he who impressed, entertained, and amused them most was the
hero of the hour. They did not discriminate very carefully between the
eloquence of the forum and the eloquence of the hustings. Human nature
ruled in both alike, and he who was the most effective speaker in a
political harangue was often retained as most likely to win in a cause
to be tried or argued. And I have no doubt in this way many retainers
came to Lincoln. Fees, money in any form, had no charms for him—in
his eager pursuit of fame he could not afford to make money. He was
ambitious to distinguish himself by some great service to mankind, and
this ambition for fame and real public service left no room for avarice
in his composition. However much he earned, he seems to have ended every
year hardly richer than he began it, and yet, as the years passed,
fees came to him freely. One of L 1,000 is recorded—a very large
professional fee at that time, even in any part of America, the paradise
of lawyers. I lay great stress on Lincoln’s career as a lawyer—much
more than his biographers do because in America a state of things
exists wholly different from that which prevails in Great Britain. The
profession of the law always has been and is to this day the principal
avenue to public life; and I am sure that his training and experience
in the courts had much to do with the development of those forces of
intellect and character which he soon displayed on a broader arena.
It was in political controversy, of course, that he acquired his wide
reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression upon the people of
what had now become the powerful State of Illinois, and upon the people
of the Great West, to whom the political power and control of the United
States were already surely and swiftly passing from the older Eastern
States. It was this reputation and this impression, and the familiar
knowledge of his character which had come to them from his local
leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West to present him
as their candidate, and to press him upon the Republican convention of
1860 as the fit and necessary leader in the struggle for life which was
before the nation.
That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible question of
slavery—and I must trust to your general knowledge of the history
of that question to make intelligible the attitude and leadership of
Lincoln as the champion of the hosts of freedom in the final contest.
Negro slavery had been firmly established in the Southern States from
an early period of their history. In 1619, the year before the Mayflower
landed our Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had
discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown in Virginia: All
through the colonial period their importation had continued. A few had
found their way into the Northern States, but none of them in sufficient
numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis for political power.
At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there is no
doubt that the principal members of the convention not only condemned
slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, but believed that by
the suppression of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual
extinction in the South, as it certainly was in the North. Washington,
in his will, provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and
said to Jefferson that it “was among his first wishes to see some plan
adopted by which slavery in his country might be abolished.” Jefferson
said, referring to the institution: “I tremble for my country when I
think that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever,”—and
Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry were all utterly opposed
to it. But it was made the subject of a fatal compromise in the Federal
Constitution, whereby its existence was recognized in the States as a
basis of representation, the prohibition of the importation of slaves
was postponed for twenty years, and the return of fugitive slaves
provided for. But no imminent danger was apprehended from it till, by
the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture by negro labor
became at once and forever the leading industry of the South, and gave
a new impetus to the importation of slaves, so that in 1808, when
the constitutional prohibition took effect, their numbers had vastly
increased. From that time forward slavery became the basis of a great
political power, and the Southern States, under all circumstances and at
every opportunity, carried on a brave and unrelenting struggle for its
maintenance and extension.
The conscience of the North was slow to rise against it, though bitter
controversies from time to time took place. The Southern leaders
threatened disunion if their demands were not complied with. To save the
Union, compromise after compromise was made, but each one in the end was
broken. The Missouri Compromise, made in 1820 upon the occasion of
the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave State, whereby, in
consideration of such admission, slavery was forever excluded from the
Northwest Territory, was ruthlessly repealed in 1854, by a Congress
elected in the interests of the slave power, the intent being to force
slavery into that vast territory which had so long been dedicated to
freedom. This challenge at last aroused the slumbering conscience and
passion of the North, and led to the formation of the Republican party
for the avowed purpose of preventing, by constitutional methods, the
further extension of slavery.
In its first campaign, in 1856, though it failed to elect its
candidates; it received a surprising vote and carried many of the
States. No one could any longer doubt that the North had made up its
mind that no threats of disunion should deter it from pressing its
cherished purpose and performing its long neglected duty. From the
outset, Lincoln was one of the most active and effective leaders and
speakers of the new party, and the great debates between Lincoln and
Douglas in 1858, as the respective champions of the restriction and
extension of slavery, attracted the attention of the whole country.
Lincoln’s powerful arguments carried conviction everywhere. His moral
nature was thoroughly aroused his conscience was stirred to the quick.
Unless slavery was wrong, nothing was wrong. Was each man, of whatever
color, entitled to the fruits of his own labor, or could one man live
in idle luxury by the sweat of another’s brow, whose skin was darker?
He was an implicit believer in that principle of the Declaration of
Independence that all men are vested with certain inalienable rights
the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On this
doctrine he staked his case and carried it. We have time only for one or
two sentences in which he struck the keynote of the contest.
“The real issue in this country is the eternal struggle between these
two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two
principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and
will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity,
and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in
whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You
work and toil and earn bread and I’ll eat it.’”
He foresaw with unerring vision that the conflict was inevitable and
irrepressible—that one or the other, the right or the wrong, freedom
or slavery, must ultimately prevail and wholly prevail, throughout the
country; and this was the principle that carried the war, once begun, to
a finish.
One sentence of his is immortal:
“Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the slavery agitation
has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion
it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘A
house divided against itself 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 do
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 further
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.”
During the entire decade from 1850 to 1860 the agitation of the
slavery question was at the boiling point, and events which have become
historical continually indicated the near approach of the overwhelming
storm. No sooner had the Compromise Acts of 1850 resulted in a temporary
peace, which everybody said must be final and perpetual, than new
outbreaks came. The forcible carrying away of fugitive slaves by Federal
troops from Boston agitated that ancient stronghold of freedom to its
foundations. The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which truly exposed
the frightful possibilities of the slave system; the reckless attempts
by force and fraud to establish it in Kansas against the will of the
vast majority of the settlers; the beating of Summer in the Senate
Chamber for words spoken in debate; the Dred Scott decision in the
Supreme Court, which made the nation realize that the slave power had at
last reached the fountain of Federal justice; and finally the execution
of John Brown, for his wild raid into Virginia, to invite the slaves to
rally to the standard of freedom which he unfurled:—all these events
tend to illustrate and confirm Lincoln’s contention that the nation
could not permanently continue half slave and half free, but must become
all one thing or all the other. When John Brown lay under sentence of
death he declared that now he was sure that slavery must be wiped out in
blood; but neither he nor his executioners dreamt that within four years
a million soldiers would be marching across the country for its final
extirpation, to the music of the war-song of the great conflict:
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on.”
And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the wilderness, this
farm laborer, rail-sputter, flatboatman, this surveyor, lawyer, orator,
statesman, and patriot, found himself elected by the great party which
was pledged to prevent at all hazards the further extension of slavery,
as the chief magistrate of the Republic, bound to carry out that
purpose, to be the leader and ruler of the nation in its most trying
hour.
Those who believe that there is a living Providence that overrules and
conducts the affairs of nations, find in the elevation of this plain man
to this extraordinary fortune and to this great duty, which he so
fitly discharged, a signal vindication of their faith. Perhaps to this
philosophical institution the judgment of our philosopher Emerson will
commend itself as a just estimate of Lincoln’s historical place.
“His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense of
mankind and of the public conscience. He grew according to the need; his
mind mastered the problem of the day: and as the problem grew, so did
his comprehension of it. In the war there was no place for holiday
magistrate, nor fair-weather sailor. The new pilot was hurried to
the helm in a tornado. In four years—four years of battle days—his
endurance, his fertility of resource, his magnanimity, were sorely
tried, and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his
even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure
in the centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
people in his time, the true representative of this continent—father
of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the
thought of their mind—articulated in his tongue.”
He was born great, as distinguished from those who achieve greatness or
have it thrust upon them, and his inherent capacity, mental, moral, and
physical, having been recognized by the educated intelligence of a free
people, they happily chose him for their ruler in a day of deadly peril.
It is now forty years since I first saw and heard Abraham Lincoln, but
the impression which he left on my mind is ineffaceable. After his great
successes in the West he came to New York to make a political address.
He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people
among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing
impressive or imposing about him—except that his great stature singled
him out from the crowd: his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame;
his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of color; his
seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle;
his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave
little evidence of that brain power which had raised him from the lowest
to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before
the meeting, he seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which
a young man might feel before presenting himself to a new and strange
audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded. It was a great
audience, including all the noted men—all the learned and cultured of
his party in New York editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants,
critics. They were all very curious to hear him. His fame as a powerful
speaker had preceded him, and exaggerated rumor of his wit—the worst
forerunner of an orator—had reached the East. When Mr. Bryant presented
him, on the high platform of the Cooper Institute, a vast sea of eager
upturned faces greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this
rude child of the people was like. He was equal to the occasion. When
he spoke he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face
shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half
he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and
manner of delivery were severely simple. What Lowell called “the
grand simplicities of the Bible,” with which he was so familiar, were
reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric,
without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point. If any came
expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they
must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his
utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere
self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all
meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur and strength of
absolute simplicity.
He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thoroughly. He
demonstrated by copious historical proofs and masterly logic that the
fathers who created the Constitution in order to form a more perfect
union, to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty
to themselves and their posterity, intended to empower the Federal
Government to exclude slavery from the Territories. In the kindliest
spirit he protested against the avowed threat of the Southern States to
destroy the Union if, in order to secure freedom in those vast regions
out of which future States were to be carved, a Republican President
were elected. He closed with an appeal to his audience, spoken with all
the fire of his aroused and kindling conscience, with a full outpouring
of his love of justice and liberty, to maintain their political purpose
on that lofty and unassailable issue of right and wrong which alone
could justify it, and not to be intimidated from their high resolve and
sacred duty by any threats of destruction to the government or of ruin
to themselves. He concluded with this telling sentence, which drove the
whole argument home to all our hearts: “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.” That night the great hall, and the next day the whole
city, rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who had
come as a stranger departed with the laurels of great triumph.
Alas! in five years from that exulting night I saw him again, for the
last time, in the same city, borne in his coffin through its draped
streets. With tears and lamentations a heart-broken people accompanied
him from Washington, the scene of his martyrdom, to his last
resting-place in the young city of the West where he had worked his way
to fame.
Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than Lincoln when
he entered office on the fourth of March, 1861, four months after his
election, and took his oath to support the Constitution and the Union.
The intervening time had been busily employed by the Southern States in
carrying out their threat of disunion in the event of his election.
As soon as the fact was ascertained, seven of them had seceded and had
seized upon the forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other public property
of the United States within their boundaries, and were making every
preparation for war. In the meantime the retiring President, who had
been elected by the slave power, and who thought the seceding States
could not lawfully be coerced, had done absolutely nothing. Lincoln
found himself, by the Constitution, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and
Navy of the United States, but with only a remnant of either at hand.
Each was to be created on a great scale out of the unknown resources of
a nation untried in war.
In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while appealing to the
seceding States to return to their allegiance, he avowed his purpose to
keep the solemn oath he had taken that day, to see that the laws of the
Union were faithfully executed, and to use the troops to recover the
forts, navy yards, and other property belonging to the government. It
is probable, however, that neither side actually realized that war
was inevitable, and that the other was determined to fight, until the
assault on Fort Sumter presented the South as the first aggressor
and roused the North to use every possible resource to maintain the
government and the imperilled Union, and to vindicate the supremacy of
the flag over every inch of the territory of the United States. The
fact that Lincoln’s first proclamation called for only 75,000 troops, to
serve for three months, shows how inadequate was even his idea of what
the future had in store. But from that moment Lincoln and his loyal
supporters never faltered in their purpose. They knew they could win,
that it was their duty to win, and that for America the whole hope
of the future depended upon their winning; for now by the acts of the
seceding States the issue of the election to secure or prevent the
extension of slavery—stood transformed into a struggle to preserve or
to destroy the Union.
We cannot follow this contest. You know its gigantic proportions; that
it lasted four years instead of three months; that in its progress,
instead of 75,000 men, more than 2,000,000 were enrolled on the side
of the government alone; that the aggregate cost and loss to the nation
approximated to 1,000,000,000 pounds sterling, and that not less than
300,000 brave and precious lives were sacrificed on each side. History
has recorded how Lincoln bore himself during these four frightful years;
that he was the real President, the responsible and actual head of the
government, through it all; that he listened to all advice, heard all
parties, and then, always realizing his responsibility to God and the
nation, decided every great executive question for himself. His absolute
honesty had become proverbial long before he was President. “Honest Abe
Lincoln” was the name by which he had been known for years. His every
act attested it.
In all the grandeur of the vast power that he wielded, he never ceased
to be one of the plain people, as he always called them, never lost or
impaired his perfect sympathy with them, was always in perfect touch
with them and open to their appeals; and here lay the very secret of
his personality and of his power, for the people in turn gave him their
absolute confidence. His courage, his fortitude, his patience, his
hopefulness, were sorely tried but never exhausted.
He was true as steel to his generals, but had frequent occasion to
change them, as he found them inadequate. This serious and painful duty
rested wholly upon him, and was perhaps his most important function as
Commander-in-Chief; but when, at last, he recognized in General Grant
the master of the situation, the man who could and would bring the war
to a triumphant end, he gave it all over to him and upheld him with all
his might. Amid all the pressure and distress that the burdens of office
brought upon him, his unfailing sense of humor saved him; probably it
made it possible for him to live under the burden. He had always been
the great story-teller of the West, and he used and cultivated this
faculty to relieve the weight of the load he bore.
It enabled him to keep the wonderful record of never having lost his
temper, no matter what agony he had to bear. A whole night might be
spent in recounting the stories of his wit, humor, and harmless sarcasm.
But I will recall only two of his sayings, both about General Grant, who
always found plenty of enemies and critics to urge the President to oust
him from his command. One, I am sure, will interest all Scotchmen. They
repeated with malicious intent the gossip that Grant drank. “What
does he drink?” asked Lincoln. “Whiskey,” was, of course, the answer;
doubtless you can guess the brand. “Well,” said the President, “just
find out what particular kind he uses and I’ll send a barrel to each of
my other generals.” The other must be as pleasing to the British as
to the American ear. When pressed again on other grounds to get rid of
Grant, he declared, “I can’t spare that man, he fights!”
He was tender-hearted to a fault, and never could resist the appeals of
wives and mothers of soldiers who had got into trouble and were under
sentence of death for their offences. His Secretary of War and other
officials complained that they never could get deserters shot. As surely
as the women of the culprit’s family could get at him he always gave
way. Certainly you will all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the
suffering relatives of those who had fallen in battle. His heart bled
with theirs. Never was there a more gentle and tender utterance than his
letter to a mother who had given all her sons to her country, written at
a time when the angel of death had visited almost every household in the
land, and was already hovering over him.
“I have been shown,” he says, “in the files of the War Department a
statement that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously
on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words
of mine which should attempt to beguile you from your grief for a
loss so overwhelming but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the
consolation which may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died
to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the
lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a
sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”
Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her queenly
and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and tender to soothe
the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.
The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted the
country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will doubtless
secure for him a foremost place in history among the philanthropists
and benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading
slavery, so many millions of his fellow-beings described in the law and
existing in fact as “chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners
and possessors, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.”
Rarely does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service
to his kind—to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.
Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more signal instance of this
triumph of an idea than here. William Lloyd Garrison, who thirty years
before had begun his crusade for the abolition of slavery, and had lived
to see this glorious and unexpected consummation of the hopeless cause
to which he had devoted his life, well described the proclamation as
a “great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and
beneficent in its far-reaching consequences, and eminently just and
right alike to the oppressor and the oppressed.”
Lincoln had always been heart and soul opposed to slavery. Tradition
says that on the trip on the flatboat to New Orleans he formed his
first and last opinion of slavery at the sight of negroes chained and
scourged, and that then and there the iron entered into his soul. No
boy could grow to manhood in those days as a poor white in Kentucky and
Indiana, in close contact with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a
growing consciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as
of its frightful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois,
where the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution and
violently against every movement for its abolition or restriction, upon
the passage of resolutions to that effect he had the courage with one
companion to put on record his protest, “believing that the institution
of slavery is founded both in injustice and bad policy.” No great
demonstration of courage, you will say; but that was at a time when
Garrison, for his abolition utterances, had been dragged by an angry mob
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in
the very year that Lovejoy in the same State of Illinois was slain by
rioters while defending his press, from which he had printed antislavery
appeals.
In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition in the District
of Columbia, with compensation to the owners, for until they raised
treasonable hands against the life of the nation he always maintained
that the property of the slaveholders, into which they had come by two
centuries of descent, without fault on their part, ought not to be taken
away from them without just compensation. He used to say that, one way
or another, he had voted forty-two times for the Wilmot Proviso, which
Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania moved as an addition to every bill which
affected United States territory, “that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall ever exist in any part of the said territory,” and it is
evident that his condemnation of the system, on moral grounds as a crime
against the human race, and on political grounds as a cancer that was
sapping the vitals of the nation, and must master its whole being or
be itself extirpated, grew steadily upon him until it culminated in his
great speeches in the Illinois debate.
By the mere election of Lincoln to the Presidency, the further extension
of slavery into the Territories was rendered forever impossible—Vox
populi, vox Dei. Revolutions never go backward, and when founded on a
great moral sentiment stirring the heart of an indignant people their
edicts are irresistible and final. Had the slave power acquiesced in
that election, had the Southern States remained under the Constitution
and within the Union, and relied upon their constitutional and legal
rights, their favorite institution, immoral as it was, blighting and
fatal as it was, might have endured for another century. The great party
that had elected him, unalterably determined against its extension, was
nevertheless pledged not to interfere with its continuance in the States
where it already existed. Of course, when new regions were forever
closed against it, from its very nature it must have begun to shrink
and to dwindle; and probably gradual and compensated emancipation,
which appealed very strongly to the new President’s sense of justice and
expediency, would, in the progress of time, by a reversion to the ideas
of the founders of the Republic, have found a safe outlet for both
masters and slaves. But whom the gods wish to destroy they first make
mad, and when seven States, afterwards increased to eleven, openly
seceded from the Union, when they declared and began the war upon the
nation, and challenged its mighty power to the desperate and protracted
struggle for its life, and for the maintenance of its authority as
a nation over its territory, they gave to Lincoln and to freedom the
sublime opportunity of history.
In his first inaugural address, when as yet not a drop of precious blood
had been shed, while he held out to them the olive branch in one hand,
in the other he presented the guarantees of the Constitution, and after
reciting the emphatic resolution of the convention that nominated
him, that the maintenance inviolate of the “rights of the States, and
especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic
institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential
to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our
political fabric depend,” he reiterated this sentiment, and declared,
with no mental reservation, “that all the protection which, consistently
with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully
given to all the States when lawfully demanded for whatever cause as
cheerfully to one section as to another.”
When, however, these magnanimous overtures for peace and reunion were
rejected; when the seceding States defied the Constitution and every
clause and principle of it; when they persisted in staying out of the
Union from which they had seceded, and proceeded to carve out of its
territory a new and hostile empire based on slavery; when they flew at
the throat of the nation and plunged it into the bloodiest war of the
nineteenth century the tables were turned, and the belief gradually came
to the mind of the President that if the Rebellion was not soon subdued
by force of arms, if the war must be fought out to the bitter end, then
to reach that end the salvation of the nation itself might require
the destruction of slavery wherever it existed; that if the war was to
continue on one side for Disunion, for no other purpose than to preserve
slavery, it must continue on the other side for the Union, to destroy
slavery.
As he said, “Events control me; I cannot control events,” and as the
dreadful war progressed and became more deadly and dangerous, the
unalterable conviction was forced upon him that, in order that the
frightful sacrifice of life and treasure on both sides might not be all
in vain, it had become his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, as
a necessary war measure, to strike a blow at the Rebellion which,
all others failing, would inevitably lead to its annihilation, by
annihilating the very thing for which it was contending. His own words
are the best:
“I understood that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of
my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving by every indispensable
means that government—that nation—of which that Constitution was the
organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the
Constitution? By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often
a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely
given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional
might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the
Constitution through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I
assumed this ground and now avow it. I could not feel that to the best
of my ability I had ever tried to preserve the Constitution if to save
slavery or any minor matter I should permit the wreck of government,
country, and Constitution all together.”
And so, at last, when in his judgment the indispensable necessity had
come, he struck the fatal blow, and signed the proclamation which has
made his name immortal. By it, the President, as Commander-in-Chief in
time of actual armed rebellion, and as a fit and necessary war measure
for suppressing the rebellion, proclaimed all persons held as slaves
in the States and parts of States then in rebellion to be thenceforward
free, and declared that the executive, with the army and navy, would
recognize and maintain their freedom.
In the other great steps of the government, which led to the triumphant
prosecution of the war, he necessarily shared the responsibility and the
credit with the great statesmen who stayed up his hands in his cabinet,
with Seward, Chase and Stanton, and the rest,—and with his generals and
admirals, his soldiers and sailors, but this great act was absolutely
his own. The conception and execution were exclusively his. He laid it
before his cabinet as a measure on which his mind was made up and could
not be changed, asking them only for suggestions as to details. He chose
the time and the circumstances under which the Emancipation should be
proclaimed and when it should take effect.
It came not an hour too soon; but public opinion in the North would not
have sustained it earlier. In the first eighteen months of the war its
ravages had extended from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi. Many
victories in the West had been balanced and paralyzed by inaction
and disasters in Virginia, only partially redeemed by the bloody and
indecisive battle of Antietam; a reaction had set in from the general
enthusiasm which had swept the Northern States after the assault upon
Sumter. It could not truly be said that they had lost heart, but faction
was raising its head. Heard through the land like the blast of a
bugle, the proclamation rallied the patriotism of the country to fresh
sacrifices and renewed ardor. It was a step that could not be revoked.
It relieved the conscience of the nation from an incubus that had
oppressed it from its birth. The United States were rescued from the
false predicament in which they had been from the beginning, and the
great popular heart leaped with new enthusiasm for “Liberty and Union,
henceforth and forever, one and inseparable.” It brought not only moral
but material support to the cause of the government, for within two
years 120,000 colored troops were enlisted in the military service and
following the national flag, supported by all the loyalty of the North,
and led by its choicest spirits. One mother said, when her son was
offered the command of the first colored regiment, “If he accepts it
I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.” He was shot
heading a gallant charge of his regiment.... The Confederates replied to
a request of his friends for his body that they had “buried him under a
layer of his niggers...;” but that mother has lived to enjoy thirty-six
years of his glory, and Boston has erected its noblest monument to his
memory.
The effect of the proclamation upon the actual progress of the war was
not immediate, but wherever the Federal armies advanced they carried
freedom with them, and when the summer came round the new spirit and
force which had animated the heart of the government and people were
manifest. In the first week of July the decisive battle of Gettysburg
turned the tide of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river
free from its source to the Gulf.
On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation and of these new
victories was of great importance. In those days, when there was no
cable, it was not easy for foreign observers to appreciate what was
really going on; they could not see clearly the true state of affairs,
as in the last year of the nineteenth century we have been able, by our
new electric vision, to watch every event at the antipodes and observe
its effect. The Rebel emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention,
spared no pains to impress upon the minds of public and private men
and upon the press their own views of the character of the contest. The
prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad than at home. The
stock markets of the world gambled upon its chances, and its bonds at
one time were high in favor.
Such ideas as these were seriously held: that the North was fighting for
empire and the South for independence; that the Southern States, instead
of being the grossest oligarchies, essentially despotisms, founded on
the right of one man to appropriate the fruit of other men’s toil and to
exclude them from equal rights, were real republics, feebler to be sure
than their Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom,
and that the mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to
crush them; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had created
a nation; that the republican experiment had failed and the Union had
ceased to exist. But the crowning argument to foreign minds was that
it was an utter impossibility for the government to win in the contest;
that the success of the Southern States, so far as separation was
concerned, was as certain as any event yet future and contingent could
be; that the subjugation of the South by the North, even if it could be
accomplished, would prove a calamity to the United States and the world,
and especially calamitous to the negro race; and that such a victory
would necessarily leave the people of the South for many generations
cherishing deadly hostility against the government and the North, and
plotting always to recover their independence.
When Lincoln issued his proclamation he knew that all these ideas were
founded in error; that the national resources were inexhaustible;
that the government could and would win, and that if slavery were once
finally disposed of, the only cause of difference being out of the way,
the North and South would come together again, and by and by be as good
friends as ever. In many quarters abroad the proclamation was
welcomed with enthusiasm by the friends of America; but I think the
demonstrations in its favor that brought more gladness to Lincoln’s
heart than any other were the meetings held in the manufacturing
centres, by the very operatives upon whom the war bore the hardest,
expressing the most enthusiastic sympathy with the proclamation, while
they bore with heroic fortitude the grievous privations which the war
entailed upon them. Mr. Lincoln’s expectation when he announced to the
world that all slaves in all States then in rebellion were set free
must have been that the avowed position of his government, that the
continuance of the war now meant the annihilation of slavery, would make
intervention impossible for any foreign nation whose people were lovers
of liberty—and so the result proved.
The growth and development of Lincoln’s mental power and moral force, of
his intense and magnetic personality, after the vast responsibilities of
government were thrown upon him at the age of fifty-two, furnish a rare
and striking illustration of the marvellous capacity and adaptability of
the human intellect—of the sound mind in the sound body. He came to
the discharge of the great duties of the Presidency with absolutely no
experience in the administration of government, or of the vastly
varied and complicated questions of foreign and domestic policy which
immediately arose, and continued to press upon him during the rest of
his life; but he mastered each as it came, apparently with the facility
of a trained and experienced ruler. As Clarendon said of Cromwell, “His
parts seemed to be raised by the demands of great station.” His life
through it all was one of intense labor, anxiety, and distress, without
one hour of peaceful repose from first to last. But he rose to every
occasion. He led public opinion, but did not march so far in advance of
it as to fail of its effective support in every great emergency. He
knew the heart and thought of the people, as no man not in constant and
absolute sympathy with them could have known it, and so holding their
confidence, he triumphed through and with them. Not only was there this
steady growth of intellect, but the infinite delicacy of his nature and
its capacity for refinement developed also, as exhibited in the
purity and perfection of his language and style of speech. The rough
backwoodsman, who had never seen the inside of a university, became in
the end, by self-training and the exercise of his own powers of mind,
heart, and soul, a master of style, and some of his utterances will rank
with the best, the most perfectly adapted to the occasion which produced
them.
Have you time to listen to his two-minutes speech at Gettysburg, at the
dedication of the Soldiers’ Cemetery? His whole soul was in it:
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting-place for 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 poor 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 which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. 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 that 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 this nation under God shall 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.”
He lived to see his work indorsed by an overwhelming majority of his
countrymen. In his second inaugural address, pronounced just forty days
before his death, there is a single passage which well displays his
indomitable will and at the same time his deep religious feeling,
his sublime charity to the enemies of his country, and his broad and
catholic humanity:
“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences
which in the Providence of God must needs come, but which, having
continued through the appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that
He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to
those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure
from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always
ascribe to Him? 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 bondsmen’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 with another drawn by 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.”
His prayer was answered. The forty days of life that remained to
him were crowned with great historic events. He lived to see
his Proclamation of Emancipation embodied in an amendment of the
Constitution, adopted by Congress, and submitted to the States for
ratification. The mighty scourge of war did speedily pass away, for it
was given him to witness the surrender of the Rebel army and the fall of
their capital, and the starry flag that he loved waving in triumph over
the national soil. When he died by the madman’s hand in the supreme hour
of victory, the vanquished lost their best friend, and the human race
one of its noblest examples; and all the friends of freedom and justice,
in whose cause he lived and died, joined hands as mourners at his grave.