He was born in Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky was a pioneer
State. He lived, as boy and man, the hard and needy life of a
backwoodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by his own
efforts at self-education, of an active, respected, influential citizen,
in the half-organized and manifold interests of a new and energetic
community. From his boyhood up he lived in direct and vigorous contact
with men and things, not as in older States and easier conditions with
words and theories; and both his moral convictions and his intellectual
pinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by
which men knew him, that character which is the most distinctive
possession of the best American nature, that almost indescribable
quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears
in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as
honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of
active life as practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all
shaped by the same essential force and testifying to the same inner
influences, was what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he
was to live and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view
than this of what he was. Even his physical conditions are not to be
forgotten in making up his character. We make too little always of the
physical; certainly we make too little of it here if we lose out of
sight the strength and muscular activity, the power of doing and
enduring, which the backwoods-boy inherited from generations of
hard-living ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a long discipline
of bodily toil. He brought to the solution of the question of labor in
this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with
labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and
excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every
sense that work had made clear and true. He could not have brought the
mind for his task so perfectly, unless he had first brought the body
whose rugged and stubborn health was always contradicting to him the
false theories of labor, and always asserting the true.
As to the moral and mental powers which distinguished him, all
embraceable under this general description of clearness of truth, the
most remarkable thing is the way in which they blend with one another,
so that it is next to impossible to examine them in separation. A great
many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an
intellectual man or not; as if intellect were a thing always of the same
sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's
nature and weigh by itself, and compare by pounds and ounces in this man
with another. The fact is, that in all the simplest characters that line
between the mental and moral natures is always vague and indistinct.
They run together, and in their best combinations you are unable to
discriminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and
how much is intellectual. You are unable to tell whether in the wise
acts and words which issue from such a life there is more of the
righteousness that comes of a clear conscience, or of the sagacity that
comes of a clear brain. In more complex characters and under more
complex conditions, the moral and the mental lives come to be less
healthily combined. They co-operate, they help each other less. They
come even to stand over against each other as antagonists; till we have
that vague but most melancholy notion which pervades the life of all
elaborate civilization, that goodness and greatness, as we call them,
are not to be looked for together, till we expect to see and so do see a
feeble and narrow conscientiousness on the one hand, and a bad,
unprincipled intelligence on the other, dividing the suffrages of men.
It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. Lincoln's, that they
reunite what God has joined together and man has put asunder. In him was
vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real
greatness. The twain were one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes who
stood and looked up to him for direction with such a loving and implicit
trust can tell you to-day whether the wise judgments that he gave came
most from a strong head or a sound heart. If you ask them, they are
puzzled. There are men as good as he, but they do bad things. There are
men as intelligent as he, but they do foolish things. In him goodness
and intelligence combined and made their best result of wisdom. For
perfect truth consists not merely in the right constituents of
character, but in their right and intimate conjunction. This union of
the mental and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is what we most
admire in children; but in them it is unsettled and unpractical. But
when it is preserved into manhood, deepened into reliability and
maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend
simplicity, which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness,
and is chosen by God to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for his
people, of faithful and true heart, such as he had who was our
President.
Another evident quality of such a character as this will be its
freshness or newness; if we may so speak. Its freshness or
readiness--call it what you will--its ability to take up new duties and
do them in a new way, will result of necessity from its truth and
clearness. The simple natures and forces will always be the most pliant
ones. Water bends and shapes itself to any channel. Air folds and adapts
itself to each new figure. They are the simplest and the most infinitely
active things in nature. So this nature, in very virtue of its
simplicity, must be also free, always fitting itself to each new need.
It will always start from the most fundamental and eternal conditions,
and work in the straightest even although they be the newest ways, to
the present prescribed purpose. In one word, it must be broad and
independent and radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the
character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate qualities, but the
necessary results of his simplicity and childlikeness and truth.
Here then we have some conception of the man. Out of this character came
the life which we admire and the death which we lament to-day. He was
called in that character to that life and death. It was just the nature,
as you see, which a new nation such as ours ought to produce. All the
conditions of his birth, his youth, his manhood, which made him what he
was, were not irregular and exceptional, but were the normal conditions
of a new and simple country. His pioneer home in Indiana was a type of
the pioneer land in which he lived. If ever there was a man who was a
part of the time and country he lived in, this was he. The same simple
respect for labor won in the school of work and incorporated into blood
and muscle; the same unassuming loyalty to the simple virtues of
temperance and industry and integrity; the same sagacious judgment
which had learned to be quick-eyed and quick-brained in the constant
presence of emergency; the same direct and clear thought about things,
social, political, and religious, that was in him supremely, was in the
people he was sent to rule. Surely, with such a type-man for ruler,
there would seem to be but a smooth and even road over which he might
lead the people whose character he represented into the new region of
national happiness and comfort and usefulness, for which that character
had been designed.
But then we come to the beginning of all trouble. Abraham Lincoln was
the type-man of the country, but not of the whole country. This
character which we have been trying to describe was the character of an
American under the discipline of freedom. There was another American
character which had been developed under the influence of slavery. There
was no one American character embracing the land. There were two
characters, with impulses of irrepressible and deadly conflict. This
citizen whom we have been honoring and praising represented one. The
whole great scheme with which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and
which has finally killed him, represented the other. Beside this nature,
true and fresh and new, there was another nature, false and effete and
old. The one nature found itself in a new world, and set itself to
discover the new ways for the new duties that were given it. The other
nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a
new world the institutions and the spirit of the old, to build anew the
structure of the feudalism which had been corrupt in its own day, and
which had been left far behind by the advancing conscience and needs of
the progressing race. The one nature magnified labor, the other nature
depreciated and despised it. The one honored the laborer, and the other
scorned him. The one was simple and direct; the other, complex, full of
sophistries and self-excuses. The one was free to look all that claimed
to be truth in the face, and separate the error from the truth that
might be in it; the other did not dare to investigate, because its own
established prides and systems were dearer to it than the truth itself,
and so even truth went about in it doing the work of error. The one was
ready to state broad principles, of the brotherhood of man, the
universal fatherhood and justice of God, however imperfectly it might
realize them in practice; the other denied even the principles, and so
dug deep and laid below its special sins the broad foundation of a
consistent, acknowledged sinfulness. In a word, one nature was full of
the influences of Freedom, the other nature was full of the influences
of Slavery.
In general, these two regions of our national life were separated by a
geographical boundary. One was the spirit of the North, the other was
the spirit of the South. But the Southern nature was by no means all a
Southern thing. There it had an organized, established form, a certain
definite, established institution about which it clustered. Here,
lacking advantage, it lived in less expressive ways and so lived more
weakly. There, there was the horrible sacrament of slavery, the outward
and visible sign round which the inward and spiritual temper gathered
and kept itself alive. But who doubts that among us the spirit of
slavery lived and thrived? Its formal existence had been swept away from
one State after another, partly on conscientious, partly on economical
grounds, but its spirit was here, in every sympathy that Northern winds
carried to the listening ear of the Southern slave-holder, and in every
oppression of the weak by the strong, every proud assumption of idleness
over labor which echoed the music of Southern life back to us. Here in
our midst lived that worse and falser nature, side by side with the true
and better nature which God meant should be the nature of Americans, of
which he was shaping out the type and champion in his chosen David of
the sheepfold.
Here then we have the two. The history of our country for many years is
the history of how these two elements of American life approached
collision. They wrought their separate reactions on each other. Men
debate and quarrel even now about the rise of Northern Abolitionism,
about whether the Northern Abolitionists were right or wrong, whether
they did harm or good. How vain the quarrel is! It was inevitable. It
was inevitable in the nature of things that two such natures living here
together should be set violently against each other. It is inevitable,
till man be far more unfeeling and untrue to his convictions than he has
always been, that a great wrong asserting itself vehemently should
arouse to no less vehement assertion the opposing right. The only wonder
is that there was not more of it. The only wonder is that so few were
swept away to take by an impulse they could not resist their stand of
hatred to the wicked institution. The only wonder is, that only one
brave, reckless man came forth to cast himself, almost single-handed,
with a hopeless hope, against the proud power that he hated, and trust
to the influence of a soul marching on into the history of his
countrymen to stir them to a vindication of the truth he loved. At any
rate, whether the Abolitionists were wrong or right, there grew up
about their violence, as there always will about the extremism of
extreme reformers, a great mass of feeling, catching their spirit and
asserting it firmly, though in more moderate degrees and methods. About
the nucleus of Abolitionism grew up a great American Anti-Slavery
determination, which at last gathered strength enough to take its stand
to insist upon the checking and limiting the extension of the power of
slavery, and to put the type-man, whom God had been preparing for the
task, before the world, to do the work on which it had resolved. Then
came discontent, secession, treason. The two American natures, long
advancing to encounter, met at last, and a whole country, yet trembling
with the shock, bears witness how terrible the meeting was.
Thus I have tried briefly to trace out the gradual course by which God
brought the character which He designed to be the controlling character
of this new world into distinct collision with the hostile character
which it was to destroy and absorb, and set it in the person of its
type-man in the seat of highest power. The character formed under the
discipline of Freedom and the character formed under the discipline of
Slavery developed all their difference and met in hostile conflict when
this war began. Notice, it was not only in what he did and was towards
the slave, it was in all he did and was everywhere that we accept Mr.
Lincoln's character as the true result of our free life and
institutions. Nowhere else could have come forth that genuine love of
the people, which in him no one could suspect of being either the cheap
flattery of the demagogue or the abstract philanthropy of the
philosopher, which made our President, while he lived, the centre of a
great household land, and when he died so cruelly, made every humblest
household thrill with a sense of personal bereavement which the death of
rulers is not apt to bring. Nowhere else than out of the life of freedom
could have come that personal unselfishness and generosity which made so
gracious a part of this good man's character. How many soldiers feel yet
the pressure of a strong hand that clasped theirs once as they lay sick
and weak in the dreary hospital! How many ears will never lose the
thrill of some kind word he spoke--he who could speak so kindly to
promise a kindness that always matched his word! How often he surprised
the land with a clemency which made even those who questioned his policy
love him the more for what they called his weakness,--seeing how the man
in whom God had most embodied the discipline of Freedom not only could
not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant! In the heartiness of his
mirth and his enjoyment of simple joys; in the directness and shrewdness
of perception which constituted his wit; in the untired, undiscouraged
faith in human nature which he always kept; and perhaps above all in the
plainness and quiet, unostentatious earnestness and independence of his
religious life, in his humble love and trust of God--in all, it was a
character such as only Freedom knows how to make.
Now it was in this character, rather than in any mere political
position, that the fitness of Mr. Lincoln to stand forth in the struggle
of the two American natures really lay. We are told that he did not come
to the Presidential chair pledged to the abolition of Slavery. When will
we learn that with all true men it is not what they intend to do, but it
is what the qualities of their natures bind them to do, that determines
their career! The President came to his power full of the blood, strong
in the strength of Freedom. He came there free, and hating slavery. He
came there, leaving on record words like these spoken three years before
and never contradicted. He had said, "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 expect it will cease to be divided. It
will become all one thing or all the other." When the question came, he
knew which thing he meant that it should be. His whole nature settled
that question for him. Such a man must always live as he used to say he
lived (and was blamed for saying it) "controlled by events, not
controlling them." And with a reverent and clear mind, to be controlled
by events means to be controlled by God. For such a man there was no
hesitation when God brought him up face to face with Slavery and put the
sword into his hand and said, "Strike it down dead." He was a willing
servant then. If ever the face of a man writing solemn words glowed with
a solemn joy, it must have been the face of Abraham Lincoln, as he bent
over the page where the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was growing
into shape, and giving manhood and freedom as he wrote it to hundreds of
thousands of his fellow-men. Here was a work in which his whole nature
could rejoice. Here was an act that crowned the whole culture of his
life. All the past, the free boyhood in the woods, the free youth upon
the farm, the free manhood in the honorable citizen's employments--all
his freedom gathered and completed itself in this. And as the swarthy
multitudes came in, ragged, and tired, and hungry, and ignorant, but
free forever from anything but the memorial scars of the fetters and the
whip, singing rude songs in which the new triumph of freedom struggled
and heaved below the sad melody that had been shaped for bondage; as in
their camps and hovels there grew up to their half-superstitious eyes
the image of a great Father almost more than man, to whom they owed
their freedom,--were they not half right? For it was not to one man,
driven by stress of policy, or swept off by a whim of pity, that the
noble act was due. It was to the American nature, long kept by God in
his own intentions till his time should come, at last emerging into
sight and power, and bound up and embodied in this best and most
American of all Americans, to whom we and those poor frightened slaves
at last might look up together and love to call him, with one voice, our
Father.
Thus, we have seen something of what the character of Mr. Lincoln was,
and how it issued in the life he lived. It remains for us to see how it
resulted also in the terrible death which has laid his murdered body
here in our town among lamenting multitudes to-day. It is not a hard
question, though it is sad to answer. We saw the two natures, the nature
of Slavery and the nature of Freedom, at last set against each other,
come at last to open war. Both fought, fought long, fought bravely; but
each, as was perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in the ways
which its own character had made familiar to it. The character of
Slavery was brutal, barbarous, and treacherous; and so the whole history
of the slave power during the war has been full of ways of warfare
brutal, barbarous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men bred in
freedom could have been driven to by the most hateful passions. It is
not to be marvelled at. It is not to be set down as the special sin of
the war. It goes back beyond that. It is the sin of the system. It is
the barbarism of Slavery. When Slavery went to war to save its life,
what wonder if its barbarism grew barbarous a hundred-fold!
One would be attempting a task which once was almost hopeless, but which
now is only needless, if he set himself to convince a Northern
congregation that Slavery was a barbarian institution. It would be
hardly more necessary to try to prove how its barbarism has shown itself
during this war. The same spirit which was blind to the wickedness of
breaking sacred ties, of separating man and wife, of beating women till
they dropped down dead, of organizing licentiousness and sin into
commercial systems, of forbidding knowledge and protecting itself with
ignorance, of putting on its arms and riding out to steal a State at the
beleaguered ballot-box away from freedom--in one word (for its simplest
definition is its worst dishonor), the spirit that gave man the
ownership in man in time of peace, has found out yet more terrible
barbarisms for the time of war. It has hewed and burned the bodies of
the dead. It has starved and mutilated its helpless prisoners. It has
dealt by truth, not as men will in a time of excitement, lightly and
with frequent violations, but with a cool, and deliberate, and
systematic contempt. It has sent its agents into Northern towns to fire
peaceful hotels where hundreds of peaceful men and women slept. It has
undermined the prisons where its victims starved, and made all ready to
blow with one blast their wretched life away. It has delighted in the
lowest and basest scurrility even on the highest and most honorable
lips. It has corrupted the graciousness of women and killed out the
truth of men.
I do not count up the terrible catalogue because I like to, nor because
I wish to stir your hearts to passion. Even now, you and I have no right
to indulge in personal hatred to the men who did these things. But we
are not doing right by ourselves, by the President that we have lost,
or by God who had a purpose in our losing him, unless we know thoroughly
that it was this same spirit which we have seen to be a tyrant in peace
and a savage in war, that has crowned itself with the working of this
final woe. It was the conflict of the two American natures, the false
and the true. It was Slavery and Freedom that met in their two
representatives, the assassin and the President; and the victim of the
last desperate struggle of the dying Slavery lies dead to-day in
Independence Hall.
Solemnly, in the sight of God, I charge this murder where it belongs, on
Slavery. I dare not stand here in His sight, and before Him or you speak
doubtful and double-meaning words of vague repentance, as if we had
killed our President. We have sins enough, but we have not done this
sin, save as by weak concessions and timid compromises we have let the
spirit of Slavery grow strong and ripe for such a deed. In the barbarism
of Slavery the foul act and its foul method had their birth. By all the
goodness that there was in him; by all the love we had for him (and who
shall tell how great it was); by all the sorrow that has burdened down
this desolate and dreadful week,--I charge this murder where it belongs,
on Slavery. I bid you to remember where the charge belongs, to write it
on the door-posts of your mourning houses, to teach it to your
wondering children, to give it to the history of these times, that all
times to come may hate and dread the sin that killed our noblest
President.
If ever anything were clear, this is the clearest. Is there the man
alive who thinks that Abraham Lincoln was shot just for himself; that it
was that one man for whom the plot was laid? The gentlest, kindest, most
indulgent man that ever ruled a State! The man who knew not how to speak
a word of harshness or how to make a foe! Was it he for whom the
murderer lurked with a mere private hate? It was not he, but what he
stood for. It was Law and Liberty, it was Government and Freedom,
against which the hate gathered and the treacherous shot was fired. And
I know not how the crime of him who shoots at Law and Liberty in the
crowded glare of a great theatre differs from theirs who have levelled
their aim at the same great beings from behind a thousand ambuscades and
on a hundred battle-fields of this long war. Every general in the field,
and every false citizen in our midst at home, who has plotted and
labored to destroy the lives of the soldiers of the Republic, is brother
to him who did this deed. The American nature, the American truths, of
which our President was the anointed and supreme embodiment, have been
embodied in multitudes of heroes who marched unknown and fell unnoticed
in our ranks. For them, just as for him, character decreed a life and a
death. The blood of all of them I charge on the same head. Slavery armed
with Treason was their murderer.