Senator John M. Thurston said in part at a banquet of the Baptist Social
Union, New York, on Lincoln’s birthday, in 1897:
“This is an entirely different gathering than that to which I have been
recently accustomed. I come from a forty days’ session of a moot court,
in which the question of silver has been discussed and passed upon
without any hope of legislation. There I have been used to having my
audiences rise and leave as soon as I began to speak.
“Mr. President, if I have any purpose to-night, it is to strengthen the
belief in a Divine Providence; and if I have any further purpose in
this time of wars and rumors of wars, it is to show that God Almighty
has made nations for higher purposes than mere money making. I am to
speak to-night of Abraham Lincoln, the simplest, serenest, sublimist
character of the age. Seventy millions of people join in commemorating
his greatness. It is not my purpose to review his life; that is too much
a part of history. That history should be taught in every American public
school and preached from every Christian pulpit. The story of Abraham
Lincoln, citizen, President, liberator and martyr, should be in the heart
of every American child. I prefer to speak of only one event in his
history. Yet that event was the harbinger of a new civilization.
“Not long since, as I sat in a crowded court room, engaged in the trial
of a case involving the title to a valuable tract of real estate, there
came to the witness stand a venerable, white-haired negro. Written all
over his old black face was the history of three-quarters of a century of
such an existence as few persons have ever known. Born a slave, he had
stood upon the auction block and been sold to the highest bidder; he had
seen his wife and children dragged from his side by those who mocked his
breaking heart; he bore upon his back the scars and ridges of a master’s
lash. Now he came into a court of justice to settle, by the testimony of
his black lips, a controversy between white men. When asked his age he
drew himself proudly up and said: ‘For fifty years I was a chattel. On
the first day of January, 1863, old Uncle Abe made me a man.’
“The act which set that old man free was the crowning glory of Lincoln’s
life, for by it he not only saved his country, but emancipated a race.
When Abraham Lincoln took his pen to sign the Emancipation Proclamation
he knew that the supreme moment had come. He had known it years before,
when he said: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe
that this government cannot exist permanently, half slave and half free,
but I do not expect this house to fall, this government to be dissolved.’
“God has always raised up a great leader for a great crisis. Moses,
initiated into the sublime mysteries of the house of Pharaoh, himself a
ruler and almost a king, led the children of Israel through the parted
waters of the Red Seas into the wilderness in the strange hope of a
deliverance. A shepherdess on the hills of France felt herself stirred at
the sore trials of her race. Joan d’Arc, the savior of her country, was
the instrument of God.
“Who can doubt that Providence put the preposterous notion of a round
world into the head of the Genoese sailor? Who can doubt that Providence
designed Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln
and Ulysses S. Grant each for his own mission? The Declaration of
Independence was the Genesis of American liberty, but the gospel of its
New Testament was the Emancipation Proclamation. Until the Emancipation
Proclamation the tide of success set strongly against the Union shore.
But afterward the soldiers of the Union marched steadily from Chattanooga
to Atlanta and from Atlanta to the sea. From the time the flag of liberty
became the flag of freedom and the Stars and Stripes no longer floated
over slaves, the Union never wavered in its onward march.
“Almost a third of a century has passed away. Blue and gray they lie
together beneath the sod. Heroes all, they fell face to face, brother
against brother. But through the mingled tears that fall alike upon the
dead of both sections, the eyes of all turn toward a new future under the
old flag. To the North and South, to the white and the black, Abraham
Lincoln was God’s special providence. What is the heritage to us? In
his own words, ‘A government of the people, by the people, and for the
people.’
“I wish that my voice could reach from one end of the land to the other
while I tell what true Americanism is. I come from a State that has as
great local necessities, perhaps, as any other. The State of Nebraska put
one star into the flag. The great State of New York put another. But
when they set them there, they ceased to shine for themselves, but for
the whole Union.
“What we need in this country is the Emancipation Proclamation and the
Stars and Stripes at every polling place. We need a revival of the
American flag. Let it float over every American battlefield, be taught
in every public school. Set the Stars of the Union in the hearts of
our children and the glory of the Republic will remain forever. It
does not matter whether the American cradle is rocked to the music of
‘Yankee Doodle’ or the lullaby of ‘Dixie’ if the flag of the nation is
displayed above it, and the American baby can be safely trusted to pull
about the floor the rusty scabbard and the battered canteen, whether the
inheritance be from blue or gray, if from the breast of a true mother and
the lips of a brave father, its little soul is filled with the glory of
the American constellation.
“The memory of Lincoln cannot perish. On freedom’s roll of honor the name
of Lincoln is written first. His colossal statue stands on a pedestal of
the people’s love, and in its protecting shadow, liberty and equality are
the heritage of every American citizen.”