[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln]
American Statesmen
STANDARD LIBRARY EDITION
[Illustration: _The Early House of Abraham Lincoln_.]
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
BY
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I.
1899
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
The fifth and final group of biographies in the American Statesmen
series deals with the Period of the Civil War. The statesmen whose lives
are included in this group are Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward,
Salmon P. Chase, Charles Francis Adams, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus
Stevens.
The years of the civil war constitute an episode rather than an
independent period in our national history. They were interposed between
two eras; and if they are to be integrally connected with either of
these, it is with the era which preceded them rather than with that
which followed them. They were the result, the closing act, of the
quarter-century of the anti-slavery crusade. When the war came to an end
the country made a new start under new conditions. Yet it is proper to
treat the years of the war by themselves, not only because they were
filled by the clearly defined and abnormal condition of warfare, but
because a distinct group of statesmen is peculiarly associated with
them. The men whose lives are found in this group had been struggling
for recognition during the years which preceded the war, but they only
arrived at the control of affairs after that event became assured. Soon
after its close their work was substantially done.
For a long while before hostilities actually broke out, it was evident
that a civil war would be a natural result of the antagonism between the
South and the North; it is now obvious enough that it was more than a
natural, that it was an absolutely inevitable result. Looking backward,
we can only be surprised that wise men ever fancied that a conflict
could be avoided; but, as usual, the strenuous hope became father to an
anxious belief. Abraham Lincoln, in the first year when he gave
indication of his political clear-sightedness, said truly that the
country could not continue half slave and half free. That truth involved
war. There was no other possible way to settle the question between the
two halves; talk of freeing the slaves by purchase, or by gradual
emancipation and colonization, was simple nonsense, the forlorn schemes
of men who would fain have escaped out of the track of inexorable
destiny. Yet the vast majority of the nation, appalled at the vision of
the great fact which lay right athwart their road, was obstinate in the
delusive expectation of flanking it, as though there were side paths
whereby mankind can circumvent fate and walk around that which _must
be_, just as if it were not. Thus it came to pass that when the South
seceded, as every intelligent man ought to have been perfectly sure
would be the case, a confusion fell for a time upon the North. In that
section of the country there was for a few months a spectacle which has
no parallel in history. There was paralysis, there was disintegration;
worse than either, there was an utter lack of straight sense and clear
thought. There were politicians, editors, writers, agitators, reformers
in multitudes whose reiteration of their moral convictions, whose
intense addresses and uncompromising articles, had for years been
bringing about precisely this event; yet when it came, it appeared that
no one of them had contemplated it with any realizing appreciation, no
one of them was ready for it, no one of them had any sensible, practical
course of action to recommend. There was no union among them, no
cohesion of opinion or of purpose, no agreement of forecast; each had
his own individual notion as to what could be done, what should be done,
what would be the train of events. Politically speaking, society was a
mere parcel of units, with topical proximity, but with no other element
of aggregation. The immensity of the crisis seemed to shake men's minds;
the enigma of duty involved such possibilities, in case of a wrong
solution, that the wisest leaders, becoming dazed and overawed, uttered
the grossest follies. Men who had been energetic and vigorous before,
when they were pursuing a purpose, who became so again afterward, when
the distinct issue had taken shape, now lost for a time their
intellectual self-possession. The picture of the country during three or
four months, or rather an observant study of the prominent men of the
country, is sufficiently interesting historically, but is vastly more so
psychologically. I know of no other period in history in which this
peculiar element of interest exists to anywhere near an equal degree. It
is the study of human nature which for a brief time absorbs us, much
more than the study of events.
But this condition was, by its nature, transitory. Events moved, and
soon created defined and clean-cut issues, in relation to which
individuals were compelled to find their positions,--positions where
they could establish a belief, whether that belief should prove at last
to be right or wrong; positions wherein they were willing to abide to
the end, be that end victory or ruin. Primarily everything depended upon
Abraham Lincoln. If he should prove to be a weak man, like his
predecessor, or if he should prove to be a man of merely ordinary
capacity and character like the presidents who had followed Van Buren,
then all was over for the North. With what anxiety, with how much
doubt, the people of the Northern States scanned their singular and
untried choice can never be fully appreciated by persons who cannot
remember those wearisome, overladen days. He was an unknown quantity in
the awful problem. In his debates with Douglas he had given some
indication of what was in him, but outside of Illinois not one man in a
hundred was familiar with those debates. Nor did even they furnish
conclusive proof of his administrative capacity, especially in these
days of novel and mortal stress. For a time he seemed to wait, to drift;
until the day of his inauguration he gave no sign; then in his speech
the people, whose hearts were standing still in their eagerness to hear,
found reassuring sentences. Yet nothing seemed to follow during many
anxious weeks; the suns rose and the suns set, and still the leader
raised no standard around which the people could rally, uttered no
inspiring word of command which could unite the dissevered political
cliques. What was in his mind all this while can never be known, though
no knowledge could be more interesting. Was he in a simple attitude of
expectancy, awaiting the march of events, watchful for some one of them
to give him the cue as well as the opportunity for action? Many believe
that this was the case; and if it was, no other course could have been
more intelligent. In due time events came which brought decision with
them, the crisis shaped itself, and he was ready with clear and prompt
action. When it was known what he would do, matters were settled. The
people, once assured that the fight would be made, entered upon it with
such a temper and in possession of such resources that, in spite of
those trying fluctuations which any wise man could have foreseen, they
were sure in the end to win.
It would be out of place in these prefatory paragraphs, to attempt any
skeleton picture of the momentous struggle. I believe that the story is
told very completely in the lives which compose this group. The
statesmen who controlled events during the war were a new group; they
were not young men, neither were they unknown or untried in public
affairs; but they were for the first time in control. In their younger
days they had been under the shadow and predominance of the old school
of statesmen, whose object had been to prevent, or at least to defer
indefinitely, precisely that crisis which was now present. They
themselves, on the other hand, had been strenuously advocating the
policies which had at last brought that crisis into existence. But the
election of Abraham Lincoln was their first, and as yet their only
triumph. In all previous trials of strength they had been defeated.
Their present success was like the bursting of a torrent through a dam.
At the instant when they attained it they found themselves involved in a
political swirl and clash of momentous difficulties. It was a tremendous
test to which they were being subjected. The part which Lincoln played,
at their head, I have endeavored to depict in his life. The manner in
which he controlled without commanding, his rare combination of
confidence in his own judgment with entire absence of self-assertion,
his instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his
capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be
postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the
idea of prescience, his long-suffering and tolerance towards impolitic,
obstructive, or over-rash individuals, his marvelous gift of keeping in
touch with the people, form a group of qualities which, united in the
President of the United States at that mortal juncture, are as strong
evidence as anything which this generation has seen to corroborate a
faith in an overruling Providence. Conceive what might have happened if
it had been some other of our presidents who had happened to have his
term begin in 1861! Yet, after all the study that can be made of him,
there are unexplainable elements in Lincoln's character which will leave
him forever an enigma. If the world ever settles down to the acceptance
of any definite, accurate picture of him, it will surely be a false
picture. There must always be vague, indefinable uncertainties in any
presentation of him which shall be truly made.
Of the men who labored with him, I have left myself room to say little,
nor need much be said here. Their lives tell their stories. Taken
together, these biographies contain the history, upon the civil side, of
the war period. Seward represents the policy of the administration as a
whole, for all civil business centred in the office of the secretary of
state. He was a man of extraordinary ability. It is true that he made a
strange blunder or two, at the outset, odd episodes in his intelligent,
clear-sighted, cool-headed career,--psychologically interesting, as has
been suggested; but he immediately recovered himself and settled down to
that course of wise statesmanship which was justly to be expected of
him.
Chase handled the finances of the country with brilliant success. People
have criticised him, especially have said that his legal-tender scheme
was a needless and mischievous measure. But his task was immeasurably
difficult, and he had to act with great promptitude, having little time
for consideration, obliged to provide instantly for immediate
exigencies, forced to respect the present state of feeling among the
moneyed classes, though it might be transitory, and to be controlled by
the possibilities of the passing moment. He met the gigantic daily
outlay without even a temporary interruption, and the country grew rich,
not only nominally in an inflated currency, but actually in a great
development of material resources, beneath his management of the
treasury. To find fault with him, and to talk of the "_might have been_"
seems unworthy; also unsatisfactory, since the consequences of a
different policy are wholly matter of supposition.
Charles Sumner, the preacher of the crusade, stands for the moral
element. Possibly his most important work came before the war. But the
prestige which he had gained made him a man to be reckoned with, and he
had a following of fervent and resolute men in the country so numerous
that his support was essential and his opinions had to be treated with
respect.
The career of Charles Francis Adams in England will be read for the
first time in the life which forms a part of this series. It has been
written by his son, of course with every possible advantage, and it is
one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the civil war. Of
him, too, it may be said that he seems to have been specially raised up
for precisely the duty which he had to fulfill. A blunder on the part
of our envoy to Great Britain would have possibly led to consequences
which one trembles to contemplate even in imagination. The services of
Franklin in France and the positive good of the French alliance in the
Revolution, may be compared with the services of Mr. Adams in England
and the negative advantage of non-interference by England on behalf of
the South in the civil war. Mr. Adams's coolness, his unerring judgment,
and the prestige of his name, in combination, made him the one man in
the United States who ought by fitness to have held his post. That he
did hold it was, perhaps, one of the two or three essential facts which
together made Northern success possible, by the elimination of unfair
and extrinsic causes of defeat.
One part only of the picture remains to be drawn, the House of
Representatives. It is by no means conducive to a cheerful patriotic
pride to contemplate the general throng of the politicians of the
country during the war. In plain truth, they did themselves little
credit. Amid the excitement of the times they utterly failed to
appreciate their true position, their personal and official limitations.
They could not let military matters alone; they did not often recognize
the boundaries of their own knowledge, and the proper scope of their
usefulness. They intermeddled ceaselessly, embroiled everything, and as
a consequence they obstructed success in the field almost as much as if
they had been another Confederate army. It has been with some difficulty
that any one from among them has been found whose life it was desirable
to write. But Thaddeus Stevens was really a man of great power and note.
Intense and earnest, he exerted a magnificent influence in the way of
encouragement and inspiration. He adhered, if not altogether so closely
as he ought, yet at least more closely than did many others, to the
proper sphere of his duties as a civilian. Influential in oratory,
skillful in political management, masterful in temperament, and of
unflinching loyalty, he was long the genuine leader of the House. In
recalling the several members of that body he stands forth as the one
striking and dominant figure. Nor did his activity cease with the war;
he continued preëminent in the questions which immediately succeeded it,
so that the reconstruction of the country, without which our story would
be incomplete, finds its proper place in his biography. Therewith, I
think, the series reaches completion.
JOHN T. MORSE, JR.
September, 1898.
CONTENTS
I. THE RAW MATERIAL
II. THE START IN LIFE
III. LOVE; A DUEL; LAW, AND CONGRESS
IV. NORTH AND SOUTH
V. THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS JOINT DEBATE
VI. ELECTION
VII. INTERREGNUM
VIII. THE BEGINNING OF WAR
IX. A REAL PRESIDENT, AND NOT A REAL BATTLE
X. THE FIRST ACT OF THE MCCLELLAN DRAMA
XI. MILITARY MATTERS OUTSIDE OF VIRGINIA
XII. FOREIGN AFFAIRS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
From an original, unretouched negative, made in 1864, at the time he
commissioned Ulysses S. Grant Lieutenant-General and Commander of all
the armies of the Republic. It is said that this negative, with one of
General Grant, was made in commemoration of that event.
Autograph from the copy of the Gettysburg Address made by Lincoln for
the Soldiers' and Sailors' Fair at Baltimore, in 1864, and now in the
possession of Wm. J.A. Bliss, Esq., of that city.
The vignette of Lincoln's early home on Goose-Nest Prairie, near
Farmington, Ill., is from a drawing after a photograph. This log cabin
was built by Lincoln and his father in 1831.
LYMAN TRUMBULL
From a photograph by Brady in the Library of the State Department at
Washington.
Autograph from the Brady Register, owned by his nephew, Mr. Levin C.
Handy, Washington, D.C.
ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS
From a photograph by Brady in the Library of the State Department at
Washington.
Autograph from the Chamberlain collection, Boston Public Library.
EDWIN M. STANTON
From a photograph by Brady in the Library of the State Department at
Washington.
Autograph from the Chamberlain collection, Boston Public Library.
THE FIGHT BETWEEN THE MONITOR AND THE MERRIMAC
From the painting by W.F. Halsall in the Capitol at Washington.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CHAPTER I
THE RAW MATERIAL
Abraham Lincoln knew little concerning his progenitors, and rested well
content with the scantiness of his knowledge. The character and
condition of his father, of whom alone upon that side of the house he
had personal cognizance, did not encourage him to pry into the obscurity
behind that luckless rover. He was sensitive on the subject; and when he
was applied to for information, a brief paragraph conveyed all that he
knew or desired to know. Without doubt he would have been best pleased
to have the world take him solely for himself, with no inquiry as to
whence he came,--as if he had dropped upon the planet like a meteorite;
as, indeed, many did piously hold that he came a direct gift from
heaven. The fullest statement which he ever made was given in December,
1859, to Mr. Fell, who had interrogated him with an eye "to the
possibilities of his being an available candidate for the presidency in
1860:" "My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished
families,--second families, perhaps I should say. My mother ... was of a
family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now remain in Adams, some
others in Macon, counties, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham
Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky, about
1781 or 1782.... His ancestors, who were Quakers, went to Virginia from
Berks County, Pennsylvania. An effort to identify them with the New
England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite than a
similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi,
Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like." This effort to connect the
President with the Lincolns of Massachusetts was afterward carried
forward by others, who felt an interest greater than his own in
establishing the fact. Yet if he had expected the quest to result
satisfactorily, he would probably have been less indifferent about it;
for it is obvious that, in common with all Americans of the old native
stock, he had a strenuous desire to come of "respectable people;" and
his very reluctance to have his apparently low extraction investigated
is evidence that he would have been glad to learn that he belonged to an
ancient and historical family of the old Puritan Commonwealth, settlers
not far from Plymouth Rock, and immigrants not long after the arrival of
the Mayflower. This descent has at last been traced by the patient
genealogist.
So early as 1848 the first useful step was taken by Hon. Solomon
Lincoln of Hingham, Massachusetts, who was struck by a speech delivered
by Abraham Lincoln in the national House of Representatives, and wrote
to ask facts as to his parentage. The response[1] stated substantially
what was afterward sent to Mr. Fell, above quoted. Mr. Solomon Lincoln,
however, pursued the search farther, and printed the results[2]. Later,
Mr. Samuel Shackford of Chicago, Illinois, himself a descendant from the
same original stock, pushed the investigation more persistently[3]. The
chain, as put together by these two gentlemen, is as follows: Hingham,
Massachusetts, was settled in 1635. In 1636 house lots were set off to
Thomas Lincoln, the miller, Thomas Lincoln, the weaver, and Thomas
Lincoln, the cooper. In 1638 other lots were set off to Thomas Lincoln,
the husbandman, and to Stephen, his brother. In 1637 Samuel Lincoln,
aged eighteen, came from England to Salem, Massachusetts, and three
years later went to Hingham; he also was a weaver, and a brother of
Thomas, the weaver. In 1644 there was a Daniel Lincoln in the place. All
these Lincolns are believed to have come from the County of Norfolk in
England[4], though what kinship existed between them is not known. It
is from Samuel that the President appears to have been descended.
Samuel's fourth son, Mordecai, a blacksmith, married a daughter of
Abraham Jones of Hull;[5] about 1704 he moved to the neighboring town of
Scituate, and there set up a furnace for smelting iron ore. This couple
had six children, of whom two were named respectively Mordecai and
Abraham; and these two are believed to have gone to Monmouth County, New
Jersey. There Mordecai seems to have continued in the iron business, and
later to have made another move to Chester County, Pennsylvania, still
continuing in the same business, until, in 1725, he sold out all his
"Mynes & Minerals, Forges, etc."[6] Then, migrating again, he settled in
Amity, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, where, at last, death caught
up with him. By his will, February 22, 1735-36, he bequeathed his land
in New Jersey to John, his eldest son; and gave other property to his
sons Mordecai and Thomas. He belied the old motto, for in spite of more
than three removes he left a fair estate, and in the probate proceedings
he is described as "gentleman."[7] In 1748 John sold all he had in New
Jersey, and in 1758 moved into Virginia, settling in that part of
Augusta County which was afterward set off as Rockingham County. Though
his will has not been found, there is "ample proof," says Mr. Shackford,
that he had five sons, named Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Thomas, and John. Of
these, Abraham went to North Carolina, there married Mary Shipley, and
by her had sons Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, who was born in 1778. In
1780 or 1782, as it is variously stated, this family moved to Kentucky.
There, one day in 1784, the father, at his labor in the field, was shot
by lurking Indians. His oldest son, working hard by, ran to the house
for a gun; returning toward the spot where lay his father's body, he saw
an Indian in the act of seizing his brother, the little boy named
Thomas. He fired, with happy aim; the Indian fell dead, and Thomas
escaped to the house. This Thomas it was who afterward became the father
of Abraham Lincoln.[8] Of the other sons of Mordecai (great-uncles of
the President), Thomas also went to Kentucky, Isaac went to Tennessee,
while Jacob and John stayed in Virginia, and begat progeny who became in
later times ferocious rebels, and of whom one wrote a very comical
blustering letter to his relative the President;[9] and probably
another, bearing oddly enough the name of Abraham, was a noted
fighter.[10] It is curious to observe of what migratory stock we have
here the sketch. Mr. Shackford calls attention to the fact that through
six successive generations all save one were "pioneers in the settlement
of new countries," thus: 1. Samuel came from England to Hingham,
Massachusetts. 2. Mordecai lived and died at Scituate, close by the
place of his birth. 3. Mordecai moved, and settled in Pennsylvania, in
the neighborhood which afterward became Berks County, while it was still
wilderness. 4. John moved into the wilds of Virginia. 5. Abraham went to
the backwoods of Kentucky shortly after Boone's settlement. 6. Thomas
moved first into the sparsely settled parts of Indiana, and thence went
onward to a similar region in Illinois.
Thus in time was corroborated what Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1848 in one
of the above-mentioned letters to Hon. Solomon Lincoln: "We have a vague
tradition that my great-grandfather went from Pennsylvania to Virginia,
and that he was a Quaker." It is of little consequence that this "vague
tradition" was stoutly contradicted by the President's father, the
ignorant Thomas, who indignantly denied that either a Puritan or a
Quaker could be found in the line of his forbears, and who certainly
seemed to set heredity at defiance if such were the case. But while thus
repudiating others, Thomas himself was in some danger of being
repudiated; for so pained have some persons been by the necessity of
recognizing Thomas Lincoln as the father of the President, that they
have welcomed, as a happy escape from this so miserable paternity, a bit
of gratuitous and unsupported gossip, published, though perhaps with
more of malice than of faith, by Mr. Herndon, to the effect that Abraham
Lincoln was the illegitimate son of some person unknown, presumably some
tolerably well-to-do Kentuckian, who induced Thomas to assume the rôle
of parent.
Upon the mother's side the ancestral showing is meagre, and fortunately
so, since the case seems to be a bad one beyond reasonable hope. Her
name was Nancy Hanks. She was born in Virginia, and was the illegitimate
child of one Lucy Hanks.[11] Nor was she the only instance of
illegitimacy[12] in a family which, by all accounts, seems to have been
very low in the social scale. Mr. Herndon calls them by the dread name
of "poor whites," and gives an unappetizing sketch of them.[13]
Throughout his pages and those of Lamon there is abundant and
disagreeable evidence to show the correctness of his estimate. Nancy
Hanks herself, who certainly was not to blame for her parentage, and
perhaps may have improved matters by an infusion of better blood from
her unknown father, is described by some as a very rare flower to have
bloomed amid the bed of ugly weeds which surrounded her. These friendly
writers make her a gentle, lovely, Christian creature, too delicate long
to survive the roughness of frontier life and the fellowship of the
shiftless rover to whom she was unfittingly wedded.[14] Whatever she may
have been, her picture is exceeding dim, and has been made upon scant
and not unquestionable evidence. Mr. Lincoln seems not often to have
referred to her; but when he did so it was with expressions of affection
for her character and respect for her mental qualities, provided at
least that it was really of her, and not of his stepmother, that he was
speaking,--a matter not clear from doubt.[15]
On June 10, 1806, Thomas Lincoln gave bond in the "just and full sum of
fifty pounds" to marry Nancy Hanks, and two days later, June 12, he did
so, in Washington County, Kentucky.[16] She was then twenty-three years
old. February 12, 1807, their daughter Sarah was born, who was married
and died leaving no issue. February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born;
no other children came save a boy who lived only a few days.
The domestic surroundings amid which the babe came into life were
wretched in the extreme. All the trustworthy evidence depicts a
condition of what civilized people call misery. It is just as well to
acknowledge a fact which cannot now be obscured by any amount of
euphemism. Yet very many of Lincoln's biographers have been greatly
concerned to color this truth, which he himself, with his honest nature,
was never willing to misrepresent, however much he resisted efforts to
give it a general publicity. He met curious inquiry with reticence, but
with no attempt to mislead. Some of his biographers, however, while
shunning direct false statements, have used alleviating adjectives with
literary skill, and have drawn fanciful pictures of a pious frugal
household, of a gallant frontiersman endowed with a long catalogue of
noble qualities, and of a mother like a Madonna in the wilderness.[17]
Yet all the evidence that there is goes to show that this romantic
coloring is purely illusive. Rough, coarse, low, ignorant, and
poverty-stricken surroundings were about the child; and though we may
gladly avail ourselves of the possibility of believing his mother to
have been superior to all the rest of it, yet she could by no means
leaven the mass. The father[18] was by calling a carpenter, but not good
at his trade, a shiftless migratory squatter by invincible tendency,
and a very ignorant man, for a long while able only to form the letters
which made his signature, though later he extended his accomplishments a
little. He rested not much above the very bottom of existence in the
pioneer settlements, apparently without capacity or desire to do better.
The family was imbued with the peculiar, intense, but unenlightened form
of Christianity, mingled with curious superstition, prevalent in the
backwoods, and begotten by the influence of the vast wilderness upon
illiterate men of a rude native force. It interests scholars to trace
the evolutions of religious faiths, but it might be not less suggestive
to study the retrogression of religion into superstition. Thomas was as
restless in matters of creed as of residence, and made various changes
in both during his life. These were, however, changes without
improvement, and, so far as he was concerned, his son Abraham might have
grown up to be what he himself was contented to remain.
It was in the second year after his marriage that Thomas Lincoln made
his first removal. Four years later he made another. Two or three years
afterwards, in the autumn of 1816, he abandoned Kentucky and went into
Indiana. Some writers have given to this migration the interesting
character of a flight from a slave-cursed society to a land of freedom,
but whatever poetic fitness there might be in such a motive, the
suggestion is entirely gratuitous and without the slightest
foundation.[19] In making this move, Thomas's outfit consisted of a
trifling parcel of tools and cooking utensils, with ever so little
bedding, and four hundred gallons of whiskey. At his new quarters he
built a "half-faced camp" fourteen feet square, that is to say, a
covered shed of three sides, the fourth side being left open to the
weather. In this, less snug than the winter's cave of a bear, the family
dwelt for a year, and then were translated to the luxury of a "cabin,"
four-walled indeed, but which for a long while had neither floor, door,
nor window. Amid this hardship and wretchedness Nancy Lincoln passed
away, October 5, 1818, of that dread and mysterious disease, the scourge
of those pioneer communities, known as the "milk-sickness."[20] In a
rough coffin, fashioned by her husband "out of green lumber cut with a
whip-saw," she was laid away in the forest clearing, and a few months
afterward an itinerant preacher performed some funeral rites over the
poor woman's humble grave.
For a year Thomas Lincoln was a widower. Then he went back to Kentucky,
and found there Mrs. Sally Johnston, a widow, whom, when she was the
maiden Sarah Bush, he had loved and courted, and by whom he had been
refused. He now asked again, and with better success. The marriage was a
little inroad of good luck into his career; for the new wife was thrifty
and industrious, with the ambition and the capacity to improve the
squalid condition of her husband's household. She had, too, worldly
possessions of bedding and furniture, enough to fill a four-horse wagon.
She made her husband put a floor, a door, and windows to his cabin. From
the day of her advent a new spirit made itself felt amid the belongings
of the inefficient Thomas. Her immediate effort was to make her new
husband's children "look a little more human," and the youthful Abraham
began to get crude notions of the simpler comforts and decencies of
life. All agree that she was a stepmother to whose credit it is to be
said that she manifested an intelligent kindness towards Abraham.
The opportunities for education were scant enough in that day and place.
In his childhood in Kentucky Abraham got a few weeks with one teacher,
and then a few weeks with another. Later, in Indiana, he studied a few
months, in a scattered way. Probably he had instruction at home, for the
sum of all the schooling which he had in his whole life was hardly one
year;[21] a singular start upon the road to the presidency of the United
States! The books which he saw were few, but a little later he laid
hands upon them all and read and re-read them till he must have absorbed
all their strong juice into his own nature. Nicolay and Hay give the
list: The Bible; "Aesop's Fables;" "Robinson Crusoe;" "The Pilgrim's
Progress;" a history of the United States; Weems's "Washington." He was
doubtless much older when he devoured the Revised Statutes of Indiana in
the office of the town constable. Dr. Holland adds Lives of Henry Clay
and of Franklin (probably the famous autobiography), and Ramsay's
"Washington;" and Arnold names Shakespeare and Burns. It was a small
library, but nourishing. He used to write and to do sums in arithmetic
on the wooden shovel by the fireside, and to shave off the surface in
order to renew the labor.
As he passed from boyhood to youth his mental development took its
characteristics from the popular demand of the neighborhood. He
scribbled verses and satirical prose, wherein the coarse wit was adapted
to the taste of the comrades whom it was designed to please; and it must
be admitted that, after giving due weight to all ameliorating
considerations, it is impossible to avoid disappointment at the
grossness of the jesting. No thought, no word raised it above the low
level of the audience made up of the laborers on the farms and the
loungers in the groceries. The biographer who has made public "The First
Chronicles of Reuben" deserves to be held in detestation.[22]
A more satisfactory form of intellectual effervescence consisted in
writing articles on the American Government, Temperance, etc., and in
speech-making to any who were near at the moment of inspiration. There
is abundant evidence, also, that already Lincoln was regarded as a witty
fellow, a rare mimic, and teller of jokes and stories; and therefore was
the champion of the fields and the favorite of all the primitive social
gatherings. This sort of life and popularity had its perils, for in that
day and region men seldom met without drinking together; but all
authorities are agreed that Lincoln, while the greatest talker, was the
smallest drinker.
The stories told of his physical strength rival those which decorate the
memory of Hercules. Others, which show his kindly and humane nature, are
more valuable. Any or all of these may or may not be true, and, though
they are not so poetical or marvelous as the myths which lend an antique
charm to the heroes of classic and romantic lore, yet they compare
fairly well with those which Weems has twined about the figure of the
youthful Washington. There is a tale of the rescue of a pig from a
quagmire, and another of the saving of a drunken man from freezing.
There are many stories of fights; others of the lifting of enormous
weights; and even some of the doing of great feats of labor in a day,
though for such tasks Lincoln had no love. These are not worth
recounting; there is store of such in every village about the popular
local hero; and though historians by such folk-lore may throw a glamour
about Lincoln's daily life, he himself, at the time, could hardly have
seen much that was romantic or poetical in the routine of ill-paid labor
and hard living. Until he came of age his "time" belonged to his father,
who let him out to the neighbors for any job that offered, making him a
man-of-all-work, without-doors and within. In 1825 he was thus earning
six dollars a month, presumably besides board and lodging. Sometimes he
slaughtered hogs, at thirty-one cents a day; and in this "rough work" he
was esteemed especially efficient. Such was the making of a President in
the United States in this nineteenth century!
Thomas Lincoln, like most men of his stamp, had the cheerful habit of
laying the results of his own worthlessness to the charge of the
conditions about him, which, naturally, he constantly sought to change,
since it seemed that no change could bring him to a lower level than he
had already found. As Abraham approached his "freedom-day," his luckless
parent conceived the notion that he might do better in Illinois than he
had done in Indiana. So he shuffled off the farm, for which he had never
paid, and about the middle of February the family caravan, with their
scanty household wares packed in an ox team, began a march which lasted
fourteen days and entailed no small measure of hardship. They finally
stopped at a bluff on the north bank of the north fork of the Sangamon,
a stream which empties into the Ohio. Here Thomas Lincoln renewed the
familiar process of "starting in life," and with an axe, a saw, and a
knife built a rough cabin of hewed logs, with a smoke-house and
"stable." Abraham, aided by John Hanks, cleared ten or fifteen acres of
land, split the rails and fenced it, planted it with corn, and made it
over to Thomas as a sort of bequest at the close of his term of legal
infancy. His subsequent relationship with his parents, especially with
his father, seems to have been slight, involving an occasional gift of
money, a very rare visit, and finally a commonplace letter of Christian
comfort when the old man was on his deathbed.[23]
At first Abraham's coming of age made no especial change in his
condition; he continued to find such jobs as he could, as an example of
which Is mentioned his bargain with Mrs. Nancy Miller "to split four
hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark
that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers." After many
months there arrived in the neighborhood one Denton Offut, one of those
scheming, talkative, evanescent busybodies who skim vaguely over new
territories. This adventurer had a cargo of hogs, pork, and corn, which
he wanted to send to New Orleans, and the engagement fell to Lincoln and
two comrades at the wage of fifty cents per day and a bonus of $60 for
the three. It has been said that this and a preceding trip down the
Mississippi first gave Lincoln a glimpse of slavery in concrete form,
and that the spectacle of negroes "in chains, whipped and scourged,"
and of a slave auction, implanted in his mind an "unconquerable hate"
towards the institution, so that he exclaimed: "If ever I get a chance
to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard." So the loquacious myth-maker John
Hanks asserts;[24] but Lincoln himself refers his first vivid impression
to a later trip, made in 1841, when there were "on board ten or a dozen
slaves shackled together with irons." Of this subsequent incident he
wrote, fourteen years later, to his friend, Joshua Speed: "That sight
was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I
touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to
assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually
exercises, the power of making me miserable."[25]
Of more immediate consequence was the notion which the rattle-brained
Offut conceived of Lincoln's general ability. This lively patron now
proposed to build a river steamboat, with "runners for ice and rollers
for shoals and dams," of which his redoubtable young employee was to be
captain. But this strange scheme gave way to another for opening in New
Salem a "general store" of all goods. This small town had been born only
a few months before this summer of 1831, and was destined to a brief but
riotous life of some seven years' duration. Now it had a dozen or
fifteen "houses," of which some had cost only ten dollars for the
building; yet to the sanguine Offut it presented a fair field for retail
commerce. He accordingly equipped his "store," and being himself engaged
in other enterprises, he installed Lincoln as manager. Soon he also gave
Lincoln a mill to run.
Besides all this patronage, Offut went about the region bragging in his
extravagant way that his clerk "knew more than any man in the United
States," would some day be President, and could now throw or thrash any
man in those parts. Now it so happened that some three miles out from
New Salem lay Clary's Grove, the haunt of a gang of frontier ruffians of
the familiar type, among whom one Jack Armstrong was champion bully.
Offut's boasting soon rendered an encounter between Lincoln and
Armstrong inevitable, though Lincoln did his best to avoid it, and
declared his aversion to "this woolling and pulling." The wrestling
match was arranged, and the settlers flocked to it like Spaniards to a
bull-fight. Battle was joined and Lincoln was getting the better of
Armstrong, whereupon the "Clary's Grove boys," with fine chivalry, were
about to rush in upon Lincoln and maim him, or worse, when the timely
intervention of a prominent citizen possibly saved even the life of the
future President.[26] Some of the biographers, borrowing the license of
poets, have chosen to tell about the "boys" and the wrestling match
with such picturesque epithets that the combat bids fair to appear to
posterity as romantic as that of Friar Tuck and Robin Hood. Its
consequence was that Armstrong and Lincoln were fast friends ever after.
Wherever Lincoln was at work, Armstrong used to "do his loafing," and
Lincoln made visits to Clary's Grove, and long afterward did a friendly
service to "old Hannah," Armstrong's wife, by saving one of her vicious
race from the gallows, which upon that especial occasion he did not
happen to deserve. Also Armstrong and his gang gave Lincoln hearty
political support, and an assistance at the polls which was very
effective, for success generally smiled on that candidate who had as his
constituency[27] the "butcher-knife boys," the "barefooted boys," the
"half-horse, half-alligator men," and the "huge-pawed boys."
An item less susceptible of a poetic coloring is that about this time
Lincoln ransacked the neighborhood in search of an English grammar, and
getting trace of one six miles out from the settlement, he walked over
to borrow or to buy it. He brought it back in triumph, and studied it
exhaustively.
There are also some tales of his honesty which may stand without
disgrace beside that of Washington and the cherry-tree, and may be
better entitled to credit. It is said that, while he was "keeping shop"
for Offut, a woman one day accidentally overpaid him by the sum of
fourpence, and that he walked several miles that night to restore the
sum to her before he slept. On another occasion, discovering that in
selling half a pound of tea he had used too small a weight, he started
instantly forth to make good the deficiency. Perhaps this integrity does
not so much differentiate Lincoln from his fellows as it may seem to do,
for it is said that honesty was the one distinguishing virtue of that
queer society. None the less these legends are exponents, which the
numerous fighting stories are not, of the genuine nature of the man. His
chief trait all his life long was honesty of all kinds and in all
things; not only commonplace, material honesty in dealings, but honesty
in language, in purpose, in thought; _honesty of mind_, so that he could
never even practice the most tempting of all deceits, a deceit against
himself. This pervasive honesty was the trait of his identity, which
stayed with him from beginning to end, when other traits seemed to be
changing, appearing or disappearing, and bewildering the observer of his
career. All the while the universal honesty was there.
It took less than a year for Offut's shop to come to ruin, for the
proprietor to wander off into the unknown void from which he had come,
and for Lincoln to find himself again without occupation. He won some
local reputation by navigating the steamboat Talisman up the Sangamon
River to Springfield; but nothing came of it.
The foregoing narrative ought to have given some idea of the moral and
physical surroundings of Lincoln's early days. Americans need to carry
their memories hardly fifty years back, in order to have a lively
conception of that peculiar body of men which for many years was pushed
out in front of civilization in the West. Waifs and strays from highly
civilized communities, these wanderers had not civilization to learn,
but rather they had shuffled off much that belonged to civilization, and
afterwards they had to acquire it afresh. Among them crudity in thought
and uncouthness in habits were intertwined in odd, incongruous crossings
with the remnants of the more respectable customs with which they had
once been familiar. Much they forgot and much they put away as being no
longer useful; many of them--not all--became very ignorant without being
stupid, very brutal without being barbarous. Finding life hard, they
helped each other with a general kindliness which is impracticable among
the complexities of elaborate social organizations. Those who were born
on the land, among whom Lincoln belonged, were peculiar in having no
reminiscences, no antecedent ideas derived from their own past, whereby
to modify the influences of the immediate present. What they should
think about men and things they gathered from what they saw and heard
around them. Even the modification to be got from reading was of the
slightest, for very little reading was possible, even if desired. An
important trait of these Western communities was the closeness of
personal intercourse in them, and the utter lack of any kind of barriers
establishing strata of society. Individuals might differ ever so widely;
but the wisest and the dullest, the most worthless and the most
enterprising, had to rub shoulder to shoulder in daily life. Yet the
variety was considerable: hardy and danger-loving pioneers fulfilling
the requirements of romance; shiftless vagrants curiously combining
utter inefficiency with a sort of bastard contempt for hardship;
ruffians who could only offset against every brutal vice an ignoble
physical courage; intelligent men whose observant eyes ranged over the
whole region in a shrewd search after enterprise and profit; a few
educated men, decent in apparel and bearing, useful in legislation and
in preventing the ideal from becoming altogether vulgarized and debased;
and others whose energy was chiefly of the tongue, the class imbued with
a taste for small politics and the public business. All these and many
other varieties were like ingredients cast together into a caldron; they
could not keep apart, each with his own kind, to the degree which is
customary in old established communities; but they all ceaselessly
crossed and mingled and met, and talked, and dealt, and helped and
hustled each other, and exerted upon each other that subtle inevitable
influence resulting from such constant intercourse; and so they
inoculated each other with certain characteristics which became common
to all and formed the type of the early settler. Thus was made "the new
West," "the great West," which was pushed ever onward, and endured along
each successive frontier for about a generation. An eternal movement, a
tireless coming and going, pervaded these men; they passed hither and
thither without pause, phantasmagorically; they seemed to be forever
"moving on," some because they were real pioneers and natural rovers,
others because they were mere vagrants generally drifting away from
creditors, others because the better chance seemed ever in the newer
place, and all because they had struck no roots, gathered no
associations, no home ties, no local belongings. The shopkeeper "moved
on" when his notes became too pressing; the schoolmaster, after a short
stay, left his school to some successor whose accomplishments could
hardly be less than his own; clergymen ranged vaguely through the
country, to preach, to pray, to bury, to marry, as the case might be;
farmers heard of a more fruitful soil, and went to seek it. Men
certainly had at times to work hard in order to live at all, yet it was
perfectly possible for the natural idler to rove, to loaf, and to be
shiftless at intervals, and to become as demoralized as the tramp for
whom a shirt and trousers are the sum of worldly possessions. Books were
scarce; many teachers hardly had as much book-learning as lads of
thirteen years now have among ourselves. Men who could neither read nor
write abounded, and a deficiency so common could hardly imply much
disgrace or a marked inferiority; many learned these difficult arts only
in mature years. Fighting was a common pastime, and when these rough
fellows fought, they fought like savages; Lincoln's father bit off his
adversary's nose in a fight, and a cousin lost the same feature in the
same way; the "gouging" of eyes was a legitimate resource. The necessity
of fighting might at any moment come to any one; even the combination of
a peaceable disposition with formidable strength did not save Lincoln
from numerous personal affrays, of which many are remembered, and not
improbably many more have been forgotten. In spite of the picturesque
adjectives which have been so decoratively used in describing the
ruffian of the frontier, he seems to have been about what his class
always is; and when these fellows had forced a fight, or "set up" a
match, their chivalry never prevented any unfairness or brutality. A
tale illustrative of the times is told of a closely contested election
in the legislature for the office of state treasurer. The worsted
candidate strode into the hall of the Assembly, and gallantly selecting
four of the largest and strongest of those who had voted against him,
thrashed them soundly. The other legislators ran away. But before the
close of the session this pugilist, who so well understood practical
politics, was appointed clerk of the Circuit Court and county
recorder.[28]
Corn bread was the chief article of diet; potatoes were a luxury, and
were often eaten raw like apples. To the people at large whiskey
"straight" seemed the natural drink of man, and whiskey toddy was not
distasteful to woman. To refuse to drink was to subject one's self to
abuse and suspicion;[29] Lincoln's notorious lack of liking for it
passed for an eccentricity, or a physical peculiarity. The customary
social gatherings were at horse-racings, at corn-shuckings, at political
speech-makings, at weddings, whereat the coarse proceedings would not
nowadays bear recital; at log-rollings, where the neighbors gathered to
collect the logs of a newly cleared lot for burning; and at
house-raisings, where they kindly aided to set up the frame of a cabin
for a new-comer; at camp-meetings, where the hysterical excitement of a
community whose religion was more than half superstition found clamorous
and painful vent;[30] or perchance at a hanging, which, if it met public
approbation, would be sanctioned by the gathering of the neighbors
within a day's journey of the scene. At dancing-parties men and women
danced barefoot; indeed, they could hardly do better, since their
foot-wear was apt to be either moccasins, or such boots as they
themselves could make from the hides which they themselves had cured. In
Lincoln's boyhood the hunting-shirt and leggings made of skins were a
sufficiently respectable garb; and buckskin breeches dyed green were
enough to captivate the heart of any girl who wished a fashionable
lover; but by the time that he had become a young man, most
self-respecting men had suits of jeans. The ugly butcher's knife and
tomahawk, which had been essential as was the rapier to the costume of
gentlemen two centuries earlier, began now to be more rarely seen at the
belt about the waist. The women wore linsey-woolsey gowns, of home
manufacture, and dyed according to the taste or skill of the wearer in
stripes and bars with the brown juice of the butternut. In the towns it
was not long before calico was seen, and calfskin shoes; and in such
populous centres bonnets decorated the heads of the fair sex. Amid these
advances in the art of dress Lincoln was a laggard, being usually one of
the worst attired men of the neighborhood; not from affectation, but
from a natural indifference to such matters. The sketch is likely to
become classical in American history of the appearance which he
presented with his scant pair of trousers, "hitched" by a single
suspender over his shirt, and so short as to expose, at the lower end,
half a dozen inches of "shinbone, sharp, blue, and narrow."
In the clearings the dwellings of these men were the "half-faced camp"
open upon one side to the weather, or the doorless, floorless, and
windowless cabin which, with prosperity, might be made luxurious by
greased paper in the windows, and "puncheon" floors. The furniture was
in keeping with this exterior. At a corner the bed was constructed by
driving into the ground crotched sticks, whence poles extended to the
crevices of the walls; upon these poles were laid boards, and upon these
boards were tossed leaves and skins and such other alleviating material
as could be found. Three-legged stools and a table were hewed from the
felled trees with an axe, which was often the settler's only and
invaluable tool, and which he would travel long miles to sharpen. If a
woman wanted a looking-glass, she scoured a tin pan, but the temptation
to inspect one's self must have been feeble. A very few kitchen utensils
completed the outfit. Troughs served for washtubs, when wash tubs were
used; and wooden ploughs broke up the virgin soil. The whole was little,
if at all, more comfortable than the red man's wigwam. In "towns," so
called, there was of course somewhat more of civilization than in the
clearings. But one must not be misled by a name; a "town" might signify
only a score of houses, and the length of its life was wholly
problematical; a few days sufficed to build the wooden huts, which in a
few years might be abandoned. In the early days there was almost no
money among the people; sometimes barter was resorted to; one lover paid
for his marriage license with maple sugar, another with wolf-scalps.
More often a promise sufficed; credit was a system well understood, and
promissory notes constituted an unquestioned and popular method of
payment that would have made a millennium for Mr. Micawber. But however
scant might be cash and houses, each town had its grocery, and these
famous "stores" were by far the chief influence in shaping the ideas of
the Westerner. There all congregated, the idlers all day long, the busy
men in the evening; and there, stimulated by the whiskey of the
proprietor, they gossiped about everybody's affairs, talked about
business and the prospects of the neighborhood, and argued about the
politics of the county, the State, and even of the nation. Jokes and
stories, often most uncouth and gross, whiled away the time. It was in
these groceries, and in the rough crucible of such talk, wherein
grotesque imagery and extravagant phrases were used to ridicule
pretension and to bring every man to his place, sometimes also to escape
taking a hard fact too hardly, that what we now call "American humor,"
with its peculiar native flavor, was born. To this it is matter of
tradition that Lincoln contributed liberally. He liked neighborly chat
and discussion; and his fondness for political debate, and his gifts in
tale and jest, made him the most popular man in every "store" that he
entered. It is commonly believed that the effect of this familiarity
with coarse talk did not afterward disappear, so that he never became
fastidious in language or in story. But apologists of this habit are
doubtless correct in saying that vulgarity in itself had no attraction
for him; it simply did not repel him, when with it there was a flavor of
humor or a useful point. Apparently it simply meant nothing to him; a
mental attitude which is not difficult of comprehension in view of its
origin.[31]
Some of the most picturesque and amusing pages of Ford's "History of
Illinois" describe the condition of the bench and bar of these
times.[32] "Boys, come in, our John is going to hold court," proclaimed
the sheriff; and the "boys" loitered into the barroom of the tavern, or
into a log cabin where the judge sat on the bed and thus, really from
the woolsack, administered "law" mixed with equity as best he knew it.
Usually these magistrates were prudent in guiding the course of
practical justice, and rarely summed up the facts lest they should make
dangerous enemies, especially in criminal cases; they often refused to
state the law, and generally for a very good reason. They liked best to
turn the whole matter over to the jurors, who doubtless "understood the
case, and would do justice between the parties." The books of the
science were scarce, and lawyers who studied them were perhaps scarcer.
But probably substantial fairness in decision did not suffer by reason
of lack of sheepskin learning.
Politics for a long while were strictly personal; the elections did not
turn upon principles or measures, but upon the popular estimate of the
candidates individually. Political discussion meant unstinted praise
and unbounded vilification. A man might, if he chose, resent a vote
against himself as a personal insult, and hence arose much secrecy and
the "keep dark" system. Stump-speaking, whiskey, and fighting were the
chief elements of a campaign, and the worst class in society furnished
the most efficient backing.[33]
Such was the condition of men and things in the neighborhood where
Abraham Lincoln was shaping in the days of his youth. Yet it was a
condition which did not last long; Illinois herself changed and grew as
rapidly as any youngster within her borders. The rate of advance in all
that goes to make up what we now regard as a civilized society was
astonishing. Between the time when Lincoln was fifteen and when he was
twenty-five, the alteration was so great as to be confusing. One hardly
became familiar with a condition before it had vanished. Some towns
began to acquire an aspect of permanence; clothes and manners became
like those prevalent in older communities; many men were settling down
in established residence, identifying themselves with the fortunes of
their neighborhood. Young persons were growing up and staying where they
had been "raised," as the phrase of a farming community had it.
Comfortable and presentable two-story houses lent an air of prosperity
and stimulated ambition; law-books began to be collected in small
numbers; and debts were occasionally paid in money, and could often be
collected by legal process. These improvements were largely due to the
swelling tide of immigration which brought men of a better type to push
their enterprises in a country presumably emerging from its disagreeable
stage. But the chief educational influence was to be found in the
Anglo-American passion for an argument and a speech. Hand in hand, as
has so long been the custom in our country, law and politics moved among
the people, who had an inborn, inherited taste for both; these
stimulated and educated the settlers in a way that only Americans can
appreciate. When Lincoln, as is soon to be seen, turned to them, he
turned to what then and there appeared the highest callings which could
tempt intellect and ambition.
The preëminently striking feature in Lincoln's nature--not a trait of
character, but a characteristic of the man--which is noteworthy in these
early days, and grew more so to the very latest, was the extraordinary
degree to which he always appeared to be in close and sympathetic touch
with the people, that is to say, the people in the mass wherein he was
imbedded, the social body amid which he dwelt, which pressed upon him on
all sides, which for him formed "the public." First this group or body
was only the population of the frontier settlement; then it widened to
include the State of Illinois; then it expanded to the population of the
entire North; and such had come to be the popular appreciation of this
remarkably developed quality that, at the time of his death, his
admirers even dared to believe that it would be able to make itself one
with all the heterogeneous, discordant, antagonistic elements which then
composed the very disunited United States. It is by reason of this
quality that it has seemed necessary to depict so far as possible that
peculiar, transitory phase of society which surrounded his early days.
This quality in him caused him to be exceptionally susceptible to the
peculiar influences of the people among whom his lot was cast. This
quality for a while prevented his differentiating himself from them,
prevented his accepting standards and purposes unlike theirs either in
speech or action, prevented his rising rapidly to a higher moral plane
than theirs. This quality kept him essentially one of them, until his
"people" and his "public" expanded beyond them. It has been the fashion
of his admirers to manifest an extreme distaste for a truthful
presentation of his earlier days. Some writers have passed very lightly
over them; others, stating plain facts with a formal accuracy, have used
their skill to give to the picture an untruthful miscoloring; two or
three, instinct with the spirit of Zola, have made their sketch with
plain unsparing realism in color as well as in lines, and so have
brought upon themselves abuse, and perhaps have deserved much of it, by
reason of a lack of skill in doing an unwelcome thing, or rather by
reason of overdoing it. The feeling which has led to suppression or to
a falsely romantic description seems to me unreasonable and wrong. The
very quality which made Lincoln, as a young man, not much superior to
his coarse surroundings was precisely the same quality which, ripening
and expanding rapidly and grandly with maturing years and a greater
circle of humanity, made him what he was in later life. It is through
this quality that we get continuity in him; without it, we cannot evade
the insoluble problem of two men,--two lives,--one following the other
with no visible link of connection between them; without it we have
physically one creature, morally and mentally two beings. If we reject
this trait, we throw away the only key which unlocks the problem of the
most singular life, taken from end to end, which has ever been witnessed
among men, a life which many have been content to regard as an unsolved
enigma. But if we admit and really perceive and feel the full force of
this trait, developed in him in a degree probably unequaled in the
annals of men, then, besides the enlightenment which it brings, we have
the great satisfaction of eliminating much of the disagreeableness
attendant upon his youthful days. Even the commonness and painful
coarseness of his foolish written expressions become actually an
exponent of his chief and crowning quality, his receptiveness and his
expression of humanity,--that is to say, of all the humanity he then
knew. At first he expressed what he could discern with the limited,
inexperienced vision of the ignorant son of a wretched vagrant pioneer;
later he gave expression to the humanity of a people engaged in a
purpose physically and morally as vast and as grand as any enterprise
which the world has seen. Thus, with perfect fairness, without wrenching
or misrepresentation or sophistry, the ugliness of his youth ceases to
be his own and becomes only the presentation of a curious social
condition. In his youth he expressed a low condition, in later life a
noble one; at each period he expressed correctly what he found. His day
and generation uttered itself through him. With such thoughts, and from
this point of view, it is possible to contemplate Lincoln's early days,
amid all their degraded surroundings and influences and unmarked by
apparent antagonism or obvious superiority on his part, without serious
dismay.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Two letters, now in the possession of Mr. Francis H. Lincoln of
Boston, Mass.
[2] _New England Hist. and Gen. Register_, October, 1865.
[3] _Ibid._ April, 1887, vol. xli. p. 153.
[4] See articles in _N.E.H. and G. Reg._ above cited. Mr. Lincoln's
article states that in Norwich, Norfolk County, Eng., there is a
"curious chased copper box with the inscription 'Abraham Lincoln,
Norwich, 1731;'" also in St. Andrew's Church in the same place a mural
tablet: "In memory of Abraham Lincoln, of this parish, who died July 13,
1798, aged 79 years." Similarities of name are also noted.
[5] A town adjoining Hingham, Mass.
[6] His brother Abraham also resided in Chester County, and died there,
April, 1745.
[7] N. and H. i. 3.
[8] A different pedigree, published in the _Lancaster Intelligencer_,
September 24, 1879, by David J. Lincoln of Birdsboro, Berks County,
Penn., is refuted by George Lincoln of Hingham, Mass., in the _Hingham
Journal_, October 10, 1879.
[9] N. and H. i. 4 note.
[10] N. and H. i. 4 note.
[11] Herndon, 3.
[12] The unpleasant Dennis Hanks was an illegitimate son of an "aunt of
the President's mother." Herndon, 13; and see Lamon, 12.
[13] Herndon, 14.
[14] Holland, 23; Lamon, 11; N. and H. i. 24; Herndon, 13, 28; Raymond,
20; but Raymond is no authority as to Lincoln's youth, and Holland is
little more valuable for the same period.
[15] Lamon, 32. But see Herndon, 13.
[16] N. and H. 23; Herndon, 5; but see Lamon, 10.
[17] For instance, see the pages of the first chapter of the Life by
Arnold, a book which becomes excellent after the author has got free
from the fancied necessities of creating an appropriate background for
the origin and childhood of the hero. So, more briefly, Raymond, who
gives no authority to support the faith which is in him.
[18] For description of him, see Lamon, 8, 9; Herndon, 11.
[19] Herndon, 19; Lamon, 16; Holland, 25.
[20] Herndon, 25-28; Lamon, 26-28.
[21] Herndon, 34-37, 41; Lamon, 34-36; Holland, 28.
[22] Mr. Herndon did this ill deed; 50-54. Lamon prefers to say that
most of this literature is "too indecent for publication," 63.
[23] Thomas Lincoln died January 17, 1851.
[24] Herndon, 75, 76; Lamon, 82; Arnold, 30; N. and H. i. 72.
[25] N. and H. i. 74.
[26] Lamon, 92, 93, has the best account of this famous encounter.
[27] Ford, _Hist. of Illinois_, 88.
[28] Ford, _Hist. of Illinois_, 81.
[29] See anecdote in _The Good Old Times in McLean County_, 48.
[30] "The jerks" was the graphic name of an attack not uncommon at these
religious meetings.
[31] See Herndon, 104, 118; Holland has some singular remarks on this
subject, p. 83; N. and H., i. 121, say that Lincoln was "clean of
speech,"--an agreeable statement, for which one would like to have some
authority.
[32] Ford, _Hist. of Illinois_, 82-86.
[33] Ford, _Hist. of Illinois_, 55, 86, 88,104; Herndon, 103; N. and H.
i. 107; Lamon, 124, 230.