Lincoln’s tenderness of heart was one of his striking traits. The story
of his life is full of touching incidents showing his pity for all
living things in distress. As a boy he protected frogs and turtles from
torture; as a frontiersman he returned young birds to their nests, and
once rode back on his tracks over the prairie and dismounted to help
a pig stuck in the mud; as President his habit of pardoning soldiers
condemned to death excited the wrath of his generals. His heart melted
at the sight of tears. It was hard for him to withstand a tale of woe.
The shedding of blood stirred horror and grief in him.
This extreme sensitiveness would have been an element of almost fatal
weakness in the man upon whom events had so suddenly thrust the command
of a great war, particularly a war between his own countrymen, but for
the fact that reason and devotion to justice were the anchors of his
nature.
He could not be moved on a clear question of principle by either
friendship, enmity or compassion.
He appointed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, in place of the
discredited Simon Cameron, in spite of the fact that Stanton had
treated him contemptuously in a law case on which they were engaged
together, and had described him as a “long, lank creature from
Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which
the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the
continent.”
He raised George B. McClellan to command the army, notwithstanding the
circumstance that McClellan, as vice-president of the Illinois Central
Railway, had once deeply wounded him by declining to pay his lawyer’s
bill; and that, in 1858, while the Illinois Central refused Lincoln the
most common courtesy, McClellan was accompanying his rival, Douglas,
in a private car and special train.
It was not chivalry, but patriotism, that inspired Lincoln to put
these two Democrats in control of the armed forces of the nation.
His own feelings were nothing; the fate of the Union was everything.
Stanton had been an honest and masterful member of Buchanan’s Cabinet.
McClellan had made a glorious answer to the Bull Run defeat by driving
the Confederate troops out of West Virginia.
The life of the nation was more important than party lines. Besides,
Stanton and McClellan had the confidence of the Democrats, and it was
essential, not only that the whole North should be held together, but
that the loyal Democrats in the wavering border States should feel that
there was no sectional or party prejudice in the government.
Stanton tried to bully Lincoln and called him “the original gorilla,”
and McClellan treated him with disdainful indifference. Neither could
exhaust his patience. He mastered his lion-headed Secretary of War by
gentle persistence. He endured McClellan’s months of inactivity after
the Army of the Potomac had grown into a fighting force of nearly a
hundred and seventy thousand magnificently trained men, and when the
government was being openly sneered at for its hesitation to give
battle.
Great-hearted, patient Lincoln! He even consented to sit
uncomplainingly in the waiting room of McClellan’s residence while the
arrogant young general talked to others.
“I will hold McClellan’s stirrup if he will only bring success,” he
said.
But, in the end, he wrote the orders which forced McClellan’s
army against Richmond; and when Frémont, in the West, ignored the
President’s orders to fight, Lincoln promptly removed him from command.
To the newly assembled Congress he said:
“This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it
is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of
government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men--to
lift artificial weights from all shoulders.... It is now for them [the
people] to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an
election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful
and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly
and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back
to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots
themselves at succeeding elections.”
To one of the many committees that went to the White House to complain
that the war was not being pressed rapidly enough, he suggested a
question and answer that were repeated all over the country.
He was tired, pale, almost worn out. The ceaseless grind of work, the
frightful and increasing responsibilities imposed by the war, the
cruel jibes of critics all over the country, had deepened the furrows
in his brow and wasted his homely face. Every mail brought threats of
assassination. The far-away, rapt look in his eyes, the pitiful droop
of his strong mouth, the pathetic sloping of his tall, black-clad
figure, gave evidence of the strain upon him.
“Gentlemen,” he said, with a smile that lit up his wonderful face,
“suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put
it in the hands of Blondin [the famous tight-rope walker] to carry
across the Niagara River on a rope. Would you shake the cable, or keep
shouting at him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter--Blondin,
stoop a little more--go a little faster--lean a little more to the
north--lean a little more to the south’? No, you would hold your
breath, as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was
safe over. The Government’s carrying an enormous weight. Untold
treasures are in their hands. They are doing the best they can. Don’t
badger them. Keep silence, and we will get you safe across.”
Lincoln did not fight battles himself, but he searched patiently for
generals who could, and then he trusted them, and kept the public off
their backs. As he said to General Grant, “If a man can’t skin, he must
hold a leg while somebody else does.”
Imagine Lincoln, in his black frock coat and high hat, stealing out
of the White House in the morning to kneel in the grass on the Mall
and practice at a sheet of note paper with newly-invented rifles till
the indignant sentries dash up shouting, to see the long figure unfold
itself upward and recognize in the disturber the President of the
United States!
Imagine him playing with his children on the White House lawn, “his
coat-tails standing out straight and his black hair tousled this way
and that” as he dashes about, chased by his shrieking playmates!
Imagine him again and again asking little girls to kiss him, snatching
them to his thin breast, fondling them with tears in his eyes!
Imagine him watching through weary nights by his son’s deathbed,
standing stricken beside the little coffin, and then, for the first
time, turning to the Bible for consolation!
Imagine him entertaining his log-cabin cousin, Dennis Hanks, in the
White House, and, when that simple soul disapproves of Secretary
Stanton’s arrogance and urges him to “kick the frisky little Yankee
out,” patiently answering, “It would be difficult to find another man
to fill his place”!
Imagine him sitting in his nightshirt on the edge of young John Hay’s
bed, night after night, reading doggerel verses from the newspapers,
cracking jokes or reciting from Shakespeare!
Imagine him signing a pardon for a young soldier sentenced to be shot
and hearing the sobs of that mother waiting outside, “Thank God! Thank
Lincoln! Pardoned! Oh, my boy! my boy!”
Imagine him facing the gray-haired father of another doomed soldier and
saying, “If your son lives until I order him shot, he will live longer
than ever Methuselah did”!
Imagine him sitting at the table day after day, his face cold,
abstracted, his gray eyes “seeing something in the air” and hardly
touching his food!
[Illustration: Life mask of Lincoln while President. Observe the wasted
features, the kindly, humorous mouth, and the reverential indications
of the high top head]
Imagine him on the night after the bloody loss of
Chancellorsville--seventeen thousand killed, wounded and missing! Mr.
Stoddard, sitting in the deserted White House, underneath Lincoln’s
room, has helped our imagination:
“But that sound, the slow, heavy, regular tread of the President’s
feet, pacing up and down in his room and thinking of Chancellorsville!
A man’s tread may well be heavy when there is such a load upon his
shoulders as Lincoln is carrying.... He can hear, in his heart, the
thunder of the Union and Confederate guns, and the shrieks and groans
that rise on the lost battlefield.... Ten o’clock--and now and then
there have been momentary breaks, as if he paused in turning at the
wall; but no pause has lasted longer than for a few heart-beats....
Eleven o’clock--and it is as if a more silent kind of silence had been
obtained, for the tread can be heard more distinctly, and a sort of
thrill comes with it now and then.... There has been no sound from
the President’s room for a number of minutes, and he may be resting
in his chair or writing. No; there it comes again, that mournfully
monotonous tread, with its turnings at the wall.... Two o’clock comes,
without another break in the steady tramp of Lincoln’s lonely vigil.
Three o’clock arrives, and your task is done, and you pass out almost
stealthily ... and the last sound in your ears is the muffled beat of
that footfall.
Before eight o’clock of the morning you are once more at the White
House ... look in at the President’s room.... He is still there, and
there is nothing to indicate that he has been out of it.... There
upon the table, beside his cup of coffee, lies the draft of his fresh
instructions to General Hooker, bidding him to push forward without any
reference to Chancellorsville.”
These are but fragmentary glimpses of the savior of the Union in his
many-sided life during the war. But they help us to understand him in
that tragic stretch of time when he plodded wearily between the White
House and the telegraph room in the War Department to learn, day by
day, what his generals at the front had to say.
It would be but vain repetition to picture him in silent, white-faced
anguish, or in equally silent transports of joy and thanksgiving, all
through the fighting days of Shiloh, Stone River, Fredericksburg,
Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness,
Spottsylvania and Petersburg, when Americans reddened American soil
with the blood of Americans, and the ordinary dress of women and
children throughout the country turned to black.
They said of him that he sometimes cracked jokes, Nero-like, while the
continent shuddered at the slaughter of its bravest and best, and while
the fate of the Union hung trembling in the balance.
“I must laugh or I will surely die,” he explained to John Hay.