not be the height of culture or of grace, but at all events it is peace.
Ultramontanism there, as everywhere else, is aggressive, and a source of
disturbance; and, on the other hand, in the struggle against slavery,
political and religious elements were inevitably intermingled, but as a
rule politics are kept perfectly clear of religion. Saving in the case
of Roman Catholicism, we cannot call to mind a single instance of a
serious appeal in an election to sectarian feeling. Much as we have
heard of the two candidates for the Presidency, we could not at this
moment tell to what Church either of them belongs. Where no Church is
privileged, there can be no cause for jealousy. The Churches dwell side
by side, without disturbing the State with any quarrels; they are all
alike loyal to the government; they unite in supporting a system of
popular education which generally includes a certain element of
unsectarian religion, they combine for social and philanthropic objects;
they testify, by their common celebration of national thanksgivings and
fasts their unity at all events as portions of the same Christian
nation. So far as we know, controversy between them is very rare; there
is more of it within the several Churches between their own more
orthodox and more liberal members. In none does it rage more violently
than in the Episcopal Church, though, under religious equality,
irreconcilable disagreement on religious questions leads to seccession,
not to mutual lawsuits and imprisonments.
Mr. Arnold says in praise of Falkland that "he was profoundly serious."
We presume he means not only that Falkland treated great questions in a
serious way, without unseasonable quizzing, but that he was, in the
words quoted from Clarendon in the next sentence, "a precise lover of
truth, and superior to all possible temptations for its violation." The
temptations, we presume, would have included those of taste or fancy, as
well as those of the more obvious kind; and Falkland's paramount regard
for truth would have extended to all his fellow-men as well as to
himself and his own intellectual circle. He would never, we are
confident, have advised any human being to separate religion from truth,
he would never have suffered himself to intimate that truth was the
property of a select circle, while "poetry" was good enough for the
common people, he would never have encouraged thousands of clergymen,
educated men with sensitive consciences, to go on preaching to their
flocks from the pulpit, on grounds of social convenience, doctrines
which they repudiated in the study, and derided in the company of
cultivated men, he would never have exhorted people to enter from
aesthetic considerations a spiritual society of which, in the same
breath, he proclaimed the creeds to be figments, the priesthood to be an
illusion, the sacred narratives to be myths, and the Triune God to be a
caricature of Lord Shaftesbury multiplied by three. If he had done so,
and if his propagandism had been successful, we suspect he would soon
have produced an anarchy, not only religious but social, compared with
which the most chaotic periods of the Revolution would have been harmony
and order. In the days of the Antonines, to which Gibbon looks back so
wistfully, opinion had little influence; the organic forces of society
were of a more primitive and a coarser kind. In modern times if a writer
could succeed in separating truth from religion, he would shake the
pillars of the moral and social as well as the intellectual world.
That religion is inseparable from truth is the strong and special
tradition of the Nonconformists. Their history has been a long struggle
for the rights of conscience against spurious authority, an authority
which we believe Mr. Arnold holds to be spurious as well as they. This
is not altogether a bad start in the pursuit of the truth for which the
world now craves, and which, we cordially admit, lies beyond the
existing creed of any particular Church. At all events, it would seem
improvident to merge such an element of religious inquiry in that of
which the tradition is submission to spurious authority, whatever
advantages the latter may have in social, literary, and aesthetic
respects. Not a generation has yet passed since the admission of
Nonconformists to the Universities; and more than a generation is needed
in order to attain the highest culture. Give the Free Churches time, and
let us see whether they have not something better to give us in return
than "hideousness" and "immense ennui."
THE EARLY YEARS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Our readers need not be afraid that we are going to bore them with the
Slavery Question or the Civil War. We deal here not with the Martyr
President, but with Abe Lincoln in embryo, leaving the great man at the
entrance of the grand scene. Mr. Ward H. Lamon has published a biography
[Footnote: The Life of Abraham Lincoln from his Birth to his
Inauguration as President. By Ward H. Lamon. Boston: James R. Osgood &
Co. 1872] which enables us to do this, and which, besides containing a
good deal that is amusing, is a curious contribution to political
science, as illustrating, by a world-renowned instance, the origin of
the species Politician. The materials for it appear to be drawn from the
most authentic sources, and to have been used with diligence, though in
point of form the book leaves something to be desired. We trust it and
the authorities quoted in it for our facts.
After the murder, criticism, of course, was for a time impossible.
Martyrdom was followed by canonization, and the popular heart could not
be blamed for overflowing in hyperbole. The fallen chief "was
Washington, he was Moses, and there were not wanting even those who
likened him to the God and Redeemer of all the earth. These latter
thought they discovered in his early origin, his kindly nature, his
benevolent precepts, and the homely anecdotes in which he taught the
people, strong points of resemblance between him and the Divine Son of
Mary." A halo of myth naturally gathered round the cradle of this new
Moses--for we will not pursue the more extravagant and offensive
parallel which may serve as a set-off against that which was drawn by
English Royalists between the death of Charles I. and the Crucifixion.
Among other fables, it was believed that the President's family had fled
from Kentucky to Indiana to escape the taint of Slavery. Thomas Lincoln,
the father of Abraham, was migratory enough, but the course of his
migrations was not determined by high moral motives, and we may safely
affirm that had he ever found himself among the fleshpots of Egypt, he
would have stayed there, however deep the moral darkness might have
been. He was a thriftless "ne'er do weel," who had very commonplace
reasons for wandering away from the miserable, solitary farm in
Kentucky, on which his child first formed a sad acquaintance with life
and nature, and which, as it happened, was not in the slave-owning
region of the State. His decision appears to have been hastened by a
"difficulty," in which he bit off his antagonist's nose--an incident to
which it would be difficult to find a parallel in the family histories
of Scripture heroes, or even in those of the Sainted Fathers of the
Republic. He drifted to Indiana, and in a spot which was then an almost
untrodden wilderness, built a _casa santa_, which his connection,
Dennis Hanks, calls "that darned little half-faced camp"--a dwelling
enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth, without a floor, and
called a camp, it seems, because it was made of poles, not of logs. He
afterwards exchanged the "camp" for the more ambitious "cabin," but his
cabin, was "a rough, rough log one," made of unhewn timber, and without
floor, door or window. In this "rough, rough," abode, his lanky, lean-
visaged, awkward and somewhat pensive though strong, hearty and patient
son Abraham had a "rough, rough" life, and underwent experiences which,
if they were not calculated to form a Pitt or a Turgot, were calculated
to season an American politician, and make him a winner in the tough
struggle for existence, as well as to identify him with the people,
faithful representation of whose aims, sentiments, tastes, passions and
prejudices was the one thing needful to qualify him for obtaining the
prize of his ambition. "For two years Lincoln (the father) continued to
live alone in the old way. He did not like to farm, and he never got
much of his land under cultivation. His principal crop was corn; and
this, with the game which a rifleman so expert would easily take from
the woods around him, supplied his table." It does not appear that he
employed any of his mechanical skill in completing and furnishing his
own cabin. It has already been stated that the latter had no window,
door or floor. "But the furniture, if it might be called furniture, was
even worse than the house. Three-legged stools served for chairs. A
bedstead was made of poles stuck in the cracks of the logs in one corner
of the cabin, while the other end rested in the crotch of a forked stick
stuck in the earthen floor. On these were laid some boards, and on the
boards a shake-down of leaves, covered with skins and old petticoats.
The table was a hewed puncheon supported by four legs. They had a few
pewter and tin dishes to eat from, but the most minute inventory of
their effects makes no mention of knives or forks. Their cooking
utensils were a Dutch oven and a skillet. Abraham slept in the loft, to
which he ascended by means of pins driven into holes in the wall." Of
his father's disposition, Abraham seems to have inherited at all events
the dislike to labour, though his sounder moral nature prevented him
from being an idler. His tendency to politics came from the same element
of character as his father's preference for the rifle. In after life we
are told his mind "was filled with gloomy forebodings and strong
apprehensions of impending evil, mingled with extravagant visions of
personal grandeur and power." His melancholy, characterized by all his
friends as "terrible," was closely connected with the cravings of his
demagogic ambition, and the root of both was in him from a boy.
In the Indiana cabin Abraham's mother, whose maiden name was Nancy
Hanks, died, far from medical aid, of the epidemic called milk sickness.
She was preceded in death by her relatives, the Sparrows, who had
succeeded the Lincolns in the "camp," and by many neighbours, whose
coffins Thomas Lincoln made out of "green lumber cut with a whip saw."
Upon Nancy's death he took to his green lumber again and made a box for
her. "There were about twenty persons at her funeral. They took her to
the summit of a deeply wooded knoll, about half a mile south-east of the
cabin, and laid her beside the Sparrows. If there were any burial
ceremonies, they were of the briefest. But it happened that a few months
later an itinerant preacher, named David Elkin, whom the Lincolns had
known in Kentucky, wandered into the settlement, and he either
volunteered or was employed to preach a sermon, which should commemorate
the many virtues and pass over in silence the few frailties of the poor
woman who slept in the forest. Many years later the bodies of Levi Hall
and his wife (relatives), were deposited in the same earth with that of
Mr. Lincoln. The graves of two or three children, belonging to a
neighbour's family, are also near theirs. They are all crumbled, sunken
and covered with wild vines in deep and tangled mats. The great trees
were originally cut away to make a small cleared space for this
primitive graveyard; but the young dogwoods have sprung up unopposed in
great luxuriance, and in many instances the names of pilgrims to the
burial place of the great Abraham Lincoln's mother are carved on their
bark. With this exception, the spot is wholly unmarked. The grave never
had a stone, nor even a board, at its head or its foot, and the
neighbours still dispute as to which of these unsightly hollows contains
the ashes of Nancy Lincoln." If Democracy in the New World sometimes
stones the prophets, it is seldom guilty of building their sepulchres.
Out of sight, off the stump, beyond the range of the interviewer, heroes
and martyrs soon pass from the mind of a fast-living people; and weeds
may grow out of the dust of Washington. But in this case what neglect
has done good taste would have dictated; it is well that the dogwoods
are allowed to grow unchecked over the wilderness grave.
Thirteen months after the death of his Nancy, Thomas Lincoln went to
Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and suddenly presented himself to Mrs. Sally
Johnston, who had in former days rejected him for a better match, but
had become a widow. "Well, Mrs. Johnston, I have no wife and you have no
husband, I came a purpose to marry you. I knowed you from a gal and you
knowed me from a boy. I have no time to lose, and if you are willin',
let it be done straight off." "Tommy, I know you well, and have no
objection to marrying you; but I cannot do it straight off, as I owe
some debts that must first be paid." They were married next morning, and
the new Mrs. Lincoln, who owned, among other wondrous household goods, a
bureau that cost forty dollars, and who had been led, it seems, to
believe that her new husband was reformed and a prosperous farmer, was
conveyed with her bureau to the smiling scene of his reformation and
prosperity. Being, however, a sensible Christian woman, she made the
best of a bad bargain, got her husband to put down a floor and hang
doors and windows, made things generally decent, and was very kind to
the children, especially to Abe, to whom she took a great liking, and
who owed to his good stepmother what other heroes have owed to their
mothers. "From that time on," according to his garrulous relative,
Dennis Hanks, "he appeared to lead a new life." It seems to have been
difficult to extract from him "for campaign purposes" the incidents of
his life before it took this happy turn.
He described his own education in a Congressional handbook as
"defective." In Kentucky he occasionally trudged with his little sister,
rather as an escort than as a school-fellow, to a school four miles off,
kept by one Caleb Hazel, who could teach reading and writing after a
fashion, and a little arithmetic, but whose great qualification for his
office lay in his power and readiness "to whip the big boys." So far the
American respect for popular education as the key to success in life
prevailed even in those wilds, and in such a family as that of Thomas
Lincoln.
Under the auspices of his new mother, Abraham began attending school
again. The master was one Crawford, who taught not only reading, writing
and arithmetic, but "manners." One of the scholars was made to retire,
and re-enter "as a polite gentleman enters a drawing room," after which
he was led round by another scholar and introduced to all "the young
ladies and gentlemen." The polite gentleman who entered the drawing room
and was introduced as Mr. Abraham Lincoln, is thus depicted: "He was
growing at a tremendous rate, and two years later attained his full
height of six feet four inches. He was long, wiry and strong, while his
big feet and hands and the length of his arms and legs were out of all
proportion to his small trunk and head. His complexion was very swarthy,
and Mr. Gentry says that his skin was shrivelled and yellow even then.
He wore low shoes, buckskin breeches, linsey woolsey shirt, and a cap
made of the skin of an opossum or a coon. The breeches clung close to
his thighs and legs, but parted by a large space to meet the tops of his
shoes. Twelve inches remained uncovered, and exposed that much of
shinbone, sharp, blue and narrow." At a subsequent period, when charged
by a Democratic rival with being "a Whig aristocrat," he gave a minute
and touching description of the breeches. "I had only one pair," he
said, "and they were buckskin. And if you know the nature of buckskin
when wet and dried by the sun they will shrink; and mine kept shrinking
until they left several inches of my legs bare between the tops of my
socks and the lower part of my breeches, and whilst I was growing taller
they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue
streak around my legs, which can be seen to this day."
Mr. Crawford, it seems, was a martinet in spelling, and one day he was
going to punish a whole class for failing to spell _defied_, when
Lincoln telegraphed the right letter to a young lady by putting his
finger with a significant smile to his eye. Many years later, however,
and after his entrance into public life, Lincoln himself spelt
_apology_ with a double p, _planning_ with a single n, and
_very_ with a double r. His schooling was very irregular, his
school days hardly amounting to a year in all, and such education as he
had was picked up afterwards by himself. His appetite for mental food,
however, was always strong, and he devoured all the books, few and not
very select, which could be found in the neighbourhood of "Pigeon
Creek." Equally strong was his passion for stump oratory, the taste for
which pervades the American people, even in the least intellectual
districts, as the taste for church festivals pervades the people of
Spain, or the taste for cricket the people of England. Abe's neighbour,
John Romine, says, "he was awful lazy. He worked for me; was always
reading and thinking; used to get mad at him. He worked for me in 1829,
pulling fodder. I say Abe was awful lazy, he would laugh and talk, and
crack jokes all the time, didn't love work, but did dearly love his
pay." He liked to lie under a shade tree, or up in the loft of the cabin
and read, cipher, or scribble. At night he ciphered by the light of the
fire on the wooden fire shovel. He practised stump oratory by repeating
the sermons, and sometimes by preaching himself to his brothers and
sister. His gifts in the rhetorical line were high; when it was
announced in the harvest field that Abe had taken the stump, work was at
an end. The lineaments of the future politician distinctly appear in the
dislike of manual labour as well as in the rest. We shall presently have
Lincoln's own opinion on that point.
Abe's first written composition appears to have been an essay against
cruelty to animals, a theme the choice of which was at once indicative
of his kindness of heart and practically judicious, since the young
gentlemen in the neighbourhood were in the habit of catching terrapins
and putting hot coals upon their backs. The essay appears not to have
been preserved, and we cannot say whether its author succeeded in
explaining that ethical mystery--the love of cruelty in boys.
In spite of his laziness, Abe was greatly in demand at hog-killing time,
notwithstanding, or possibly in consequence of which, he contracted a
peculiarly tender feeling towards swine, and in later life would get off
his horse to help a struggling hog out of the mire or to save a little
pig from the jaws of an unnatural mother.
Society in the neighbourhood of Pigeon Creek was of the thorough
backwoods type; as coarse as possible, but hospitable and kindly, free
from cant and varnish, and a better school of life than of manners,
though, after all, the best manners are learnt in the best school of
life, and the school of life in which Abe studied was not the worst. He
became a leading favourite, and his appearance, towering above the other
hunting shirts, was always the signal for the fun to begin. His nature
seems to have been, like many others, open alike to cheerful and to
gloomy impressions. A main source of his popularity was the fund of
stories to which he was always adding, and to which in after life, he
constantly went for solace, under depression or responsibility, as
another man would go to his cigar or snuff box. The taste was not
individual but local, and natural to keen-witted people who had no other
food for their wits. In those circles "the ladies drank whiskey-toddy,
while the men drank it straight." Lincoln was by no means fond of drink,
but in this, as in every thing else, he followed the great law of his
life as a politician, by falling in with the humour of the people. One
cold night be and his companions found an acquaintance lying dead-drunk
in a puddle. All but Lincoln were disposed to let him lie where he was,
and freeze to death. But Abe "bent his mighty frame, and taking the man
in his long arms, carried him a great distance to Dennis Hanks' cabin.
There he built a fire, warmed, rubbed and nursed him through the entire
night, his companions having left him alone in his merciful task." His
real kindness of heart is always coming out in the most striking way,
and it was not impaired even by civil war.
Though sallow-faced, Lincoln had a very good constitution, but his frame
hardly bespoke great strength: he was six feet four and large-boned, but
narrow chested, and had almost a consumptive appearance. His strength,
nevertheless, was great. We are told that harnessed with ropes and
straps he could lift a box of stones weighing from a thousand to twelve
hundred pounds. But that he could raise a cask of whiskey in his arms
standing upright, and drink out of the bung-hole, his biographer does
not believe. The story is no doubt a part of the legendary halo which
has gathered round the head of the martyr. In wrestling, of which he was
very fond, he had not his match near Pigeon Creek, and only once found
him anywhere else. He was also formidable as a pugilist. But he was no
bully; on the contrary, he was peaceable and chivalrous in a rough way.
His chivalry once displayed itself in a rather singular fashion. He was
in the habit, among other intellectual exercises, of writing satires on
his neighbours in the form of chronicles, the remains of which, unlike
any known writings of Moses, or even of Washington, are "too indecent
for publication." In one of these he assailed the Grigsbys, who had
failed to invite him to a brilliant wedding. The Grigsby blood took
fire, and a fight was arranged. But when they came to the ring, Lincoln,
deeming the Grigsby champion too much overmatched, magnanimously
substituted for himself his less puissant stepbrother, John Johnston,
who was getting well pounded when Abe, on pretence of foul play,
interfered, seized Grigsby by the neck, flung him off and cleared the
ring. He then "swung a whiskey bottle over his head, and swore that he
was the big buck of the lick,"--a proposition which it seems, the other
bucks of the lick, there assembled in large numbers, did not feel
themselves called upon to dispute.
That Abraham Lincoln should have said, when a bare-legged boy, that he
intended to be President of the United States, is not remarkable. Every
boy in the United States says it; soon, perhaps, every girl will be able
to say it, and then human happiness will be complete. But Lincoln was
really carrying on his political education. Dennis Hanks is asked how he
and Lincoln acquired their knowledge. "We learned," he replies, "by
sight, scent and hearing. We heard all that was said, and talked over
and over the questions heard; wore them slick, greasy and threadbare.
Went to political and other speeches and gatherings, as you do now; we
would hear all sides and opinions, talk them over, discuss them,
agreeing or disagreeing. Abe, as I said before, was originally a
Democrat after the order of Jackson; so was his father, so we all
were.... He preached, made speeches, read for us, explained to us,
&c.... Abe was a cheerful boy, a witty boy; was humorous always,
sometimes would get sad, not very often.... Lincoln would frequently
make political and other speeches; he was calm, logical and clear
always. He attended trials, went to court always, read the Revised
Statutes of Indiana, dated 1824, heard law speeches, and listened to law
trials. Lincoln was lazy, a very lazy man. He was always reading,
scribbling, writing, ciphering, writing poetry, and the like.... In
Gentryville, about one mile west of Thomas Lincoln's farm, Lincoln would
go and tell his jokes and stories, &c., and was so odd, original and
humorous and witty, that all the people in town would gather around him.
He would keep them there till midnight. I would get tired, want to go
home, cuss Abe most heartily. Abe was a good talker, a good reader, and
was a kind of newsboy." One or two articles written by Abe found their
way into obscure journals, to his infinite gratification. His foot was
on the first round of the ladder. It is right to say that his culture
was not solely political, and that he was able to astonish the natives
of Gentryville by explaining that when the sun appeared to set, it "was
we did the sinking and not the sun."