Produced by Al Haines
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
BY LORD CHARNWOOD
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
Statesmen--even the greatest--have rarely won the same unquestioning
recognition that falls to the great warriors or those supreme in
science, art or literature. Not in their own lifetime and hardly to
this day have the claims to supremacy of our own Oliver Cromwell,
William III. and Lord Chatham rested on so sure a foundation as those
of a Marlborough or a Nelson, a Newton, a Milton or a Hogarth. This is
only natural. A warrior, a man of science, an artist or a poet are
judged in the main by definite achievements, by the victories they have
won over foreign enemies or over ignorance and prejudice, by the joy
and enlightenment they have brought to the consciousness of their own
and succeeding generations. For the statesman there is no such exact
measure of greatness. The greater he is, the less likely is his work
to be marked by decisive achievement which can be recalled by
anniversaries or signalised by some outstanding event: the chief work
of a great statesman rests in a gradual change of direction given to
the policy of his people, still more in a change of the spirit within
them. Again, the statesman must work with a rough and ready
instrument. The soldier finds or makes his army ready to yield
unhesitating obedience to his commands, the sailor animates his fleet
with his own personal touch, and the great man in art, literature or
science is master of his material, if he can master himself. The
statesman cannot mould a heterogeneous people, as the men of a
well-disciplined army or navy can be moulded, to respond to his call
and his alone. He has to do all his work in a society of which a large
part cannot see his object and another large part, as far as they do
see it, oppose it. Hence his work at the best is often incomplete and
he has to be satisfied with a rough average rather than with his ideal.
Lincoln, one of the few supreme statesmen of the last three centuries,
was no exception to this rule. He was misunderstood and underrated in
his lifetime, and even yet has hardly come to his own. For his place
is among the great men of the earth. To them he belongs by right of
his immense power of hard work, his unfaltering pursuit of what seemed
to him right, and above all by that childlike directness and simplicity
of vision which none but the greatest carry beyond their earliest
years. It is fit that the first considered attempt by an Englishman to
give a picture of Lincoln, the great hero of America's struggle for the
noblest cause, should come at a time when we in England are passing
through as fiery a trial for a cause we feel to be as noble. It is a
time when we may learn much from Lincoln's failures and success, from
his patience, his modesty, his serene optimism and his eloquence, so
simple and so magnificent.
BASIL WILLIAMS.
BISCOT CAMP,
LUTON,
March, 1916.
CONTENTS
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
CHAP.
I. BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN
II. THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION
1. The Formation of a National Government
2. Territorial Expansion
3. The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government
4. The Missouri Compromise
5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth
6. Slavery and Southern Society
7. Intellectual Development
III. LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER
1. Life at New Salem
2. In the Illinois Legislature
3. Marriage
IV. LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT
1. The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress
2. California and the Compromise of 1850
3. Lincoln in Retirement
4. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise
V. THE RISE OF LINCOLN
1. Lincoln's Return to Public Life
2. The Principles and the Oratory of Lincoln
3. Lincoln against Douglas
4. John Brown
5. The Election of Lincoln as President
VI. SECESSION
1. The Case of the South against the Union
2. The Progress of Secession
3. The Inauguration of Lincoln
4. The Outbreak of War
VII. THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR
VIII. THE OPENING OF THE WAR AND LINCOLN'S ADMINISTRATION
1. Preliminary Stages of the War
2. Bull Run
3. Lincoln's Administration Generally
4. Foreign Policy and England
5. The Great Questions of Domestic Policy
IX. THE DISASTERS OF THE NORTH
1. Military Policy of the North
2. The War in the West up to May, 1862
3. The War in the East up to May, 1863
X. EMANCIPATION
XI. THE APPROACH OF VICTORY
1. The War to the End of 1863
2. Conscription and the Politics of 1863
3. The War in 1864
4. The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864
XII. THE END
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
INDEX
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN
The subject of this memoir is revered by multitudes of his countrymen
as the preserver of their commonwealth. This reverence has grown with
the lapse of time and the accumulation of evidence. It is blended with
a peculiar affection, seldom bestowed upon the memory of statesmen. It
is shared to-day by many who remember with no less affection how their
own fathers fought against him. He died with every circumstance of
tragedy, yet it is not the accident of his death but the purpose of his
life that is remembered.
Readers of history in another country cannot doubt that the praise so
given is rightly given; yet any bare record of the American Civil War
may leave them wondering why it has been so unquestioningly accorded.
The position and task of the American President in that crisis cannot
be understood from those of other historic rulers or historic leaders
of a people; and it may seem as if, after that tremendous conflict in
which there was no lack of heroes, some perverse whim had made men
single out for glory the puzzled civil magistrate who sat by. Thus
when an English writer tells again this tale, which has been well told
already and in which there can remain no important new facts to
disclose, he must endeavour to make clear to Englishmen circumstances
and conditions which are familiar to Americans. He will incur the
certainty that here and there his own perspective of American affairs
and persons will be false, or his own touch unsympathetic. He had
better do this than chronicle sayings and doings which to him and to
those for whom he writes have no significance. Nor should the writer
shrink too timidly from the display of a partisanship which, on one
side or the other, it would be insensate not to feel. The true
obligation of impartiality is that he should conceal no fact which, in
his own mind, tells against his views.
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America,
was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the
backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called
Hodgensville in what is now La Rue County.
Fifty years later when he had been nominated for the Presidency he was
asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said,
"it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early
life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that
sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':--
"'The short and simple annals of the poor.'
That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make out of it."
His other references to early days were rare. He would repeat queer
reminiscences of the backwoods to illustrate questions of state; but of
his own part in that old life he spoke reluctantly and sadly.
Nevertheless there was once extracted from him an awkward
autobiographical fragment, and his friends have collected and recorded
concerning his earlier years quite as much as is common in great men's
biographies or can as a rule be reproduced with its true associations.
Thus there are tales enough of the untaught student's perseverance, and
of the boy giant's gentleness and prowess; tales, too, more than enough
in proportion, of the fun which varied but did not pervade his
existence, and of the young rustic's occasional and somewhat oafish
pranks. But, in any conception we may form as to the growth of his
mind and character, this fact must have its place, that to the man
himself the thought of his early life was unattractive, void of
self-content over the difficulties which he had conquered, and void of
romantic fondness for vanished joys of youth.
Much the same may be said of his ancestry and family connections.
Contempt for lowly beginnings, abhorrent as it is to any honest mind,
would to Lincoln's mind have probably been inconceivable, but he lacked
that interest in ancestry which is generally marked in his countrymen,
and from talk of his nearer progenitors he seems to have shrunk with a
positive sadness of which some causes will soon be apparent. Since his
death it has been ascertained that in 1638 one Samuel Lincoln of
Norwich emigrated to Massachusetts. Descent from him could be claimed
by a prosperous family in Virginia, several of whom fought on the
Southern side in the Civil War. One Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of
the President and apparently a grandson of Samuel, crossed the
mountains from Virginia in 1780 and settled his family in Kentucky, of
which the nearer portions had recently been explored. One morning four
years later he was at work near his cabin with Mordecai, Josiah, and
Thomas, his sons, when a shot from the bushes near by brought him down.
Mordecai ran to the house, Josiah to a fort, which was close to them.
Thomas, aged six, stayed by his father's body. Mordecai seized a gun
and, looking through the window, saw an Indian in war paint stooping to
pick up Thomas. He fired and killed the savage, and, when Thomas had
run into the cabin, continued firing at others who appeared among the
bushes. Shortly Josiah returned with soldiers from the fort, and the
Indians ran off, leaving Abraham the elder dead. Mordecai, his
heir-at-law, prospered. We hear of him long after as an old man of
substance and repute in Western Illinois. He had decided views about
Indians. The sight of a redskin would move him to strange excitement;
he would disappear into the bushes with his gun, and his conscience as
a son and a sportsman would not be satisfied till he had stalked and
shot him. We are further informed that he was a "good old man."
Josiah also moved to Illinois, and it is pleasant to learn that he also
was a good old man, and, as became a good old man, prospered pretty
well. But President Lincoln and his sister knew neither these
excellent elders nor any other of their father's kin.
And those with whom the story of his own first twenty-one years is
bound up invite almost as summary treatment. Thomas Lincoln never
prospered like Mordecai and Josiah, and never seems to have left the
impress of his goodness or of anything else on any man. But, while
learning to carpenter under one Joseph Hanks, he married his employer's
niece Nancy, and by her became the father first of a daughter Sarah,
and four years later, at the farm near Hodgensville aforesaid, of
Abraham, the future President. In 1816, after several migrations, he
transported his household down the Ohio to a spot on the Indiana shore,
near which the village of Gentryville soon sprang up. There he abode
till Abraham was nearly twenty-one. When the boy was eight his mother
died, leaving him in his sister's care; but after a year or so Thomas
went back alone to Kentucky and, after brief wooing, brought back a
wife, Sarah, the widow of one Mr. Johnston, whom he had courted vainly
before her first marriage. He brought with her some useful additions
to his household gear, and her rather useless son John Johnston.
Relatives of Abraham's mother and other old neighbours--in particular
John and Dennis Hanks--accompanied all the family's migrations.
Ultimately, in 1830, they all moved further west into Illinois.
Meanwhile Abraham from an early age did such various tasks for his
father or for neighbouring farmers as from time to time suited the
father. When an older lad he was put for a while in charge of a ferry
boat, and this led to the two great adventures of his early days,
voyages with a cargo boat; and two mates down by river to New Orleans.
The second and more memorable of these voyages was just after the
migration to Illinois. He returned from it to a place called New
Salem, in Illinois, some distance from his father's new farm, in
expectation of work in a store which was about to be opened. Abraham,
by this time, was of age, and in accordance with custom had been set
free to shift for himself.
Each of these migrations was effected with great labour in
transportation of baggage (sometimes in home-made boats), clearing of
timber, and building; and Thomas Lincoln cannot have been wanting in
the capacity for great exertions. But historians have been inclined to
be hard on him. He seems to have been without sustained industry; in
any case he had not much money sense and could not turn his industry to
much account. Some hint that he drank, but it is admitted that most
Kentucky men drank more. There are indications that he was a dutiful
but ineffective father, chastising not too often or too much, but
generally on the wrong occasion. He was no scholar and did not
encourage his son that way; but he had a great liking for stories. He
was of a peaceable and inoffensive temper, but on great provocation
would turn on a bully with surprising and dire consequences. Old
Thomas, after Abraham was turned loose, continued a migrant, always
towards a supposed better farm further west, always with a mortgage on
him. Abraham, when he was a struggling professional man, helped him
with money as well as he could. We have his letter to the old man on
his death-bed, a letter of genuine but mild affection with due words of
piety. He explains that illness in his own household makes it
impossible for him to pay a last visit to his father, and then, with
that curious directness which is common in the families of the poor and
has as a rule no sting, he remarks that an interview, if it had been
possible, might have given more pain than pleasure to both. Everybody
has insisted from the first how little Abraham took after his father,
but more than one of the traits attributed to Thomas will certainly
reappear.
Abraham, as a man, when for once he spoke of his mother, whom he very
seldom mentioned, spoke with intense feeling for her motherly care. "I
owe," he said, "everything that I am to her." It pleased him in this
talk to explain by inheritance from her the mental qualities which
distinguished him from the house of Lincoln, and from others of the
house of Hanks. She was, he said, the illegitimate daughter of a
Virginian gentleman, whose name he did not know, but from whom as he
guessed the peculiar gifts, of which he could not fail to be conscious,
were derived.
Sarah his sister was married at Gentryville to one Mr. Grigsby. The
Grigsbys were rather great people, as people went in Gentryville. It
is said to have become fixed in the boy's mind that the Grigsbys had
not treated Sarah well; and this was the beginning of certain woes.
Sarah Bush Lincoln, his stepmother, was good to him and he to her.
Above all she encouraged him in his early studies, to which a fretful
housewife could have opposed such terrible obstacles. She lived to
hope that he might not be elected President for fear that enemies
should kill him, and she lived to have her fear fulfilled. His
affectionate care over her continued to the end. She lived latterly
with her son John Johnston. Abraham's later letters to this companion
of his youth deserve to be looked up in the eight large volumes called
his Works, for it is hard to see how a man could speak or act better to
an impecunious friend who would not face his own troubles squarely. It
is sad that the "ever your affectionate brother" of the earlier letters
declines to "yours sincerely" in the last; but it is an honest decline
of affection, for the man had proved to be cheating his mother, and
Abraham had had to stop it.
Two of the cousinhood, Dennis Hanks, a character of comedy, and John
Hanks, the serious and steady character of the connection, deserve
mention. They and John Johnston make momentary reappearances again.
Otherwise the whole of Abraham Lincoln's kindred are now out of the
story. They have been disposed of thus hastily at the outset, not
because they were discreditable or slight people, but because Lincoln
himself when he began to find his footing in the world seems to have
felt sadly that his family was just so much to him and no more. The
dearest of his recollections attached to premature death; the next to
chronic failure. Rightly or wrongly (and we know enough about heredity
now to expect any guess as to its working in a particular case to be
wrong) he attributed the best that he had inherited to a licentious
connection and a nameless progenitor. Quite early he must have been
intensely ambitious, and discovered in himself intellectual power; but
from his twelfth year to his twenty-first there was hardly a soul to
comprehend that side of him. This chill upon his memory unmistakably
influenced the particular complexion of his melancholy. Unmistakably
too he early learnt to think that he was odd, that his oddity was
connected with his strength, that he might be destined to stand alone
and capable of so standing.
The life of the farming pioneer in what was then the Far West afforded
a fair prospect of laborious independence. But at least till Lincoln
was grown up, when a time of rapid growth and change set in, it offered
no hope of quickly gotten wealth, and it imposed severe hardship on
all. The country was thickly wooded; the settler had before him at the
outset heavy toil in clearing the ground and in building some rude
shelter,--a house or just a "half-faced camp," that is, a shed with one
side open to the weather such as that in which the Lincoln family
passed their first winter near Gentryville. The site once chosen and
the clearing once made, there was no such ease of cultivation or such
certain fertility as later settlers found yet further west when the
development of railways, of agricultural machinery, and of Eastern or
European markets had opened out to cultivation the enormous stretches
of level grass plain beyond the Mississippi.
Till population had grown a good deal, pioneer families were largely
occupied in producing for themselves with their own hands what, in
their hardy if not always frugal view, were the necessities and
comforts of life. They had no Eastern market for their produce, for
railways did not begin to be made till 1840, and it was many years
before they crossed the Eastern mountains. An occasional cargo was
taken on a flat-bottomed boat down the nearest creek, as a stream is
called in America, into the Ohio and so by the innumerable windings of
the Mississippi to New Orleans; but no return cargo could be brought up
stream. Knives and axes were the most precious objects to be gained by
trade; woollen fabrics were rare in the West, when Lincoln was born,
and the white man and woman, like the red whom they had displaced, were
chiefly dressed in deer skins. The woods abounded in game, and in the
early stages of the development of the West a man could largely support
himself by his gun. The cold of every winter is there great, and an
occasional winter made itself long remembered, like the "winter of the
deep snow" in Illinois, by the havoc of its sudden onset and the
suffering of its long duration. The settling of a forest country was
accompanied here as elsewhere by the occasional ravages of strange and
destructive pestilences and the constant presence of malaria.
Population was soon thick enough for occasional gatherings, convivial
or religious, and in either case apt to be wild, but for long it was
not thick enough for the life of most settlers to be other than lonely
as well as hard.
Abraham Lincoln in his teens grew very fast, and by nineteen he was
nearly six foot four. His weight was never quite proportionate to
this. His ungainly figure, with long arms and large hands and
relatively small development of chest, and the strange deep-cut
lineaments of his face were perhaps the evidence of unfit (sometimes
insufficient) food in these years of growth. But his muscular strength
was great, and startling statistical tales are told of the weight he
could lift and the force of his blows with a mallet or an axe. To a
gentle and thoughtful boy with secret ambition in him such strength is
a great gift, and in such surroundings most obviously so. Lincoln as a
lad was a valuable workman at the varied tasks that came his way,
without needing that intense application to manual pursuits which the
bent of his mind made irksome to him. And he was a person of high
consideration among the lads of his age and company. The manners of
the people then settling in Indiana and Illinois had not the extreme
ferocity for which Kentucky had earlier been famous, and which crops up
here and there in frontier life elsewhere. All the same, as might
naturally be supposed, they shared Plato's opinion that youths and men
in the prime of life should settle their differences with their fists.
Young Lincoln's few serious combats were satisfactorily decisive, and
neither they nor his friendly wrestling bouts ended in the quarrels
which were too common among his neighbours. Thus, for all his
originality and oddity, he early grew accustomed to mix in the sort of
company he was likely to meet, without either inward shrinking or the
need of conscious self-assertion.
In one thing he stood aloof from the sports of his fellows. Most
backwoodsmen were bred to the gun; he has told us that he shot a turkey
when he was eight and never afterwards shot at all. There is an early
tale of his protests against an aimless slaughter of mud turtles; and
it may be guessed that the dislike of all killing, which gave him sore
trouble later, began when he was young. Tales survive of his kindness
to helpless men and animals. It marks the real hardness of his
surroundings, and their hardening effect on many, that his exertions in
saving a drunken man from death in the snow are related with apparent
surprise. Some tales of his helping a pig stuck in a bog or a dog on
an ice floe and the like seem to indicate a curious and lasting trait.
These things seem not to have been done spontaneously, but on mature
reflection after he had passed unheeding by. He grew to be a man of
prompt action in circumstances of certain kinds; but generally his
impulse was slow and not very sure. Taste and the minor sensibilities
were a little deficient in him. As a lady once candidly explained to
him, he was not ready with little gracious acts. But rare occasions,
such as can arouse a passionate sense of justice, would kindle his
slow, kind nature with a sudden fire.
The total amount of his schooling, at the several brief periods for
which there happened to have been a school accessible and facility to
get to it, was afterwards computed by himself at something under twelve
months. With this slight help distributed over the years from his
eighth to his fifteenth birthday he taught himself to read, write, and
do sums. The stories of the effort and painful shifts, by which great
men accomplish this initial labour almost unhelped, have in all cases
the same pathos, and have a certain sameness in detail. Having learnt
to read he had the following books within his reach: the Bible,
"Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," the "Pilgrim's Progress," a
"History of the United States," and Weems' "Life of Washington." Later
on the fancy took him to learn the laws of his State, and he obtained
the "Laws of Indiana." These books he did read, and read again, and
pondered, not with any dreamy or purely intellectual interest, but like
one who desires the weapon of learning for practical ends, and desires
also to have patterns of what life should be. As already said, his
service as a labourer could be considerable, and when something stirred
his ambition to do a task quickly his energy could be prodigious. But
"bone idle is what I called him," was the verdict long after of one,
perhaps too critical, employer. "I found him," he said, "cocked up on
a haystack with a book. 'What are you reading?' I said. 'I'm not
reading, I'm studying,' says he. 'What are you studying?' says I.
'Law,' says he, as proud as Cicero. 'Great God Almighty!' said I."
The boy's correction, "studying" for "reading," was impertinent, but
probably sound. To be equally sound, we must reckon among his
educational facilities the abundant stories which came his way in a
community which, however unlettered, was certainly not dull-spirited;
the occasional newspaper; the rare lectures or political meetings; the
much more frequent religious meetings, with preachers who taught a grim
doctrine, but who preached with vigour and sometimes with the deepest
sincerity; the hymns often of great emotional power over a simple
congregation--Cowper's "There is a fountain filled with blood," is one
recorded favourite among them; the songs, far other than hymns, which
Dennis Hanks and his other mates would pick up or compose; and the
practice in rhetoric and the art of exposition, which he unblushingly
afforded himself before audiences of fellow labourers who welcomed the
jest and the excuse for stopping work. The achievement of the
self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his
difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer
advantage. There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the
most of few books; great advantage in having one's choice restricted by
circumstances to good books; great advantage too in the consciousness
of untrained faculty which leaves a man capable in mature life of
deliberately undertaking mental discipline.
Along with the legends and authentic records of his self-training,
signs of an ambition which showed itself early and which was from the
first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing
Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys. The selection here made
from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was
literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in
coarseness and ill-nature. First it must be recalled that Abraham bore
a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and
perhaps the only grudge he ever bore. There had arisen from this a
combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which
was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was
over-matched. But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of
lampoons by Abraham, in prose and a kind of verse. These were gross
and silly enough, though probably to the taste of the public which he
then addressed, but it is the sequel that matters. In a work called
"The First Chronicles of Reuben," it is related how Reuben and Josiah,
the sons of Reuben Grigsby the elder, took to themselves wives on the
same day. By local custom the bridal feast took place and the two
young couples began their married careers under the roof of the
bridegrooms' father. Moreover, it was the custom that, at a certain
stage in the celebrations, the brides should be escorted to their
chambers by hired attendants who shortly after conducted the
bridegrooms thither. On this occasion some sense of mischief afoot
disturbed the heart of Mrs. Reuben Grigsby the elder, and, hastening
upstairs, just after the attendants had returned, she cried out in a
loud voice and to the great consternation of all concerned, "Why,
Reuben, you're in bed with the wrong wife!" The historian who, to the
manifest annoyance of Lincoln's other biographers, has preserved this
and much other priceless information, infers that Abraham, who was not
invited to the feast, had plotted this domestic catastrophe and won
over the attendants to his evil purpose. This is not a certain
inference, nor is it absolutely beyond doubt that the event recorded in
"The First Chronicles of Reuben" ever happened at all. What is certain
is that these Chronicles themselves, composed in what purports to be
the style of Scripture, were circulated for the joint edification of
the proud race of Grigsby and of their envious neighbours in the
handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, then between seventeen and eighteen.
Not without reason does an earlier manuscript of the same author
conclude, after several correct exercises in compound subtraction, with
the distich:--
"Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,
He will be good, but God knows when."
Not to be too solemn about a tale which has here been told for the
whimsical fancy of its unseemliness and because it is probably the
worst that there is to tell, we may here look forward and face the
well-known fact that the unseemliness in talk of rough, rustic boys
flavoured the great President's conversation through life. It is well
to be plain about this. Lincoln was quite without any elegant and
sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed. His
life was austere and seems to have been so from the start. He had that
shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in
rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily
maintained. The testimony of his early companions, along with some
fragments of the boy's feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that
he acquired it young. But a large part of the stories and pithy
sayings for which he was famous wherever he went, but of which when
their setting is lost it is impossible to recover the enjoyment, were
undeniably coarse, and naturally enough this fact was jarring to some
of those in America who most revered him. It should not really be
hard, in any comprehensive view of his character and the circumstances
in which it unfolded itself, to trace in this bent of his humour
something not discordant with the widening sympathy and deepening
tenderness of his nature. The words of his political associate in
Illinois, Mr. Leonard Swett, afterwards Attorney-General of the United
States, may suffice. He writes: "Almost any man, who will tell a very
vulgar story, has, in a degree, a vulgar mind. But it was not so with
him; with all his purity of character and exalted morality and
sensibility, which no man can doubt, when hunting for wit he had no
ability to discriminate between the vulgar and refined substances from
which he extracted it. It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel,
and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from
a parlour table." In any case his best remembered utterances of this
order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty,
and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at
them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what
they called his pure-mindedness.
One last recollection of Lincoln's boyhood has appealed, beyond any
other, to some of his friends as prophetic of things to come. Mention
has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi. With
the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel
sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant
city of New Orleans, they must have been great experiences. Only two
incidents of them are recorded. In the first voyage he and his mates
had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a
sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage he met with the
negro in a way that to him was more memorable. He and the young
fellows with him saw, among the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained,
maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a
slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded
and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved,
that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the
soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and
Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of
honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems
that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a
tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," John Hanks
said long after, and other men's recollections of Lincoln's talk
confirmed him--"Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was
silent. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed
his opinion of slavery. It ran its iron into him then and there, May,
1831. I have heard him say so often." Perhaps in other talks old John
Hanks dramatised his early remembrances a little; he related how at the
slave auction Lincoln said, "By God, boys, let's get away from this.
If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard."
The youth, who probably did not express his indignation in these
prophetic words, was in fact chosen to deal "that thing" a blow from
which it seems unlikely to recover as a permitted institution among
civilised men, and it is certain that from this early time the thought
of slavery never ceased to be hateful to him. Yet it is not in the
light of a crusader against this special evil that we are to regard
him. When he came back from this voyage to his new home in Illinois he
was simply a youth ambitious of an honourable part in the life of the
young country of which he was proud. We may regard, and he himself
regarded, the liberation of the slaves, which will always be associated
with his name, as a part of a larger work, the restoration of his
country to its earliest and noblest tradition, which alone gave
permanence or worth to its existence as a nation.