But in his determination to save the Republic no horror could shake
his resolution. It is no small part of his title to the love of the
nation to-day that one so merciful and tender-hearted could suffer the
frightful shocks of years of slaughter and waste without wavering from
his duty.
His sense of nationality, his refusal to consider the American
people save as a whole, was expressed in that immortal speech at the
dedication of the cemetery on the Gettysburg battlefield in November,
1863.
Edward Everett, who was looked upon as the most eloquent of living
Americans, was the orator of the occasion. The invitation to Lincoln
was an afterthought.
Yet who can remember anything of the two hours’ polished speech
of Everett, and who can forget a sentence of the two hundred and
sixty-five words which Lincoln spoke almost before his hundred thousand
listeners realized the dignity and imperishable beauty of his utterance?
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation,
or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We
are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a
portion of it as the final resting place of those who here gave their
lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper
that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we
cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled
here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The
world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly
carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of
freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the
people shall not perish from the earth.”
Even after that Lincoln offered pardon to every one who would return to
the old allegiance, save the leaders of the rebellion. His heart cried
out to the bleeding South.
Yet his head was steady, and when he put the sword of the nation into
the hands of Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan to help him; when the
army swept all before it, and when, after reviewing Grant’s forces
in front of grim Petersburg, Lincoln called for half a million fresh
soldiers, he had the wit and shrewdness to silence Horace Greeley’s
senseless clamor for peace negotiations by writing to the officious
editor:
“If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition
of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of
the Union and abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say
to him he may come to me with you; and that if he really brings such
proposition, he shall at the least have safe conduct with the paper
(and without publicity if he chooses) to the point where you shall have
met him. The same if there be two or more persons.”
[Illustration: One of the last photographs of Lincoln. The picture
shows plainly the cares of office]
After his second election to the Presidency, and while pressing his
generals on to the end, Lincoln continued to show how free was his
soul from bitterness toward the South. The climax came in his second
inaugural speech, when a million soldiers were executing his orders in
the field. It was the last, supreme outpouring of his great and gentle
soul before peace came in the surrender at Appomattox, to be followed
by his own bloody death at the hands of a fanatic.
Those who saw him on the day of his second inauguration say that he
was thinner and more wrinkled than ever. His face had a ghastly, gray
pallor. There was an expression of indescribable mourning in his eyes.
After speaking for some time to the crowd there came a strangely
beautiful look into his wasted features as he drew himself to his full
height and raised his hands high. Then came that matchless outburst
which is repeated by hundreds of thousands of American schoolboys every
year:
“Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of
war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until
all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of
unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with
the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said
three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of
the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to
do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves, and with all nations.”
After he was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s theater on April 14,
1865, Lincoln never spoke again. He had seen the stars and stripes
raised in Richmond. He had seen the end of human slavery on the
American continent. The nation was one again. But he was to speak no
deathbed message. It was all in that last great speech: “With malice
toward none; with charity for all.”
For hours they stood about him as he lay moaning or struggling for
breath, his wife, his Cabinet officers, his pastor, secretary and
doctors. At daybreak the troubled look vanished from his face. There
was absolute stillness, followed by a trembling prayer by the pastor.
“Now he belongs to the ages,” said the deep voice of Secretary Stanton.
* * * * *
No, while Lincoln lives in the heart of the nation, it is idle to think
that the Republic can be corrupt or cowardly.
There were less than nine millions of Americans when he was born. These
have become almost ninety millions. The national wealth has grown to
more than a hundred billions of dollars. The flag he defended now
flies over the Philippines, Hawaii and Porto Rico. The law-resisting
millionaire, the “captain of industry” and the “tariff baron” have
taken the place of the slaveholder.
Yet the love of Lincoln deepens with increasing years; and a century
after his birth in a Kentucky log cabin, and nearly forty-four years
after his martyrdom, the American people answered the charge that they
had outlived their early ideals by the tribute they paid to the memory
of their humblest-born, plainest, most beloved leader and President.
_Set up, Electrotyped and Printed at_
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