CHAPTER I._Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.

[Illustration: Harriet Beecher Stowe]

MEN OF OUR TIMES;

LEADING PATRIOTS OF THE DAY.

BEING NARRATIVES OF THE LIVES AND DEEDS OF

Statesmen, Generals, and Orators.

INCLUDING

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES AND ANECDOTES

LINCOLN, GRANT, GARRISON, SUMNER, CHASE, WILSON, GREELEY,

FARRAGUT, ANDREW, COLFAX, STANTON, DOUGLASS,

BUCKINGHAM, SHERMAN, SHERIDAN, HOWARD,

PHILLIPS AND BEECHER.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,

AUTHOR OF UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED

WITH EIGHTEEN STEEL PORTRAITS.

PUBLISHED BY SUBSCRIPTION ONLY.

HARTFORD PUBLISHING CO., HARTFORD, CONN.

J. D. DENISON, NEW YORK; J. A. STODDARD, CHICAGO, ILL.

1868

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States

for the District of Connecticut.

Electrotyped by

LOCKWOOD & MANDEVILLE,

HARTFORD, CONN.

DEDICATION.

To the Young Men Of America,

THESE RECORDS

OF THEIR ELDER BRETHREN IN THE REPUBLIC,

ARE INSCRIBED

BY THE AUTHOR.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE.

1. PRESIDENT LINCOLN, FRONTISPIECE.

2. GEN. U. S. GRANT, 111

3. WILLIAM L. GARRISON, 154

4. CHARLES SUMNER, 214

5. SALMON P. CHASE, 241

6. HENRY WILSON, 269

7. HORACE GREELEY, 293

8. COM. D. G. FARRAGUT, 311

9. GOV. JOHN A. ANDREW, 325

10. SCHUYLER COLFAX, 347

11. E. M. STANTON, 363

12. FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 380

13. GEN. P. H. SHERIDAN, 405

14. GEN. W. T. SHERMAN, 423

15. GEN. OLIVER O. HOWARD, 447

16. GOV. WM. A. BUCKINGHAM, 463

17. WENDELL PHILLIPS, 483

18. REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER, 505

PREFACE.

In these sketches of some of the leading public men of our times, the

editor professes to give such particulars of their lives, and such

only, as the public have a right to know.

Every such man has two lives, his public and his private one. The one

becomes fairly the property of the public, in virtue of his having been

connected with events in which every one has a share of interest; but

the other belongs exclusively to himself, his family, and his intimate

friends, and the public have no more right to discuss or pry into its

details than they have into those of any other private individual.

The editor has aimed to avoid all privacies and personalities which

might be indelicate in relation to family circles. She has indeed, in

regard to all the characters, so far as possible, dwelt upon the early

family and community influences by which they were formed, particularly

upon the character and influence of mothers; but such inquiries relate

for the most part to those long dead, and whose mortal history has

become a thing of the past.

Whenever the means have been at hand, the family stock from which

each man has been derived, has been minutely traced. The question

of inherited traits is becoming yearly one of increasing interest,

and most striking results come from a comparison of facts upon this

subject. The fusion of different races is said to produce marked

results on the characteristics of the human being. America has been a

great smelting furnace in which tribes and nations have been melted

together, and the result ought to be some new developments of human

nature. It will always be both interesting and useful to know both

the quality of the family stock, and the circumstances of the early

training of men who have acted any remarkable part in life.

Our country has recently passed through a great crisis which has

concentrated upon it for a time the attention of the civilized world.

It has sustained a shock which the whole world, judging by past

experience, said must inevitably shatter the republic to fragments, and

yet, like a gallant ship in full sail, it has run down the terrible

obstacle, and gone on triumphant, and is this day stronger for the

collision.

This wonderful success is owing to the character of the people which

a Christian Democracy breeds. Of this people we propose to give

a specimen; to show how they were formed in early life, from the

influences which are inherent in such a state.

We are proud and happy to know that these names on our list are after

all but _specimens_. Probably every reader of this book will recall as

many more whom he will deem equally worthy of public notice. There is

scarcely one of them who would not say in reference to his position

before the public, what Lincoln said: "I stand where I do because some

man must stand there, but there are twenty others that might as well

have been leaders as myself." On the whole, we are not ashamed to

present to the world this list of men as a specimen of the graduates

from the American school of Christian Democracy.

So far as we know, the American government is the only permanent

republic which ever based itself upon the principles laid down by

Jesus Christ, of the absolute equal brotherhood of man, and the rights

of man on the simple ground of manhood. Notwithstanding the contrary

practices of a section of the States united in the Union, and the

concessions which they introduced into the constitution, nobody doubts

that this was the leading idea of the men who founded our government.

The declaration of American Independence crystalized a religious

teaching within a political act. The constitution of the United States

still further elaborates these principles, and so strong was the logic

of ideas that the conflict of opinions implied in the incidental

concessions to opposite ideas, produced in the government of the

country a continual and irrepressible discord. For a while it seemed

doubtful which idea would triumph, and whether the accidental parasite

would not strangle and wither the great original tree. The late war

was the outcome of the whole. The fierce fire into which our national

character has been cast in the hour of trial, has burned out of it the

last lingering stain of compromise with anything inconsistent with its

primary object, "to ordain justice and perpetuate liberty."

These men have all been formed by the principles of that great

Christian document, and that state of society and those social

influences which grew out of it, and it is instructive to watch, in

their early life, how a Christian republic trains her sons.

In looking through the list it will be seen that almost every one

of these men sprang from a condition of hard-working poverty. The

majority of them were self-educated men, who in early life were inured

to industrious toil. The farm life of America has been the nursery of

great men, and there is scarce a man mentioned in the book who has not

hardened his muscles and strengthened his brain power by a hand to hand

wrestle with the forces of nature in agricultural life. Frugality,

strict temperance, self-reliance and indomitable industry have been the

lessons of their early days.

Some facts about these specimen citizens are worthy of attention. More

than one-half of them were born and received their early training in

New England, and full one-third are direct lineal descendants of the

Pilgrim fathers. All, so far as we know, are undoubted believers in

the Christian religion--the greater proportion of them are men of

peculiarly and strongly religious natures, who have been active and

efficient in every peculiarly religious work. All have been agreed in

one belief, that the teachings of Jesus Christ are to be carried out

in political institutions, and that the form of society based on his

teachings, is to be defended at any sacrifice and at all risks.

There is scarcely a political man upon this list whose early efforts

were not menaced with loss and reproach and utter failure, if he

advocated these principles in the conduct of political affairs.

For these principles they have temporarily suffered buffetings,

oppressions, losses, persecutions, and in one great instance, DEATH.

All of them honored liberty when she was hard beset, insulted and

traduced, and it is fit that a free people should honor them in the

hour of her victory.

It will be found when the sum of all these biographies is added up that

the qualities which have won this great physical and moral victory have

not been so much exceptional gifts of genius or culture, as those more

attainable ones which belong to man's moral nature.

Taken as a class, while there is a fair proportion both of genius and

scholarship among them, yet the general result speaks more of average

talent and education turned to excellent account, than of any striking

eminence in any particular direction.

But we regard it as highest of all that they were men of good and

honest hearts--men who have set their faces as a flint to know and do

the RIGHT. All of them are men whose principles have been tried in

the fire, men who have braved opposition and persecution and loss for

the sake of what they believed to be true, and knew to be right, and

for this even more than for their bravery in facing danger, and their

patience and perseverance in overcoming difficulties, we have good hope

in offering them as examples to the young men of America.

In respect to one of the names on the list, the editor's near

relationship, while it gives her most authentic access to all

sources of just information, may be held to require an apology. But

the fashion of writing biographies of our leading men is becoming

so popular that the only way in which a prominent man can protect

himself from being put before the public by any hands who may think

fit to assume the task, is to put into the hands of some friend such

authentic particulars as may with propriety be recorded. Mr. Beecher

has recently been much embarrassed by the solicitation of parties, who

notwithstanding his remonstrances, announce an intention of writing his

life. He has been informed by them that it was to be done whether he

consented or not, and that his only choice was between furnishing these

parties with material, or taking the risk of what they might discover

in their unassisted researches.

In this dilemma, it is hoped that the sketch presented in this volume,

as being undeniably authentic, may so satisfy the demand, that there

may be no call for any other record.

H. B. STOWE.

HARTFORD, January, 1868.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

CHAPTER I.--ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

The Men of our Time--Lincoln Foremost--The War was the

Working-Man's Revolution--Abraham Lincoln's Birth and Youth--

The Books he Read--The Thirty Thousand Dollars for Tender--

The Old Stocking of Government Money--A Just Lawyer; Anecdotes

--His First Candidacy and Speech--Goes to Legislature and

Congress--The Seven Debates and Campaign against Douglass

in 1858--Webster's and Lincoln's Language Compared--The

Cooper Institute Speech--The Nomination at Chicago--Moral

and Physical Courage--The Backwoodsman President and the

Diplomatists--Significance of his Presidential Career--

Religious Feelings--His Kindness--"The Baby Did It"--The

First Inaugural--The Second Inaugural, and other State Papers

--The Conspiracy and Assassination--The Opinions of Foreign

Nations on Mr. Lincoln. 11

CHAPTER II.--ULYSSES S. GRANT.

A General Wanted--A Short War Expected--The Young Napoleon

--God's Revenge Against Slavery--The Silent Man in Galena

--"Tanning Leather"--Gen. Grant's Puritan Descent--How he

Loaded the Logs--His West Point Career--Service in Mexico

--Marries, and Leaves the Army--Wood-Cutting, Dunning and

Leather-Selling--Enlists against the Rebellion--Missouri

Campaign--Paducah Campaign--Fort Donelson Campaign--Battle

of Shiloh--How Grant Lost his Temper--Vicksburg Campaign

--Lincoln on Grant's "Drinking"--Chattanooga--Grant's

Method of Making a Speech--Appointed Lieutenant-General--

The Richmond Campaign--"Mr. Grant is a Very Obstinate Man"--

Grant's Qualifications as a Ruler--Honesty--Generosity to

Subordinates--Sound Judgment of Men--Power of Holding his

Tongue--Grant's Sidewalk Platform--Talks Horse to Senator

Wade--"Wants Nothing Said"--The Best Man for Next President. 111

CHAPTER III.--WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

Mr. Garrison's Birth and Parents--His Mother--Her Conversion

--His Boyhood--Apprenticed to a Printer--First Anti-Slavery

Address--Advice to Dr. Beecher--Benjamin Lundy--Garrison

Goes to Baltimore--First Battle with Slavery--In Jail--

First Number of the Liberator--Threats and Rage from the South

--The American Anti-Slavery Society--First Visit to England

--The Era of Mob Violence--The Respectable Boston Mob--

Mr. Garrison's Account--Again in Jail--The Massachusetts

Legislature Uncivil to the Abolitionists--Logical Vigor of the

Slaveholders--Garrison's Disunionism--Denounces the Church

--Liberality of the Liberator--The Southerners' own Testimony

--Mr. Garrison's Bland Manners--His Steady Nerves--His

use of Language--Things by their Right Names--Abolitionist

"Hard Language;" Garrison's Argument on it--Protest for

Woman's Rights--The Triumph of his Cause--"The Liberator"

Discontinued--Second Visit to England--Letter to Mrs. Stowe. 154

CHAPTER IV.--CHARLES SUMNER.

Mr. Sumner an instance of Free State High Culture--The "Brahmin

Caste" of New England--The Sumner Ancestry; a Kentish Family

--Governor Increase Sumner; His Revolutionary Patriotism--His

Stately Presence; "A Governor that can Walk"--Charles Sumner's

Father--Mr. Sumner's Education, Legal and Literary Studies

--Tendency to Ideal Perfection--Sumner and the Whigs--

Abolitionism Social Death--Sumner's Opposition to the Mexican

War--His Peace Principles--Sumner Opposes Slavery Within the

Constitution, as Garrison Outside of it--Anti-Slavery and the

Whigs--The Political Abolitionist Platform--Webster asked

in vain to Oppose Slavery--Sumner's Rebuke of Winthrop--

Joins the Free Soil Party--Succeeds Webster in the Senate--

Great Speech against the Fugitive Slave Law--The Constitution

a Charter of Liberty--Slavery not in the Constitution--

First Speech after the Brooks Assault--Consistency as to

Reconstruction. 214

CHAPTER V.--SALMON P. CHASE.

England and our Finances in the War--President Wheelock and

Mr. Chase's Seven Uncles--His Uncle the Bishop--His Sense

of Justice at College--His Uncle the Senator--Admitted to

the Bar for Cincinnati--His First Argument before a U. S.

Court--Society in Cincinnati--The Ohio Abolitionists--

Cincinnati on Slavery--The Church admits Slavery to be "an

Evil"--Mr. Chase and the Birney Mob--The Case of the Slave

Girl Matilda--How Mr. Chase "Ruined Himself"--He Affirms the

Sectionality of Slavery--The Van Zandt Case--Extracts from

Mr. Chase's Argument--Mr. Chase in Anti-Slavery Politics--His

Qualifications as a Financier. 241

CHAPTER VI.--HENRY WILSON.

Lincoln, Chase and Wilson as Illustrations of Democracy--Wilson's

Birth and Boyhood--Reads over One Thousand Books in Ten Years

--Learns Shoemaking--Earns an Education Twice Over--Forms a

Debating Society--Makes Sixty Speeches for Harrison--Enters

into Political Life on the Working-Men's Side--Helps to form

the Free Soil Party--Chosen United States Senator over Edward

Everett--Aristocratic Politics in those Days--Wilson and the

Slaveholding Senators--The Character of his Speaking--Full of

Facts and Practical Sense--His Usefulness as Chairman of the

Military Committee--His "History of the Anti-Slavery Measures

in Congress"--The 37th and 38th Congresses--The Summary of

Anti-Slavery Legislation from that Book--Other Abolitionist

Forces--Contrast of Sentiments of Slavery and of Freedom--

Recognition of Hayti and Liberia; Specimen of the Debate--Slave

and Free Doctrine on Education--Equality in Washington Street

Cars--Pro-Slavery Good Taste--Solon's Ideal of Democracy

Reached in America. 269

CHAPTER VII.--HORACE GREELEY.

The Scotch-Irish Race in the United States--Mr. Greeley a Partly

Reversed Specimen of it--His Birth and Boyhood--Learns to

Read Books Upside Down--His Apprenticeship on a Newspaper--

The Town Encyclopedia--His Industry at his Trade--His First

Experience of a Fugitive Slave Chase--His First Appearance in

New York--The Work on the Polyglot Testament--Mr. Greeley

as "The Ghost"--The First Cheap Daily Paper--The Firm of

Greeley & Story--The New Yorker, the Jeffersonian and the Log

Cabin--Mr. Greeley as Editor of the New Yorker--Beginning of

The Tribune--Mr. Greeley's Theory of a Political Newspaper--

His Love for The Tribune--The First Week of that Paper--The

Attack of the Sun and its Result--Mr. McElrath's Partnership

--Mr. Greeley's Fourierism--"The Bloody Sixth"--The Cooper

Libel Suits--Mr. Greeley in Congress--He Goes to Europe--

His Course in the Rebellion--His Ambition and Qualifications

for Office--The Key-Note of his Character. 293

CHAPTER VIII.--DAVID G. FARRAGUT.

The Lesson of the Rebellion to Monarchs--The Strength of the

United States--The U. S. Naval Service--The Last War--

State of the Navy in 1861--Admiral Farragut Represents the Old

Navy and the New--Charlemagne's Physician, Farraguth--The

Admiral's Letter about his Family--His Birth--His Cruise

with Porter when a Boy of Nine--The Destruction of the Essex

--Farragut in Peace Times--Expected to go with the South--

Refuses, is Threatened, and goes North--The Opening of the

Mississippi--The Bay Fight at Mobile--The Admiral's Health--

Farragut and the Tobacco Bishop. 311

CHAPTER IX.--JOHN A. ANDREW.

Governor Andrew's Death Caused by the War--The Governors Dr.

Beecher Prayed for--Governor Andrew a Christian Governor--

Gov. Andrew's Birth--He goes to Boston to Study Law--Not

Averse to unfashionable and Unpopular Causes--His Cheerfulness

and Social Accomplishments--His Sunday School Work--Lives

Plainly--His Clear Foresight of the War--Sends a Thousand

Men to Washington in One Day--The Story of the Blue Overcoats

--The Telegram for the Bodies of the Dead of Baltimore--Gov.

Andrew's Tender Care for the Poor--The British Minister and the

Colored Women--The Governor's Kindness to the Soldier's Wife

--His Biblical Proclamations--The Thanksgiving Proclamation

of 1861--The Proclamation of 1862--His Interest in the

Schools for the Richmond Poor--Cotton Mather's Eulogy on Gov.

Winthrop--Gov. Andrew's Farewell Address to the Massachusetts

Legislature--State Gratitude to Gov. Andrew's Family. 325

CHAPTER X.--SCHUYLER COLFAX.

General William Colfax, Washington's Friend--Mr. Colfax his

Grandson--Mr. Colfax's Birth and Boyhood--Removes to

Indiana--Becomes Deputy County Auditor--Begins to Deal with

Politics--Becomes an Editor--The Period of Maximum Debt--

Mr. Colfax's First Year--He is Burnt Out--His Subsequent

Success as an Editor--His Political Career as a Whig--Joins

the Republican Party--Popularity in his own District--The

Nebraska Bill--Mr. Colfax goes into Congress--The Famous

Contest for Speakership--Mr. Colfax Saves his Party from Defeat

--Banks Chosen Speaker--Mr. Colfax's Great Speech on the Bogus

Laws of Kansas--The Ball and Chain for Free Speech--Mr.

Colfax Shows the Ball, and A. H. Stephens Holds it for him--Mr.

Colfax Renominated Unanimously--His Remarkable Success in his

own District--Useful Labors in Post Office Committee--Early

for Lincoln for President--Mr. Colfax urged for Post Master

General--His Usefulness as Speaker--The Qualifications for

that Post--Mr. Colfax's Public Virtues. 347

CHAPTER XI.--EDWIN M. STANTON.

Rebel Advantages at Opening of the War--They Knew all about

the Army Officers--Early Contrast of Rebel Enthusiasm and

Union Indifference--Importance of Mr. Stanton's Post--His

Birth and Ancestry--His Education and Law Studies--County

Attorney--State Reporter--Defends Mr. McNulty--Removes to

Pittsburg--His Line of Business--The Wheeling Case--He

Removes to Washington--His Qualifications as a Lawyer--He

Enters Buchanan's Cabinet--His Unexpected Patriotism--His

Own Account of the Cabinet at News of Anderson's Move to Sumter

--The Lion before the Old Red Dragon--Appointed Secretary of

War--"Bricks in his Pockets"--Stanton's Habitual Reserve--

His Wrath--"The Angel Gabriel as Paymaster"--Anecdotes of

Lincoln's Confidence in Stanton--Lincoln's Affection for him--

The Burdens of his Office--His Kindness of Heart within a Rough

Outside--The Country his Debtor. 363

CHAPTER XII.--FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

The Opportunity for Every Man in a Republic--The Depth Below a

White Man's Poverty--The Starting Point whence Fred Douglass

Raised Himself--His Mother--Her Noble Traits--Her Self

Denial for the sake of Seeing him--She Defends him against Aunt

Katy--Her Death--Col. Loyd's Plantation--The Luxury of his

own Mansion--The Organization of his Estate--"Old Master"--

How they Punished the Women--How Young Douglass Philosophized

on Being a Slave--Plantation Life--The Allowance of Food

--The Clothes--An Average Plantation Day--Mr. Douglass'

Experience as a Slave Child--The Slave Children's Trough--The

Slave Child's Thoughts--The Melancholy of Slave Songs--He

Becomes a House Servant--A Kind Mistress Teaches him to Read--

How he Completed his Education--Effects of Learning to Read--

Experiences Religion and Prays for Liberty--Learns to Write--

Hires his Time, and Absconds--Becomes a Free Working-Man in New

Bedford--Marries--Mr. Douglass on Garrison--Mr. Douglass'

Literary Career. 380

CHAPTER XIII.--PHILIP H. SHERIDAN.

Sheridan a Full-Blooded Irishman--The Runaway Horse--

Constitutional Fearlessness--Sheridan Goes to West Point--

Sheridan's Apprenticeship to War--The Fight with the Apaches

at Fort Duncan--He is Transferred to Oregon--Commands at

Fort Yamhill in the Yokima Reservation--The Quarrel among

the Yokimas--Sheridan Popular with Indians--He Thinks he

has a Chance to be Major Some Day--Sheridan's Shyness with

Ladies--He Employs a Substitute in Waiting on a Lady--

Sheridan's Kindness and Efficiency in Office Work--He Becomes

a Colonel of Cavalry--His Shrewd Defeat of Gen. Chalmers--

Becomes Brigadier--The Kentucky Campaign against Bragg--

Sheridan Saves the Battle of Perrysville--Saves the Battle of

Murfreesboro--Gen. Rousseau on Sheridan's Fighting--Sheridan

at Missionary Ridge--Joins Grant as Chief of Cavalry--His

Raids around Lee--His Campaign in the Valley of Virginia

--He Moves Across and Joins in the Final Operations--His

Administration at New Orleans--Grant's Opinion of Sheridan. 405

CHAPTER XIV.--WILLIAM T. SHERMAN.

The Result of Eastern Blood and Western Developments--Lincoln,

Grant, Chase and Sherman Specimens of it--The Sherman Family

Character--Hon. Thomas Ewing adopts Sherman--Character of the

Boy--He Enters West Point--His Peculiar Traits Showing thus

Early--How he Treated his "Pleb"--His Early Military Service

--His Appearance as First Lieutenant--Marries and Resigns--

Banker at San Francisco--Superintendent of Louisiana Military

Academy--His Noble Letter Resigning the Superintendency--He

Foresees a Great War--Cameron and Lincoln Think not--Sherman

at Bull Run--He Goes to Kentucky--Wants Two Hundred Thousand

Troops--The False Report of his Insanity--Joins Grant; His

Services at Shiloh--Services in the Vicksburg Campaigns--

Endurance of Sherman and his Army--Sherman's estimate of Grant

--How to live on the Enemy--Prepares to move from Atlanta--

The Great March--His Courtesy to the Colored People--His

Foresight in War--Sherman on Office-Holding. 423

CHAPTER XV.--OLIVER O. HOWARD.

Can there be a Christian Soldier?--General Howard's Birth--His

Military Education--His Life Before the Rebellion--Resigns in

Order to get into the Field--Made Brigadier for Good Conduct

at Bull Run--Commands the Eleventh Corps and Joins the Army

at Chattanooga--His Services in the Army of the Potomac--

Extreme Calmness on the Field of Battle--Services with Sherman

--Sherman's high Opinion of him--Col. Bowman's Admiration

of Howard's Christian Observances--Patriotic Services while

Invalided at Home--Reproves the Swearing Teamster--Placed

over the Freedmen's Bureau--The Central Historic Fact of the

War--The Rise of Societies to Help the Freedmen--The Work of

the Freedmen's Bureau--Disadvantages Encountered by it, and by

General Howard--Results of the Bureau thus far--Col. Bowman's

Description of Gen. Howard's Duties--Gen. Sherman's Letter to

Gen. Howard on Assuming the Post--Estimate of Gen. Howard's

Abilities. 447

CHAPTER XVI.--WILLIAM A. BUCKINGHAM.

The Buckinghams an Original Puritan Family--Rev. Thomas

Buckingham--Gov. Buckingham's Father and Mother--Lebanon, the

Birthplace of Five Governors--Gov. Buckingham's Education--He

Teaches School--His Natural Executive Tendency--His Business

Career--His Extreme Punctuality in Payments--His Business

and Religious Character--His Interest in the Churches and

Schools--His Benefactions in those Directions--His Political

Course--He Accepts Municipal but not Legislative Offices--A

Member of the Peace Conference--He Himself Equips the First

State Militia in the War--His Zealous Co-operation with the

Government--Sends Gen. Aiken to Washington--The Isolation of

that City from the North--Gov. Buckingham's Policy for the War;

Letter to Mr. Lincoln--His Views on Emancipation; Letter to Mr.

Lincoln--Anecdote of the Temperance Governor's Staff. 463

CHAPTER XVII.--WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Birth and Ancestry of Wendell Phillips--His Education and Social

Advantage--The Lovejoy Murder--Speech in Faneuil Hall--The

Murder Justified--Mr. Phillips' First Speech--He Defends the

Liberty of the Press--His Ideality--He Joins the Garrisonian

Abolitionists--Gives up the Law and Becomes a Reformer--His

Method and Style of Oratory--Abolitionists Blamed for the

Boston Mob--Heroism of the Early Abolitionists--His Position

in Favor of "Woman's Rights"--Anecdote of His Lecturing--His

Services in the Cause of Temperance--Extract from His Argument

on Prohibition--His Severity towards Human Nature--His Course

During and Since the War--A Change of Tone Recommended. 483

CHAPTER XVIII.--HENRY WARD BEECHER.

Mr. Beecher a Younger Child--Death of his Mother--His

Step-Mother's Religious Influence--Ma'am Kilbourn's School

--The Passing Bell--Unprofitable Schooling--An Inveterate

School Joker--Masters the Latin Grammar--Goes to Amherst

College--His Love of Flowers--Modes of Study; a Reformer--

Mr. Beecher and the Solemn Tutor--His Favorite Poetry--His

Introduction to Phrenology--His Mental Philosophy--Doctrine

of Spiritual Intuition--Punctuality for Joke's Sake--Old

School and New School--Doubts on Entering the Ministry--

Settlement at Lawrenceburg--His Studies; First Revival--Large

Accessions to the Church--"Tropical Style"--Ministerial Jokes

--Slavery in the Pulpit--The Transfer to Brooklyn--Plymouth

Church Preaching--Visit to England--Speeches in England--

Letters from England--Christian View of England--The Exeter

Hall Speech--Preaches an Unpopular Forgiveness. 505

[Illustration: A. Lincoln]

CHAPTER I.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

The Men of our Time--Lincoln Foremost--The War was the

Working-Man's Revolution--Abraham Lincoln's Birth and Youth--

The Books he read--The Thirty Thousand Dollars for Tender--The

Old Stocking of Government Money--A Just Lawyer; Anecdotes--His

First Candidacy and Speech--Goes to Legislature and Congress--

The Seven Debates and Campaign against Douglas in 1858--Webster's

and Lincoln's Language Compared--The Cooper Institute Speech--

The Nomination at Chicago--Moral and Physical Courage--The

Backwoodsman President and the Diplomatists--Significance of

his Presidential Career--Religious Feelings--His Kindness--

"The Baby Did It"--The First Inaugural--The Second Inaugural,

and other State Papers--The Conspiracy and Assassination--The

Opinions of Foreign Nations on Mr. Lincoln.

Our times have been marked from all other times as the scene of an

immense conflict which has not only shaken to its foundation our own

country, but has been felt like the throes of an earthquake through all

the nations of the earth.

Our own days have witnessed the closing of the great battle, but the

preparations for that battle have been the slow work of years.

The "Men of Our Times," are the men who indirectly by their moral

influence helped to bring on this great final crisis, and also those

who, when it was brought on, and the battle was set in array, guided it

wisely, and helped to bring it to its triumphant close.

In making our selection we find men of widely different spheres and

characters. Pure philanthropists, who, ignoring all selfish and worldly

politics, have labored against oppression and wrong; far-seeing

statesmen, who could foresee the working of political causes from

distant years; brave naval and military men, educated in the schools

of our country; scientific men, who helped to perfect the material

forces of war by their discoveries and ingenuity--all are united in one

great crisis, and have had their share in one wonderful passage of the

world's history.

Foremost on the roll of "men of our time," it is but right and fitting

that we place the honored and venerated name of the man who was called

by God's providence to be the leader of the nation in our late great

struggle, and to seal with his blood the proclamation of universal

liberty in this country--the name of

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

The revolution through which the American nation has been passing

was not a mere local convulsion. It was a war for a principle which

concerns all mankind. It was the war for the rights of the working

class of society as against the usurpation of privileged aristocracies.

You can make nothing else of it. That is the reason why, like a

shaft of light in the judgment day, it has gone through all nations,

dividing the multitudes to the right and the left. _For_ us and our

cause, all the common working classes of Europe--all that toil and

sweat, and are oppressed. _Against_ us, all privileged classes,

nobles, princes, bankers and great manufacturers, all who live at

ease. A silent instinct, piercing to the dividing of soul and spirit,

joints and marrow, has gone through the earth, and sent every soul

with instinctive certainty where it belongs. The poor laborers of

Birmingham and Manchester, the poor silk weavers of Lyons, to whom our

conflict has been present starvation and lingering death, have stood

bravely _for_ us. No sophistries could blind or deceive _them_; they

knew that _our_ cause was _their_ cause, and they suffered their part

heroically, as if fighting by our side, because they knew that our

victory was to be their victory. On the other side, all aristocrats and

holders of exclusive privileges have felt the instinct of opposition,

and the sympathy with a struggling aristocracy, for they, too, felt

that our victory would be their doom.

This great contest has visibly been held in the hands of Almighty God,

and is a fulfillment of the solemn prophecies with which the Bible is

sown thick as stars, that He would spare the soul of the needy, and

judge the cause of the poor. It was He who chose the instrument for

this work, and He chose him with a visible reference to the rights and

interests of the great majority of mankind, for which he stood.

Abraham Lincoln was in the strictest sense _a man of the working

classes_. All his advantages and abilities were those of a man of

the working classes, all his disadvantages and disabilities those of

the working classes, and his position at the head of one of the most

powerful nations of the earth was a sign to all who live by labor,

that their day is coming. Lincoln was born to the inheritance of hard

work, as truly as the poorest laborer's son that digs in our fields.

He was born in Kentucky, in 1809. At seven years of age he was set

to work, axe in hand, to clear up a farm in a Western forest. Until

he was seventeen his life was that of a simple farm laborer, with

only such intervals of schooling as farm laborers get. Probably the

school instruction of his whole life would not amount to more than six

months. At nineteen he made a trip to New Orleans as a hired hand on a

flat-boat, and on his return he split the timber for a log cabin and

built it, and enclosed ten acres of land with a rail fence of his own

handiwork. The next year he hired himself for twelve dollars a month to

build a flat-boat and take her to New Orleans, and any one who knows

what the life of a Mississippi boatman was in those days, must know

that it involved every kind of labor. In 1832, in the Black Hawk Indian

war, the hardy boatman volunteered to fight for his country, and was

unanimously elected a captain, and served with honor for a season in

frontier military life. He was very popular with his soldiers for two

reasons; the first was his great physical strength; the second, that

he could tell more and better stories than any other man in the army.

Odd constituents for a commander's character; but like everything else

in Lincoln's life, the fact shows how wonderfully he represented, and

therefore suited, the people. Some time after the war, the surveyor of

Sangamon county, being driven with work, came to him to take the survey

of a tract off from his hands. True, he had never studied surveying,

but what of that? He accepted the job, procured a chain and a treatise

on surveying, and _did the work_. Do we not see in this a parallel of

the wider wilderness which in later years he was to undertake to survey

and fit for human habitation, _without_ chart or surveyor's chain?

After this, while serving as a postmaster, he began his law studies.

He took the postmastership for the sake of reading all the papers

that came into the town, at the same time borrowing the law books he

was too poor to buy, and studying by the light of his evening fire. He

soon acquired a name in the country about as a man of resources and

shrewdness. He was one that people looked to for counsel in exigencies,

and to whom they were ready to depute almost any enterprise which

needed skill and energy, or patience and justice. "He was in great

request," says one of his biographers, "by thick-headed people, because

of his clearness and skill in narration." It might well have been

added, because also of his kindness, patience and perfect justness of

nature in listening, apprehending and stating.

Mr. Lincoln was now about twenty-three. His life thus far may perhaps

be considered as his education; at any rate, it is the part of his life

which answers to the school years, college course, and professional

studies of a regularly educated lawyer at the East. It included, of

actual "schooling," only the six months total already mentioned. Even

then it was his mother who had taught him to read and write. Of the

use of books of any kind, this backwoods graduate had little enough.

His course of reading was a very thorough illustration of the ancient

rule to "read not many but much." He read seven books over and over. Of

three of them, the Bible, Shakspeare and Æsop's Fables, he could repeat

large portions by heart. The other four were the Pilgrim's Progress,

the Life of Washington, the Life of Franklin, and the Life of Henry

Clay. It is a curious fact that neither then nor afterwards did he ever

read a novel. He began Ivanhoe once, but was not interested enough to

finish it. He was one of those men who have the peculiar faculty of

viewing this whole world of men and things as a side spectator, and the

interest of the drama of life thus silently seen at first hand, was to

him infinitely more interesting than any second hand imitation. "My

life is story enough," once said a person of this peculiar temperament,

"what should I want to read stories for?" The interest he felt in human

beings was infinitely stronger with him than the interest in artistic

representation.

One of his biographers says that he "seldom bought a new book, and

seldom read one," and he adds, with a good deal of truth, that "his

education was almost entirely a newspaper one," and that he "was one of

the most thorough newspaper readers in America."

But that which was much more the real essence of his self-education,

was the never-ceasing and strenuous course of laborious thought and

reasoning that he kept up, upon the meaning, the connection, the

tendency, the right and wrong, the helps or remedies, of all the past

facts he read of, or of the present facts that he experienced in life.

And this education he not only began early and pursued effectively,

but he never ceased it. All his life he maintained that course of

steady labor after practical knowledge and practical wisdom. Whenever

he could read a good book he did, and his practice for a long time

was, after having finished it, to write out an analysis of it; a very

fatiguing but very improving process. One of his companions while a

young "hired man," described him in after years, as "the likeliest boy

in God's world. He would work all day as hard as any of us, and study

by fire-light in the log house half the night, and in this way he made

himself a thorough practical surveyor." Another man described him as he

saw him while working for a living, in 1830, or thereabouts, "lying on

a trundle-bed, with one leg stretched out rocking the cradle containing

the child of his hostess, while he himself was absorbed in the study of

English grammar."

The world has many losses that mankind are not conscious of. The

burning of the Alexandrian library was an irreparable loss, but a

greater loss is in the silence of great and peculiar minds. Had there

been any record of what Lincoln thought and said while he thus hewed

his way through the pedantic mazes of book learning, we might have

some of the newest, the strangest, the most original contributions to

the philosophy of grammar and human language in general that ever have

been given. They would have savored very much of Beethoven's answer

when the critics asked him why he would use consecutive octaves in

music. "Because they sounded well," said the scornful old autocrat; and

Lincoln's quiet perseverance in a style of using the English language

peculiarly his own had something of the same pertinacity. He seemed

equally amused by the critical rules of rhetoric, and as benevolently

and paternally indulgent to the mass of eager scholars who thought

them important, as he was to the turbulent baby whom he rocked with

one leg while he pursued his grammatical studies. But after his own

quaint, silent fashion, he kept up his inquiries into the world of book

learning with remarkable perseverance, and his friend and biographer,

Mr. Arnold, says, became "thoroughly at home in all the liberal

studies and scientific questions of the day." This is rather strongly

put, and we fancy that Lincoln would have smiled shrewdly over it, but

the specifications which Mr. Arnold adds are undoubtedly true. Mr.

Lincoln "had mastered English, and made some progress in Latin, and

knew the Bible more thoroughly than many who have spent their lives in

its perusal."

But what book learning he obtained would never have made him a lawyer,

not to say President. The education which gave him his success in life

was his self-training in the ability to understand and to state facts

and principles about men and things.

In 1836 our backwoodsman, flat-boat hand, captain, surveyor, obtained

a license to practice law, and as might be expected, rose rapidly. One

anecdote will show the esteem in which he was held in his neighborhood.

A client came to him in a case relating to a certain land claim, and

Lincoln said to him, "Your first step must be to take thirty thousand

dollars and go and make a legal tender; it of course will be refused,

but it is a necessary step." "But," said the man, "I haven't the thirty

thousand dollars to make it with." "O, that's it; just step over to the

bank with me, and I'll get it." So into the bank they went, and Lincoln

says to the cashier, "We just want to take thirty thousand dollars to

make a legal tender with; I'll bring it back in an hour or two." The

cashier handed across the money to "Honest Abe," and without a scratch

of the pen in acknowledgment, he strode his way with the money, all in

the most sacred simplicity, made the tender, and brought it back with

as much nonchalance as if he had been borrowing a silver spoon of his

grandmother.

It was after he had been practicing law some time, that another

incident took place, showing him as curiously scrupulous about small

sums as he was trusty and trusted about large ones. When he left New

Salem and went to Springfield, he was still so poor that he even found

it difficult to procure the necessaries of life. For some years he

struggled forward, when one day there came a post-office agent, who in

pursuance of the routine business of the department, presented to the

almost penniless and still struggling ex-postmaster a regulation draft

for the balance due to the Washington office, in all $17.60. Dr. Henry,

a friend of Mr. Lincoln's, happening to fall in with the agent, went

along with him, intending to offer to lend the money, as it was about

certain that he could have no such sum as that at his command. When the

draft was presented, Lincoln asked the officer to be seated, sat down

himself a few moments, looking puzzled; then asked to be excused for

a little, stepped out to his boarding house and returned. He brought

with him an old stocking, untied it, and poured out on the table a

quantity of small silver coin and "red cents." These they counted;

they amounted to $17.60, the precise amount called for by the draft.

More than that--it was _the very money_ called for by the draft, for

at leaving his postmastership, the punctilious officer had tied up the

balance on hand, and kept it by him, awaiting the legal call for it. At

paying it over, he remarked that he _never used, even temporarily, any

money that was not his_. This money, he added, he felt belonged to the

government, and he had no right to exchange or use it for any purposes

of his own.

His honesty, shrewdness, energy and keen practical insight into men

and things soon made him the most influential man in his state, both

as lawyer and politician. Of this influence, and most especially of

its depending upon his wonderfully direct plain common sense, and

the absolute honesty and utter justness of his mind, there are many

anecdotes. In politics and in law alike, both the strength of his

conscientiousness and the kind of yearning after a rounded wholeness of

view which was an intellectual instinct with him, forced him habitually

to consider all sides of any question. "For fifteen years before his

election to the Presidency," says one writer, in striking illustration

of this habit in politics, "he subscribed regularly to _The Richmond

Enquirer_ and _The Charleston Mercury_. He grew slowly, as public

opinion grew; and as an anti-slavery man, was a gradual convert." Thus

it resulted that "while Rhett and Wise, with slavery in full feather,

wrote every day the inviolateness of secession and the divinity

of bondage, these two Illinois lawyers, (Lincoln and his partner,

Herndon,) in their little square office, read every vaunting cruel

word, paid to read it, and educated themselves out of their mutual

indignations."

In like manner he was fair and impartial in legal investigations. "The

jury" says one account, "always got from him a fair statement of any

case in hand, and years later it was remarked by the Chief Justice of

Illinois that when Lincoln spoke, he argued both sides of the case so

well that a speech in response was always superfluous."

Mr. Lincoln's fellow lawyers used to say that he was in professional

matters, "perversely honest." He could not take hold heartily on the

wrong side. He never engaged in it, knowingly; if a man desired to

retain him whose cause was bad, he declined, and told the applicant not

to go to law. A lady once came to him to have him prosecute a claim

to some land, and gave him the papers in the case for examination,

together with a retainer in the shape of a check for two hundred

dollars. Next day she came to see what her prospects were, when Mr.

Lincoln told her that he had examined the documents very carefully,

that she "had not a peg to hang her claim on," and that he could not

conscientiously advise her to bring an action. Having heard this

judgment, the lady thanked him, took her papers, and was about to

depart. "Wait a moment," said Mr. Lincoln, "here is the check you gave

me." "But," said she, "Mr. Lincoln, I think you have earned _that_."

"No, no," he answered, insisting on her receiving it, "that would not

be right. I can't take pay for doing my duty."

He was quite as prompt and just in accepting unprofitable duty as in

declining its profitable opposite. During all the early part of his

legal practice in Springfield, it was considered an unpopular and

politically dangerous business for a lawyer to defend any fugitive

slave on trial for surrender to the South, and even the brave Col.

Baker, in those days also practicing there, on one occasion directly

refused to defend such a case, saying that as a political man he could

not afford it. But the luckless applicant, having consulted with an

abolitionist friend, went next to Lincoln, and got him. "_He's_ not

afraid of an unpopular case," said the friend; "when I go for a lawyer

to defend an arrested fugitive slave, other lawyers will refuse me; but

if Mr. Lincoln is at home, he will always take up my case."

On a few occasions after having even entered into the trial of a case,

Mr. Lincoln would find that, as sometimes happens, he had been deceived

by his own client, and that he really had not the right on his side.

When this was the case, he could as it were be seen to wilt at once,

and whatever further he might do in the case was only mechanical. In

such a case, having an associate, and having refused to argue it, the

associate argued the case _and won it_, and then offered to divide with

Mr. Lincoln the fee of $900; but Lincoln would not take a cent. Once

in defending a man sued for delivering lambs instead of sheep, the

testimony clearly showed that such delivery had been made. Instead of

trying to confuse the witnesses or becloud the evidence, Mr. Lincoln

ascertained how many such lambs had been delivered, and quietly told

the jury that they must give a verdict against his client. He simply

cautioned them to be just in fixing the damages. When he had recovered

a verdict against a railroad company, and a certain offset against

his client was to be deducted, he interrupted the final decision just

in time to have the offset _made larger_ by a certain amount which he

had just found out ought to be added to it. His careful and primitive

scrupulousness was just as marked in dealing with any associates in a

case. When he received a joint fee his invariable custom was to divide

it properly, and tie up in a separate parcel each associate's part of

_the very money received_, duly labelled and directed.

In 1841 Mr. Lincoln argued before the Supreme Court of Illinois, the

case of Nance, a negro girl, who had been sold within the state. A note

had been given in payment for her, and the suit was brought to recover

upon this note. Mr. Lincoln, defending, proved that Nance was free, and

that thus nothing had been sold; so that the note was void. The Court

below had sustained the note, but the Supreme Court, in accordance with

Mr. Lincoln's argument, reversed this judgment. The decision made Nance

free, and put a stop to sales of human beings in Illinois.

Another remarkable case in which he was engaged, was, the defence of

young Armstrong from a charge of murder. This Armstrong was the son

of a man who had befriended and employed Mr. Lincoln in youth, and

the present charge was, that he had killed a certain person who had

unquestionably died from injuries received in a camp-meeting riot where

young Armstrong was present. The father was dead, and the mother aged

and poor; a chain of apparently perfectly conclusive circumstantial

evidence had been forged, which had convinced the community of

Armstrong's guilt; indeed, had he not been safely secured in a strong

jail he would have been lynched. Neither the youth nor his old mother

had any money. The people and the newspapers were furious against the

prisoner; and his fate appeared absolutely certain even to himself,

when Mr. Lincoln, hearing of the matter in some way, volunteered

for the defence, and was gladly accepted. When the trial came on,

the evidence for the prosecution was given, and constituted what

appeared to the audience a perfectly conclusive proof of guilt. Lincoln

cross-examined very lightly, only correcting up and ascertaining a few

places and dates; and his own witnesses were only to show comparatively

good previous character for the prisoner.

The prosecutor, sure of his prey, made only a short and formal

argument. Mr. Lincoln followed for the defence. He began slowly,

calmly, carefully. He took hold of the heart of the evidence for the

state--that of the chief witness. He pointed out first one discrepancy,

and then another, and then another. He came at last to that part of

the evidence where this principal witness had sworn positively that he

had been enabled by the light of the moon to see the prisoner give the

fatal blow with a slung shot; and taking up the almanac he showed that

at the hour sworn to on the night sworn to _the moon had not risen_;

that the whole of this evidence was a perjury.

The audience, gradually stirred and changed in the temper of their

minds by the previous series of skilfully displayed inconsistencies,

rising from hate into sympathy, flamed suddenly up at this startling

revelation, and the verdict of "not guilty" was almost visible in the

faces of the jury. But this was not all. Turning upon the infamous

man who had sought to swear away another's life, Mr. Lincoln, now

fully kindled into his peculiarly slow but intensely fiery wrath, held

him up to the view of court and jury and audience, in such a horrid

picture of guilt and shame that the miserable fellow, stunned and

confounded, actually fled from the face of the incensed lawyer out of

the court room. And in conclusion, Mr. Lincoln appealed to the jury to

lay aside any temporary prejudices, and to do simple justice. And he

referred to the motive of his own presence there,--to his gratitude for

the kindness of the prisoner's father in past years, in a manner so

affecting as to bring tears from many eyes. In less than half an hour

the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and the young man was set

free, his life saved and his character restored.

When he went for the second time into public life, on the passage of

the Nebraska Bill in 1854, he was becoming eminent in the difficult and

lucrative department of patent law. But his fellow lawyers used to call

his fees "ridiculously small." Indeed, he never took but one large fee,

and that his friends insisted on his taking. This was $5,000 from the

Illinois Central Railroad Company, one of the richest corporations in

the country, and for very valuable services in a very important case.

Once before this he had received what he thought a large fee, and he

made a good use of it. The sum was five hundred dollars, and a friend

who called to see him the next morning, found him counting it over and

over, and piling it up on the table to look at. "Look here," he said,

"see what a heap of money I've got from the ---- case! Did you ever see

anything like it! Why, I never had so much money in my life before,

put it all together!" Then he added, that if he could only get another

$250 to put with it, he would at once buy a quarter-section of land,

and settle it on his old step-mother. This was an odd use to make of

a man's first important gains in money, and his friend, who at once

loaned him the required additional amount, tried to make him give the

land for the old lady's life only. But Lincoln insisted on his own

plan, saying, "I shall do no such thing. It is a poor return at the

best, for all the good woman's devotion and fidelity to me, and there

isn't going to be any half-way work about it."

Mr. Lincoln was a great favorite at the bar, his good nature, his

kindness, and his unfailing flow of stories, making him a most welcome

guest on every circuit.

He never took technical advantages, but on the other hand often

showed an adversary some error in matter of form, and suggested to

him how to cure it. His forensic habits were excessively simple, but

very effective. The most telling of all of them was _to be in the

right_; for when juries know that a lawyer habitually refuses to be

on the wrong side, habitually breaks down if on that side, simply

from consciousness of the fact, and habitually makes strong and clear

arguments if on the right side, they are prepossessed in favor of

that lawyer before he says a word. He did not make speeches to the

jury, he talked with them; often in warm weather taking off his coat

for coolness, selecting some intelligent looking juryman, reasoning

with him until convinced, then taking another, and so on. He did not

browbeat witnesses, but kept them comfortable and good humored. In

short, Mr. Lincoln was decidedly and deservedly a powerful as well as

a successful lawyer. He must have been of great professional powers

to maintain himself, and rise to the leadership of the bar, with the

competitors he had. Among these were Mr. Douglas, Secretary Browning,

Senator Trumbull, Governor Yates, Judge Davis of the U. S. Supreme

Court, Col. Baker, Gen. Hardin, Gov. Bissell, Gen. Shields, Senator

Washburn, N. B. Judd, Gen. Logan, and others. He became recognized by

his fellow-citizens as "the first lawyer in Illinois," and one of the

judges on the bench described him as "the finest lawyer he ever knew,"

and another as "one of the ablest he had ever known."

Like so many of his profession, Mr. Lincoln was very early a

politician. Indeed, his devotion to politics interfered very

considerably with his gains, and delayed his eminence in his

profession. The value to his fellow-countrymen of the political results

which he was the means of bringing to pass, is, however, so infinitely

beyond any money value, that no regret can be felt at his ambition.

Mr. Lincoln's popularity among his neighbors, his assiduous study of

the newspapers, his intense and untiring meditations and reasonings

on the political questions of the day, brought him into the political

field pretty early and pretty well prepared. It was in 1832, when he

was twenty-three years old, that his first candidacy and his first

speech took place. The story and speech all together are so short

that they can be inserted here in full. On the day of election, then,

Mr. Lincoln's opponent spoke first, and delivered a long harangue of

the regular political sort. Lincoln, who followed him, completed his

oration in just seventy-nine words--less than one minute's talking.

This is what he said: "Gentlemen, fellow citizens:--I presume you know

who I am; I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many

friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics can be

briefly stated. I am in favor of a national bank, I am in favor of the

internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my

sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful, if

not, it will be all the same."

He was beaten, however, in spite of his terseness. But in his own

district he received all but seven out of 284 votes; and he was never

beaten again in any election by the people.

His actual political career, not counting this defeat, began in 1834,

when he was chosen member of the State Legislature, and being too poor

to afford a horse, _walked_ over a hundred miles to Vandalia to take

his seat. He remained a member for four successive terms of two years

each. Mr. Douglas became a member two years after him, in 1836; the

two men quickly became party leaders on their respective sides of the

house, and thus their political courses and their political rivalries

began almost together. At the two latter of his four legislative terms,

Mr. Lincoln was the Whig candidate for Speaker, and once lacked only

one vote of being elected. Mr. Lincoln's eight years' service in the

State Legislature was busy and useful, and gave him an assured and high

position in his party. The work done was usually of a local character,

of course, its most important departments being that of the improvement

of internal communication by railroad and canal, and that of education.

But even on the question of slavery, the one significant occasion for

utterance which arose was promptly improved, and in such a manner as

to show both the settled feelings and convictions of Lincoln's mind

on the subject, and his characteristic practice of restricting his

official utterances strictly to the exigencies of the case. His dislike

of slavery was not only the consequence of his inborn sense of justice

and kindly feelings, but was his direct inheritance from his parents,

who left Kentucky and settled in Indiana expressly to bring up their

family on free instead of slave soil. In March, 1839, some strong

pro-slavery resolutions were passed by the Legislature of Illinois,

and by large majorities in both houses. This, the few anti-slavery

members could not prevent. But Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Dan Stone took the

most decided stand in their power on the other side, by putting on

record on the House journals a formal protest against the resolutions.

In this protest, they declared views that would to-day be considered

very conservative, about legal or political interference with slavery;

but they also declared in the most unqualified manner, and in so many

words, their belief "that the institution of slavery is founded on both

injustice and bad policy."

At the end of his fourth term, Mr. Lincoln declined a further

nomination, finding it absolutely necessary to devote more time than

hitherto to his own private affairs. When he thus left the Legislature

of his own accord, he was virtually the leader of his party in the

State, having reached that creditable and influential though unofficial

position by his own good qualities, in the eight years of his life

ending with his thirty-fifth. It was a great achievement for a man no

older, and so destitute of outside help.

For four years Mr. Lincoln now remained a hard-working lawyer,

although he did a good deal of political work besides, particularly in

"stumping" Illinois and Indiana in the Presidential canvass of 1844.

In this campaign Mr. Lincoln made many strong and effective speeches

for Henry Clay, and though his candidate was beaten, his own reputation

as a politician and speaker was much increased. In 1846 he was elected

to Congress as a Whig, and his extreme popularity at home is shown

by the fact that his own majority on this occasion was 1,511 in the

Springfield district, while Mr. Clay's had been only 914.

During this congressional term, Mr. Lincoln met the grinding of the

great question of the day--the upper and nether millstone of slavery

and freedom revolving against each other. Lincoln's whole nature

inclined him to be a harmonizer of conflicting parties, rather than a

committed combatant on either side. He was firmly and from principle an

enemy to slavery, but the ground he occupied in Congress was in some

respects a middle one between the advance guard of the anti-slavery

army and the spears of the fire-eaters. He voted with John Quincy Adams

for the receipt of anti-slavery petitions; he voted with Giddings for

a committee of inquiry into the constitutionality of slavery in the

District of Columbia, and the expediency of abolishing slavery in that

district; he voted for the various resolutions prohibiting slavery in

the territories to be acquired from Mexico, and he voted forty-two

times for the Wilmot Proviso. On one occasion, he offered a plan

for abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, by compensation

from the national treasury, with the consent of a majority of the

citizens. He opposed the annexation of Texas, but voted for the bill

to pay the expenses of the war. He voted against paying for slaves as

property, when that question came up in the celebrated Pacheco case,

and thus recorded his denial of the right of owning men, or of its

acknowledgment by the nation.

During this term of service in Congress, Mr. Lincoln was a laborious

and faithful public servant; always present to vote, and always ready

for business; and his speeches, homely and rough as they were, showed

so much broad strong sense, natural rectitude, sincerity, and power of

reasoning, as to give him a good position as a debater. He declined a

re-election; tried for but did not obtain the commissionership of the

Land Office at Washington; declined appointments as Secretary and as

Governor of Oregon Territory; returned to his home and his work; was

unsuccessful as candidate for the United States Senate in the Illinois

Legislature of 1849-50; and labored industriously at his profession,

until the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas Nebraska Bill,

and the violences and iniquities connected with them, called him once

more into public life.

He now took the field, heart and soul against the plot to betray

our territories into slavery, and to perpetuate the power of that

institution over the whole country. Henceforth he was all his life a

public man; first a prominent champion in the decisively important

state of Illinois, and afterwards the standard bearer and the martyr of

Freedom in America.

That contest in Illinois, in which the political doctrines of Mr.

Douglas were the central theme of discussion, and in which he himself

on one side and Mr. Lincoln on the other, were the leading speakers

and the controlling minds, was an important act in that great drama

of emancipation which culminated in the Rebellion. In Mr. Lincoln's

life it was if possible still greater in comparative importance; for

his debates with Douglas determined his reputation as a speaker and a

public man, and lifted him to the position from which he stepped into

the presidential chair.

During other previous and subsequent portions of his life, other traits

of Mr. Lincoln's character were often and clearly exemplified. But at

no time was he nearly as plainly and strikingly prominent as a power,

as during his contest with that bold and energetic politician and

remarkably ready and forcible debater, Stephen A. Douglas.

Their first great public duel, as it may be called, was at Springfield,

in October, 1854, just after the passage of the Nebraska bill. The

country was all aflame with excitement. Every fibre of justice, honor,

honesty, conscience that there was in the community was in that

smarting and vibrating state which follows the infliction of a violent

blow, and Douglas had come back to his own state to soothe down the

irritation and to defend his wicked and unpopular course before the

aroused tribunal of his fellow citizens.

He was to defend his course and conduct to a great audience assembled

at the State fair, and Mr. Lincoln was to answer him.

Never was there a greater contrast between two men. Douglas might be

called a brilliant impersonation of all the mere worldly forces of

human nature. He had a splendid physique, with all the powers of

the most captivating oratory, the melody of a most astonishing voice

which ran with ease through every gamut of human feeling, grave, gay,

pathetic, passionate, enthusiastic; now rising with irresistible

impetuosity, now mocking with gay and careless defiance, and with

this voice and this person, he was master of all those shadings and

delicacies of sophistry by which the worse can be made to appear the

better reason. He knew well how to avoid answering a telling argument

by a dazzling glitter of side issues--to make a plain man believe

he had got his difficulty solved, when he had been only skilfully

bewitched, and made to forget where it was. In a popular audience he

had something for every one. Gaiety, gallantry and compliments for

ladies, assured confidence for doubters, vehement assertions for timid

people, stormy brow-beatings, and lion roars of denunciation, to finish

with a grand sweep the popular impression which his sophistries and

assertions had begun. Of truth, he made that very sparing use which

demagogues always do. A little blue line of steel makes a whole heavy

headed iron axe go through the wood,--and so Douglas just skilfully and

artistically tipped the edges of heavy masses of falsehood with the

cutting force of some undeniable truth.

Of moral sensibility Douglas had not enough in his nature, even to

understand that kind of material in others, and to make allowance for

it. Nothing could be more exactly the contrary of Lincoln's scrupulous

careful self-education, in pure questions of the right and the wrong of

things, than Douglas' glittering, careless, reckless, defiant mode of

treating all these subjects. Lincoln had trained himself always to ask,

What is it right to do? Douglas, What _can_ I do? Lincoln, to enquire

What course _ought_ they to take? Douglas, What course can I make them

take? Lincoln, to ask, What is the truth--Douglas, What can be made to

_seem_ truth. His life question was an inquiry, pure and simple, how

much can I get, how much can I do, without losing my hold over men and

being turned out of society?

The pure moral aspects of political questions, he flouted and scoffed

at as unworthy the attention of a practical politician. The rights of

human beings, the eternal laws of rectitude, he treated as a skilful

conjurer treats so many gaily painted balls, which he throws up and

tosses and catches, simply to show his own agility; he played with them

when they came in his way, just as he thought he could make them most

effective for his own purposes.

But if he did not understand or care for eternal principles, he was

perfect master of all the weak and low and petty side of human nature.

He knew how to stir up all the common-place, base and ignoble passions

of man; to bring his lower nature into lively exercise.

The first day in the fair, the multitude was given up to him, and he

swept and played on them as a master musician sweeps a piano, and for

the hour he seemed to be irresistible, bearing all things in his own

way.

Lincoln had this advantage, when his turn came, that he represented

that higher portion of human nature, of which Douglas had little

knowledge, and which his mode of treatment had left almost wholly

untouched. We have spoken of the vast legal influence which Lincoln had

gradually acquired in his own state, by the intense pertinacity with

which he identified himself in every case with right and justice, so

that the mere fact that he had accepted a cause was a strong reason in

advance for believing it the true one.

The people had been excited, amused, dazzled and bewildered, and were

tossing restlessly as the sea swells and dashes after a gale--when

that plain man without outward "form or comeliness," without dazzle of

oratory, or glitter of rhetoric, rose to give them in a fatherly talk,

the simple eternal RIGHT of the whole thing.

It was, he felt, an hour of destiny, a crisis in the great battle

to be fought for mankind for ages to come, and an eye witness thus

describes the scene: "His whole heart was in the subject. He quivered

with feeling and emotion; the house was as still as death." And another

account describes how "the effect of this speech was most magnetic

and powerful. Cheer upon cheer interrupted him, women waved their

handkerchiefs, men sprung from their seats and waved their hats in

uncontrollable enthusiasm." Mr. Douglas was present at this speech,

and was the most uneasy auditor there. As soon as Mr. Lincoln had

concluded, Mr. Douglas jumped up and said that he had been abused,

"though," he added, "in a perfectly courteous manner." He went on

with a rejoinder, and spoke for some time, but without much success.

In fact, he was astounded and disconcerted at finding that there

was so much to be said against him, and that there was a man to say

it so powerfully. The self-confident and even arrogant tone in which

he had opened the debate was gone. At closing, he announced himself

to continue his remarks in the evening, but he did not do it. He had

received a blow too tremendous even for his immense vigor, and from

which he could not so quickly recover.

A little while afterwards, Douglas spoke again and Lincoln answered

him again, at Peoria, and with a similar result. The vast positive

will of the "Little Giant" could not stand up against the still

loftier power with which Mr. Lincoln assailed him from the height

of a moral superiority that irresistibly carried with it the best

convictions of the whole community, and cowed the defiant wrong-doer.

Mr. Lincoln was _right_. Mr. Douglas felt himself vanquished by a

power incomprehensible to himself, and of which none of his political

calculations ever took account.

But as regards the struggle at this time in Illinois, the fact that he

felt himself over-weighted, was sufficiently proved by his declining,

after the two duels at Springfield and Peoria, to proceed, as Mr.

Lincoln invited him, with a series of such debates in other parts of

the State.

Mr. Lincoln, having thus publicly shown himself far stronger than the

strongest of his opponents, proceeded to show himself a man of kindly

self-command, by foregoing the Republican nomination to the U. S.

Senate, and giving it to Hon. Lyman Trumbull, in order to save the risk

of admitting Matteson, the pro-slavery candidate. Unquestionably this

conduct coincided with the shrewdest selfishness; but very few are the

politicians from whom a selfishness small and near would not conceal

the larger and further one. It was by earnest and assiduous personal

influence that Mr. Lincoln secured Mr. Trumbull's election.

It is said of a certain great diplomatist, that he was so accustomed

to dealing with men as knaves that when he had to do with an honest

man he always blundered. Douglas' mistake and defeat were precisely

of this kind. He had so little sense of conscience or moral feeling

himself that he was perfectly unprepared for the uprising of these

sentiments on the part of the people, and astonished at the power which

a man might wield simply from addressing a class of sentiments which he

habitually ignored.

So in Congress, when the petition of the three thousand clergymen was

presented against the Kansas and Nebraska bill, he was in a perfect

rage, and roared like a lion at bay. That this contemptible question of

right and wrong should get up such an excitement and seriously threaten

such a brilliant stroke of diplomacy as he meditated, seemed to him, in

all sincerity, perfectly ridiculous--he could not sufficiently express

his hatred and contempt.

Mere power as a debater, either in parliamentary assemblies or before

popular meetings, has often existed, without any share of the calmer,

and larger, and profounder, and more reflective abilities of the

statesman. Mr. Lincoln possessed both, and in both, his methods were

alike of an intuitively practical, and remarkably direct, simple and

effective nature. Doubtless he had often given proofs of skill in

practical politics, during his consultations of the preceding twenty

years, with the leaders and managers of his party in Illinois. Obscure

operations of local party organizations seldom make any record, or

become visible at all on the surface of history. But the man who in

an adverse hour, when all other counsellors have failed, can unite

discordant elements into a new party, must be confessed to have

statesmanlike skill. This is more peculiarly so when this party must

be founded on a moral principle, and must be bounded and circumscribed

in its working by moral rules and restraints. While unprincipled men

can help themselves by any and all sorts of means, men of principle

are confined to those within certain limits, and the difficulties of

organization in such cases are vastly greater.

When in 1856 the Illinois convention met to choose delegates to the

National Convention that nominated Fremont, there was in the political

ocean a wild chaos of elements. Free Soil men, Anti-Nebraska men,

Liberty Party men, Native Americans, Old Whigs and Old Democrats, and

newly arrived emigrants of no party at all, mixed up in heterogeneous

confusion, tossing and tumbling blindly about for a new platform

to stand on. After long and vain discussion, the committee on a

platform sent for Mr. Lincoln and asked for a suggestion. All the

sections of the Convention were opposed to slavery extension, but

in no other current political question were they at one. There was

imminent danger of discord and division. Their calm adviser quietly

said, "Take the Declaration of Independence, and Hostility to Slavery

Extension. Let us build our new party on the rock of the Declaration

of Independence, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us."

Mr. Lincoln's profound and unfailing moral sense had seized upon the

relation between the heart of the United States and eternal right. His

suggestion embodied the only doctrine that could have won in the coming

battle. What he advised was done, and the party, on this platform,

revolutionized Illinois, made Mr. Lincoln President, extinguished

slavery, and reorganized the nation.

At Philadelphia, the same question came up again, and was solved by

adopting the same principle. It was on this occasion that Mr. Lincoln's

high position and important influence in the northwest received the

first acknowledgement that he was obtaining a national reputation. He

obtained a vote of one hundred and ten for the Vice Presidency on the

preliminary or informal ballot.

The great effort, however, which finally and firmly established Mr.

Lincoln's reputation as a speaker and statesman, was in 1858, when

he and Douglas once more were brought to a face encounter before the

people of Illinois, as opposing candidates for the U. S. Senate.

During the months of August, September and October, according to the

honest western custom, these two opposing candidates stumped the State

together, and presented their opposing claims and views in a series of

public gatherings. These meetings were in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's

invitation, but Mr. Douglas in accepting adroitly contrived to name

terms that gave him the opening and the closing turns, not only of the

whole series, but of four out of seven of the meetings.

In the June and July preceding, Mr. Lincoln made three other speeches,

two at Springfield and one at Chicago, which may be considered a sort

of preface to the great debates. The first of these, at Springfield,

June 17, 1858, was in some respects the most remarkable of Mr.

Lincoln's oratorical productions. It was made at the close of the

Republican State Convention which nominated Mr. Lincoln a candidate for

the U. S. Senate; and its opening paragraph is so remarkable for style,

so heavy with meaning, and so instinct with political foresight, that

it is worth quoting entire. It is as follows:

"Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Convention:--If we could first

know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge

what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since

a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise

of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that

policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly

augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have

been reached and passed. '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 do expect it will cease to be divided. It will

become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery

will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public

mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate

extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall

become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as

well as South."

In this brief statement, Mr. Lincoln set forth the whole object of

the southern and northern parties on the slavery question, and though

he did not prophesy which way the contest would be decided, he did

prophesy exactly the two alternatives to one of which the country

was necessarily to advance. It is further noticeable here that Mr.

Lincoln's statement includes exactly the same prophecy, only not so

classically worded, as Mr. Seward's famous phrase, in his speech at

Rochester, the following October, of "an Irrepressible Conflict." And

once more; the opening sentence, as a writer upon Mr. Lincoln has

shown, is in like manner curiously coincident in thought with the first

sentence of another still more famous speech--Daniel Webster's reply to

Hayne. Mr. Webster said:

"When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and

on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in

the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and

ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.

Let us imitate that prudence, and before we float further, refer to

the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to

conjecture where we now are."

That is a stately and sonorous opening, majestic and poetical. Now

compare it with Mr. Lincoln's synonym: "If we could first know where

we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do,

and how to do it." The thing could not have been said more shortly,

more directly, more clearly, more strongly in English. As the writer

observes from whom this parallel is taken, "Mr. Webster used eighty-two

words, nearly a quarter of them having over one syllable; Mr. Lincoln

only twenty-five, of which only three, or less than one-eighth, have

more than one syllable. Counting still more closely, we find that Mr.

Webster used 347 letters, to Mr. Lincoln's 88." In less than one-third

the words, in just over one-fourth the letters, and without the least

approach to a figure of speech, Mr. Lincoln said what Mr. Webster did.

"This," to quote once more, "may seem a petty method of comparing

orators; but it reveals a great secret of directness, clearness,

simplicity and force of style; it goes far to explain how Mr. Lincoln

convinced an audience."

"This speech," says Mr. Arnold, "was the text of the great debate

between Lincoln and Douglas." It states the question in the United

States as between slavery and freedom, with very great strength and

plainness, and lays down the principles that apply to it with equal

power. It had been carefully prepared beforehand, as a manifesto for

which the times were ripe. For the first time it placed the speaker

publicly upon advanced anti-slavery ground; and it is by no means

improbable that in taking that ground, Mr. Lincoln had some secret

conscious or half conscious feeling not only that he was marking out

the place that his party must occupy in the coming struggle, but that

in doing so he assumed the place of standard-bearer. He explained the

doctrines of the Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision; showed

how the Democratic party had become ranged on the side of slavery;

explained how the result of the Dred Scott decision, together with

the indifferent policy so jauntily vaunted by Douglas, of "not caring

whether slavery were voted up or down," must result in a final victory

of slavery; and showed how Mr. Douglas' doctrines permitted and invited

that final victory. And having thus showed "where we are, and whither

we are tending," he ended with a solemn but cheering exhortation, "what

to do and how to do it." "The result," he said, "is not doubtful. We

shall not fail, if we stand firm we shall not fail. Wise counsels may

accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but sooner or later, THE VICTORY IS

SURE TO COME."

That is the language, not of a party politician, recommending expedient

nostrums, but of a statesman who feels profoundly that his people

are sound at heart, and will assuredly one day do full justice; who

proclaims in advance the eternal victory of the right side, and boldly

calls on all who hear him to advance up to the line of their own

consciences.

Before delivering this speech, Mr. Lincoln locked himself into a room

with his partner, Mr. Herndon, and read him the first paragraph of

the speech. "What do you think of it?" said he. Herndon answered, "I

think it is all true, but I doubt whether it is good policy to say it

now." Mr. Lincoln replied, "That makes no difference; it is the truth,

and the nation is entitled to it." This was both honest and politic;

for if the ground of principle as against expediency had not been

taken, there was none left to oppose the reasonings of Mr. Douglas,

which were extremely adroit, and so far as expediency admitted, indeed

unanswerable.

In the conduct of that remarkable campaign of 1858, Mr. Douglas was

the advocate of expediency, Mr. Lincoln of principle. Mr. Douglas

appealed to the prejudices of the white race against the black, and

argued in favor of present ease and selfish indifference to justice

in our conduct as a nation. Mr. Lincoln incessantly appealed to the

consciences of his audience, to all that part of human nature which

is kindly, which is just, which is noble; to the broad doctrines upon

which our national freedom was originally based. It is true that along

with these main currents of debate numerous minor questions and side

issues came up; but such was the pervading color, the chief drift of

the discussion. Over and over and over again, there sounds out among

the words of Douglas, "This is a white man's government; the negro

ought not to vote." And even more constant is the lofty reply, "I stand

by the Declaration of Independence, and the everlasting rights of

humanity. The negro is a man, and he ought to have all the rights of a

man!"

Mr. Lincoln's speech at Springfield, on June 17th, has been briefly

described. Mr. Douglas, coming home to his own State, to justify his

course, and receive his re-election, answered him in his Chicago speech

of July 9th, and Mr. Lincoln rejoined next day. Douglas spoke again,

at Bloomington on the 16th, and at Springfield on the 17th, and on the

latter day Mr. Lincoln spoke also at Springfield. In this speech he

set forth a curious and characteristic contrast between himself and

his opponent, in a grotesque and sarcastic manner that must have told

sharply upon his western audience, while its comic surface is underlaid

with the usual solid basis of conscious adherence to justice and

principle. Mr. Lincoln said:

"Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown. All the anxious politicians

of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have

been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to be the

President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly,

fruitful face, post-offices, land-offices, marshalships and cabinet

appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting

out in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy

hands. And as they have been gazing upon this attractive picture so

long, they cannot, in the little distraction that has taken place

in the party, bring themselves to give up the charming hope; but

with greedier anxiety they rush about him, sustain him, and give him

marches, triumphal entries, and receptions beyond what even in the

days of his highest prosperity they could have brought about in his

favor. On the contrary, nobody has ever expected me to be President.

In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages

were sprouting out. These are disadvantages, all taken together,

that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon

principle, and upon principle alone. I am, in a certain sense, made

the standard-bearer in behalf of the Republicans. I was made so

merely because there had to be some one so placed--I being in no wise

preferable to any other one of the twenty-five--perhaps a hundred, we

have in the Republican ranks. Then I say I wish it to be distinctly

understood and borne in mind, that we have to fight this battle without

many--perhaps without any--of the external aids which are brought

to bear against us. So I hope those with whom I am surrounded have

principle enough to nerve themselves for the task and leave nothing

undone that can be fairly done, to bring about the right result."

Two years before, Mr. Lincoln had used even stronger terms in

contrasting himself and his antagonist. In 1856 he said: "Twenty-two

years ago, Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted; we were

both young men--he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both

ambitious, I perhaps quite as much as he. With me, the race of ambition

has been a failure--a flat failure. With him, it has been one of

splendid success. His name fills the nation, and it is not unknown

in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has

reached. _So reached that the oppressed of my species might have shared

with me in the elevation_, I would rather stand on that eminence than

wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow."

Mr. Lincoln's exact position on the emancipation question at this time,

is an interesting illustration of his firm adherence to principle, and

at the same time of his extreme caution in touching established laws,

and his natural tendency to give voice to the average public sentiment

of his day, rather than to go beyond it, or to reprove that sentiment

for not going further. He averred over and over again, that he was "not

in favor of negro citizenship;" but he said "there is no reason in the

world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the

Declaration of Independence--the right of life, liberty and the pursuit

of happiness. In the right to eat the bread without the leave of

anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal

of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man."

The same primary granite substratum of moral right, of everlasting

justice, underlies all these speeches. It crops out here and there,

in passages, a specimen of which is worth quoting, not merely for the

sake of their aptness then or now; but also as excellent patterns

for the application of moral principles to political practices--a

lesson peculiarly important in a republic, simply because its diligent

employment is the sole possible basis of national strength and

happiness. In the debate at Quincy, October 13th, Mr. Lincoln stated a

whole code of political ethics, along with its application to the case

in hand, in one paragraph, as follows:

"We have in this nation this element of domestic slavery. It is a

matter of absolute certainty that it is a disturbing element. It is the

opinion of all the great men who have expressed an opinion upon it,

that it is a dangerous element. We keep up a controversy in regard to

it. That controversy necessarily springs from difference of opinion,

and if we can learn exactly--can reduce to the lowest elements--what

that difference of opinion is, we perhaps shall be better prepared for

discussing the different systems of policy that we would propose in

regard to that disturbing element. I suggest that the difference of

opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference

between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it

a wrong. The Republican party think it wrong--we think it is a moral,

a social and a political wrong. We think it is a wrong not confining

itself merely to the persons or the States where it exists, but that it

is a wrong in its tendency, to say the least, that it extends itself

to the existence of the whole nation. Because we think it wrong, we

propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as a wrong. We

deal with it as with any other wrong, in so far as we can prevent its

growing any larger, and so deal with it that in the run of time there

may be some promise of an end to it. We have a due regard to the actual

presence of it amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in

any satisfactory way, and all the Constitutional obligations thrown

about it. I suppose that in reference both to its actual existence in

the nation, and to our Constitutional obligations, we have no right at

all to disturb it in the States where it exists, and we profess that

we have no more inclination to disturb it than we have the right to do

it. We go further than that; we don't propose to disturb it where, in

one instance, we think the Constitution would permit us. We think the

Constitution would permit us to disturb it in the District of Columbia.

Still we do not propose to do that, unless it should be in terms which

I don't suppose the nation is very likely soon to agree to--the terms

of making the emancipation gradual and compensating the unwilling

owners. Where we suppose we have the Constitutional right, we restrain

ourselves in reference to the actual existence of the institution and

the difficulties thrown about it. We also oppose it as an evil so

far as it seeks to spread itself. We insist on the policy that shall

restrict it to its present limits."

Still more sharply and strongly he stated the question in the last

debate, at Alton, as simply this: Is Slavery wrong?

"That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this

country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be

silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles--right

and wrong--throughout the world. They are the two principles that have

stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue

to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the

divine right of kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it

develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil

and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes,

whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people

of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one

race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same

tyrannical principle."

With equal force he often exposed and rebuked the moral levity shown

by his opponent--his affectation of indifference to all principle,

his supercilious dazzling contempt of moral distinctions. In his last

speech at Alton, he very fully reviewed the whole question, and Mr.

Douglas' individual position before the country, with great breadth and

power.

There was as striking a contrast between the externals of the two

champions, as between their political doctrines. Douglas went pompously

up and down the land, with special trains of railroad cars, bands of

music, long processions, banners, cannon firing, and all the flourish

and gaudy show of a triumphing conqueror; and he is said to have paid

away half his fortune in securing this fatal victory. But Mr. Lincoln

went about almost as frugally, as plainly, as quietly, as if he had

been on one of his accustomed legal circuits, and reflected with a

queer astonishment upon the trifling sum that he did actually expend.

He said to a friend after the campaign was over, "I don't believe I

have expended in this canvass one cent less than Five Hundred Dollars

in cash!" He sometimes good humoredly alluded to these demonstrations.

"Auxiliary to these main points," he says, "to be sure, are their

thunderings of cannon, their marching and music, their fizzle-gigs

and fire works; but I will not waste time with them, they are but

the little trappings of the campaign." Mr. Townsend, a picturesque

writer, thus contrasts the bearing of the two men: "Douglas was

uneasily arrogant in Lincoln's presence; the latter, never sensitive

nor flurried, so grew by his imperturbability that when he reached

the White House, Mr. Douglas was less surprised than anybody else.

The great senatorial campaign, in which they figured together, is

remembered by every Springfielder. Douglas, with his powerful voice and

facile energy, went into it under full steam. Lincoln began lucidly

and cautiously. When they came out of it, Douglas was worn down with

rage and hoarseness, and Lincoln was fresher than ever. He prepared

all the speeches of this campaign by silent meditation, sitting or

lying alone, studying the flies on the ceiling. "The best evidence

of his superiority in this debate is the fact that the Republicans

circulated both sets of speeches as a campaign document in 1860, but

Mr. Douglas's friends refused to do so.

And Mr. Arnold, a personal friend of Mr. Lincoln's, attributes to Mr.

Lincoln just that sort of superiority that comes from a consciousness

of being on the right side and of having an antagonist in whose

attitude there is reason for contempt. "He had one advantage," says Mr.

Arnold, "over Douglas, he was always good humored; he had always an

apt and happy story for illustration, and while Douglas was sometimes

irritable, Lincoln never lost his temper." And Mr. Arnold says that

when Lincoln and Douglas came to Chicago together just after the close

of the seven debates, "Lincoln was in perfect health, his face bronzed

by the prairie suns, but looking and moving like a trained athlete. His

voice was clearer, stronger and better than when he began the canvass.

Douglas was physically much broken. He was so hoarse that he could

hardly articulate, and was entirely unintelligible in an ordinary tone."

But the circumstance that shows most clearly of all, how entirely

Mr. Lincoln saw over, and through, and beyond his adversary, both as

statesman and politician, how entirely he managed him, wielded him,

used him, is the fearful grip into which he put the "Little Giant" on

the question of the conflict between "Popular Sovereignty" and the Dred

Scott decision. In return for a series of questions by Mr. Douglas,

Mr. Lincoln, having answered them all categorically, prepared certain

others to put to Mr. Douglas; and of these one was:

"Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way,

against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery

from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?"

When Mr. Lincoln consulted a friend upon this set of questions, the

friend remonstrated against this one; saying in substance, "In answer,

Mr. Douglas must either accept the Dred Scott decision as binding,

which would lose him the election to the Senate in consequence of the

popular feeling in Illinois against it, or else that he must assert

that his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" would enable the territory

to keep slavery out, by "unfriendly legislation," contrary to the

Dred Scott decision. And this," urged the friend, "he will do; it

will satisfy Illinois, and give Douglas the senatorship. You are only

placing the step for him to rise upon."

"That may be," said Mr. Lincoln, with a shrewd look, "_but if he

takes that shoot he never can be President_." This meant, that while

the doctrine of legislating slavery out of a territory might satisfy

Illinois, it would be odious and inadmissible to the whole South, and

that it would therefore render Douglas' election to the Presidency

impossible. And it came to pass exactly as Mr. Lincoln foretold at

this time, and as he told "Billy" when he returned home at the end of

the canvass. One of Mr. Lincoln's characteristic sentences afterwards

summed all the contradiction of Douglas' position, in the statement

that it was "declaring that a thing may be lawfully driven away from a

place where it has a lawful right to go."

These seven debates were the most widely known of Mr. Lincoln's labors

in this campaign, but he made about fifty other speeches in different

parts of the State.

The result of this celebrated canvass was to return Douglas to the

Senate, although the vote of the people was in favor of Lincoln.

The Legislative districts in the State had been so arranged by the

Democratic party as to secure their majority in the Legislature. But

even if the popular majority had been with Douglas, Mr. Lincoln had

won. He set out to lose the State; he set out to carry the nation;

and he did it. It was the foresight of the statesman, contending with

the cunning of the politician. It was part of the victory that he who

really lost thought he had won. Mr. Herndon, Mr. Lincoln's law partner,

told afterwards how Mr. Lincoln came home and said, "Billy, I knew I

should miss the place, when I competed for it. _This defeat will make

me President._"

In the period between this canvass and the Presidential nomination at

Chicago, Mr. Lincoln, while at work in his profession, did good service

in the cause of freedom in several of the States, making a number of

effective speeches in Ohio, Kansas, and particularly in New England

and New York. His contest with Douglas had probably already made Mr.

Lincoln the second choice of large numbers of Republicans for the

nomination of 1860. His great speech at Cooper Institute in February,

1860, confirmed this choice, and enlarged those numbers.

The invitation which resulted in his great Cooper Institute speech

was originally to give a lecture in Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn, and

he was to receive $200 for it. After some delay, at last he agreed

to speak on February 27th; but the three young men who had organized

the course, thought the time late in the season, and began to fear

that they would lose money. It sounds curious enough now, to think of

a fear lest a speech by Mr. Lincoln should not refund $350 expenses,

but so they thought. A political friend of his who had negotiated

the engagement, at last assumed one fourth of the risk, and with a

good deal of trouble, managed to have the speech at Cooper Institute,

instead of Brooklyn. Attempts were vainly made to induce one and then

another Republican club to assume the risk of the engagement. The New

York Times, in announcing the lecture, kindly spoke of the speaker as

"a lawyer who had some local reputation in Illinois."

The Cooper Institute speech was prepared with much care, and was

a production of very great power of logic, history and political

statement. It consisted of an exposition of the true doctrines of the

founders of our nation on the question of slavery, and of the position

of the two parties of the day on the same question. It was alive and

luminous throughout with the resolute and lofty and uncompromising

morality on principle, which had colored all his debates with Douglas,

and made a very deep impression upon the audience present, and upon the

far greater audience that read it afterwards.

Its close was very powerful. After showing that the demands of the

South were summed up in the requirement that the North should call

slavery right instead of wrong, and should then join the south in

acting accordingly, he added:

"If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty,

fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those

sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and

belabored--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between

the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should

be neither a living man nor a dead man--such as a policy of "don't

care" on a question about which all true men do care--such as Union

appeals, beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists, reversing

the Divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to

repentance--such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay

what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither let us be

slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened

from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to

ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith

let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it."

The words are singularly plain, they are nakedly homely. But the

thoughts are very noble and very mighty.

At the close of the speech, the same friend who had engineered it, made

a few remarks, in which he prophesied. He said, "One of three gentlemen

will be our standard bearer in the Presidential contest of this year;

the distinguished Senator from New York--Mr. Seward; the late able and

accomplished Governor of Ohio, Mr. Chase, or the unknown knight who

entered the political list, against the Bois Guilbert of democracy,

Stephen A. Douglas, on the prairies of Illinois, in 1858, and unhorsed

him--Abraham Lincoln."

The narrator adds, "Some friends joked me after the meeting, as not

being a good prophet. The lecture was over; all the expenses were paid;

I was handed by the gentlemen interested, the sum of $4.25 as my share

of the profits." It is worth adding that Mr. Lincoln observed to the

same gentleman, after his subsequent tour further eastward, "when I was

East, several gentlemen made about the same remark to me that you did

to-day about the Presidency; they thought my chances were about equal

to the best."

The story of the nomination at Chicago, of the election, of the

perilous journey to Washington, need not be repeated. While the

nominating convention was sitting, Mr. Lincoln's friends telegraphed

to him that in order to be nominated he needed the votes of two of the

delegations, and that to secure these, he must promise that if elected

the leaders of those delegations should be made members of his Cabinet.

He telegraphed at once back again; "I authorize no bargains and will be

bound by none." The adoption of those ten words as a rule would go very

far to purify the whole field of political party action.

Little did the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for President,

know what they were doing. Little did the honest, fatherly, patriotic

man, who stood in his simplicity on the platform at Springfield, asking

the prayers of his townsmen and receiving their pledges to remember

him, foresee how awfully he was to need those prayers, the prayers

of all this nation and the prayers of all the working, suffering

common people throughout the world. God's hand was upon him with a

visible protection, saving first from the danger of assassination at

Baltimore, and bringing him safely to our national capital.

Perhaps the imperturbable cool courage of Mr. Lincoln was the trait in

him least appreciated in proportion to his share of it. He promptly and

unhesitatingly risked his life to keep his Philadelphia appointment on

the way to Washington, filling his programme, because it was his duty,

without any variance for assassins. It should be here recorded, by the

way, that the story that he fled from Harrisburg, disguised in a Scotch

cap and cloak, which made so much noise in the country at the time, was

a forgery, devised by a disreputable reporter. Mr. Lincoln never used

any disguises, and it would have required more than one "Scotch cap" to

bring his six feet four down to an average height.

He was so kind-hearted, so peaceable, so averse, either to cause or to

witness controversy or wrath, that only the extremest need would force

him to the point of wrath and of fighting. But when the need was real,

the wrath and the fight came out. Whether moral or physical courage,

upon a real demand for it, it never failed. On his flat boat trip to

New Orleans in his youth, he and his mate, armed only with sticks of

wood, beat off seven negro marauders who attacked and would have robbed

their boat. When clerk in a country store he seized, flung down and

subdued a bully who was insolent to some women, and what is more, the

beaten bully became his friend. He once, alone, by suddenly dropping

from a scuttle down upon the platform, kept off a gang of rowdies who

were about to hustle his friend Col. Baker off the stand. He and

Baker once, with no others, escorted to the hotel, a speaker who was

threatened with violence by a Democratic crowd whom he had offended.

When some Irishmen at Springfield once undertook to take possession of

the poll and restrict the voting to their friends, Lincoln, hearing

of it, stepped into the first store, seized an axe helve, and marched

alone through the turbulent crowd up to the poll, opening the road

as he went; and alone he kept the ballot-box free and safe until the

foolish crowd gave up their plan. His anger sometimes--though very

seldom--flamed up at ill usage of himself; but never so hotly as

at ill usage to others. When a poor negro citizen of Illinois was

imprisoned at New Orleans, simply for being a free negro from outside

of Louisiana, and was about to be sold into slavery, to pay jail fees,

Mr. Lincoln found that the Governor of Illinois could not help the poor

fellow. When the fact became plain, he jumped up and swore, "By the

Almighty," he said, "I'll have that negro back, or I'll have a twenty

years' agitation in Illinois, until the Governor can do something in

the premises!" Somebody sent money and set the man free; or else the

twenty years' agitation would have begun, and finished too. An officer,

a worthless fellow, after being dismissed and repeatedly trying to get

back into the army, at last insolently told President Lincoln, "I see

you are fully determined not to do me justice." Now this was just what

he _was_ determined to do him; and in righteous anger he arose, laid

down his papers, collared the fellow, walked him to the door and flung

him out, saying, "Sir, I give you fair warning, never to show yourself

in this room again. I can bear censure, but not insult!"

In Mr. Lincoln's administration, the world has seen and wondered at the

greatest sign and marvel of our day, to wit, a plain working man of the

people, with no more culture, instruction or education than any such

working man may obtain for himself, called on to conduct the passage of

a great nation through a crisis involving the destinies of the whole

world. The eyes of princes, nobles, aristocrats, of dukes, earls,

scholars, statesmen, warriors, all turned on the plain backwoodsman,

with his simple sense, his imperturbable simplicity, his determined

self-reliance, his impracticable and incorruptible honesty, as he sat

amid the war of conflicting elements, with unpretending steadiness,

striving to guide the national ship through a channel at whose perils

the world's oldest statesmen stood aghast. The brilliant courts of

Europe levelled their opera glasses at the phenomenon. Fair ladies saw

that he had horny hands and disdained white gloves; dapper diplomatists

were shocked at his system of etiquette; but old statesmen, who knew

the terrors of that passage, were wiser than court ladies and dandy

diplomatists, and watched him with a fearful curiosity, simply asking,

"Will that awkward old backwoodsman really get that ship through? If

he does, it will be time for us to look about us." Sooth to say, our

own politicians were somewhat shocked with his State papers at first.

"Why not let _us_ make them a little more conventional, and file them

to a classical pattern?" "No," was his reply, "I shall write them

myself. _The people will understand them._" "But this or that form of

expression is not elegant, nor classical." "_The people will understand

it_," was his invariable reply. And whatever may be said of his State

papers, as compared with the diplomatic standards, it has been a fact

that they have always been wonderfully well understood by the people,

and that since the time of Washington, the State papers of no President

have more controlled the popular mind. And one reason for this is, that

they have been informal and undiplomatic. They have more resembled a

father's talks to his children than a State paper. And they have had

that relish and smack of the soil, that appeal to the simple human

heart and head, which is a greater power in writing than the most

artful clerices of rhetoric. Lincoln might well say with the apostle,

"But though I be rude in speech yet not in knowledge, but we have been

thoroughly _made manifest among you_ in all things." His rejection of

what is called fine writing, was as deliberate as St. Paul's, and for

the same reason--because he felt that he was speaking on a subject

which must be made clear to the lowest intellect, though it should fail

to captivate the highest. But we say of Lincoln's writings, that for

all true, manly purposes of writing, there are passages in his State

papers that could not be better put--they are absolutely perfect.

They are brief, condensed, intense, and with a power of insight and

expression which make them worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold.

Such are some passages of the celebrated letter to the Springfield

convention, especially that masterly one where he compares the conduct

of the patriotic and loyal blacks with that of the treacherous and

disloyal whites. No one can read this letter and especially the passage

mentioned, without feeling the influence of a mind both strong and

generous. "Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will

come soon and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in

all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there

can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that

they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost.

And then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent

tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet,

they have helped mankind on to this great consummation, while I fear

there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant

heart and deceitful speech they have striven to hinder it."

The lesson of Mr. Lincoln's career as President, is a manifold

one. He was in a strangely full and close manner the exponent, the

representative, the federal head, the voice, the plenary agent, of

the people of the United States. As such, his life teaches what the

war teaches, to wit; the strength and the magnificent morality of

an intelligent people, trained in self-control, in thought, in the

doctrines of justice and freedom, and in the fear of God.

Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher. · 第 1 / 20 章