On the 20th of July, 1864, Horace Greeley crossed into Canada to confer
with refugee rebels at Niagara. He bore with him this paper from the
President:
“To Whom It May Concern: Any proposition which embraces the restoration
of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of
slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control
the armies now at war with the United States, will be received and
considered by the executive government of the United States, and will
be met by liberal terms and other substantial and collateral points, and
the bearer or bearers thereof shall have safe conduct both ways.”
To this Jefferson Davis replied: “We are not fighting for slavery; we
are fighting for independence.”
LINCOLN WAS a GENTLEMAN.
Lincoln was compelled to contend with the results of the ill-judged zeal
of politicians, who forced ahead his flatboat and rail-splitting record,
with the homely surroundings of his earlier days, and thus, obscured
for the time, the other fact that, always having the heart, he had long
since acquired the manners of a true gentleman.
So, too, did he suffer from Eastern censors, who did not take those
surroundings into account, and allowed nothing for his originality of
character. One of these critics heard at Washington that Mr. Lincoln, in
speaking at different times of some move or thing, said “it had petered
out;” that some other one’s plan “wouldn’t gibe;” and being asked if the
War and the cause of the Union were not a great care to him, replied:
“Yes, it is a heavy hog to hold.”
The first two phrases are so familiar here in the West that they need no
explanation. Of the last and more pioneer one it may be said that it had
a special force, and was peculiarly Lincoln-like in the way applied by
him.
In the early times in Illinois, those having hogs, did their own
killing, assisted by their neighbors. Stripped of its hair, one held the
carcass nearly perpendicular in the air, head down, while others put
one point of the gambrel-bar through a slit in its hock, then over the
string-pole, and the other point through the other hock, and so swung
the animal clear of the ground. While all this was being done, it took a
good man to “hold the hog,” greasy, warmly moist, and weighing some two
hundred pounds. And often those with the gambrel prolonged the strain,
being provokingly slow, in hopes to make the holder drop his burden.
This latter thought is again expressed where President Lincoln, writing
of the peace which he hoped would “come soon, to stay; and so come as to
be worth the keeping in all future time,” added that while there would
“be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue and clenched
teeth and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind
on to this great consummation,” he feared there would “be some white
ones unable to forget that, with malignant heart and deceitful tongue,
they had striven to hinder it.”
He had two seemingly opposite elements little understood by strangers,
and which those in more intimate relations with him find difficult to
explain; an open, boyish tongue when in a happy mood, and with this a
reserve of power, a force of thought that impressed itself without words
on observers in his presence. With the cares of the nation on his mind,
he became more meditative, and lost much of his lively ways remembered
“back in Illinois.”