FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN
I once heard a public lecturer in America telling a New York audience of
an experience in the Mississippi Valley, where he asked an audience of
children what body of water lay in the middle of the earth--wishing them
to name to him, of course, the Mediterranean Ocean--and unexpectedly got
the serious answer from a lad of deep conviction but narrow horizon, "the
Sangamon River." I told the amused lecturer, who had never heard of this
river, at any rate as locally pronounced, that the lad spoke more truly
than the lecturer knew. For to those of even wider horizons, whose
greatest and most beloved hero in history lived and was buried near the
banks of the Sangamon, it is the middle water of the earth.
It is but a little river, and it is but one of the rivers of the valley of
a hundred thousand streams, truly the Medimarenean Land, since all the
oceans are now being gathered about it. The Sangamon flows into the
Illinois, the Illinois into the Mississippi, and the Mississippi is now to
flow into all the seas, even as the life of Lincoln is to flow into all
history.
How little competent I am to speak dispassionately of this great
incarnation of the spirit of those western waters the distorted geography
of the untravelled lad whom the alien lecturer found on the prairies will
suggest, for the river of the home and the fame of Lincoln empties into
the river of my birth.
It was along this latter river--the Illinois--as we know, that La Salle
and his men, in midwinter of 1682, dragged on the ice their canoes,
baggage, and disabled companions from the Chicago River, all the way to
the site of Fort Crèvecoeur, where they found open water, and thence in
their canoes made their way past the mouth of the Sangamon (which first
appears on the maps of the new world in 1683, just after La Salle's
journey, as the River Emicouen) and on into the Mississippi. We recall
their "adventurous progress" and the unveiling to their eyes more and more
of the vast new world, where the warm and drowsy air and hazy sunlight
succeeded the frosty breath of the north. We see them floating down the
winding water path. We see the red children of the sun--the Indian sun-
worshippers--clothed in white cloaks, receiving the white heralds of
Europe; we hear the weather-beaten voyageurs chant on the shores of the
gulf solemn, exulting songs learned in church and cloister of France; we
hear the faint voice of their leader crying his claim to all the great
valley from the mouth of the river to its source beyond the country of the
Nadouesioux--the voice not of a human throat alone but of a vision in the
wilderness. We discern after long years the sounds of its realization. We
see the iridescence of the John Law bubble shining over the turbid waters
of that river for a moment. We see the raising and lowering of flags of
various colors. We hear Napoleon's representative saying: "May the
inhabitants of this valley and a Frenchman never meet upon any spot of the
globe without feeling brothers!" We see the general who is later to embody
the west's crude democratic ideals, Andrew Jackson, victorious in the last
struggle of independence from Europe. We see the red worshippers of the
sun in their white cloaks crossing the river, vanishing toward its
setting; and we see the black shadows of men, the negro slaves, creeping
out of Africa after the white heralds of Europe in America. Seeing and
hearing all this, we have seen and heard the intimations of the glory of
France in the new world, the birth of a world-power, the United States,
the infancy of a new democracy, the disappearance of the aboriginal
Indian, the menace of the black shadow that had made a nation half slave
and half free, and the prophecy of the triumphant coming of the new-age
producers and poets, the men of the Land of the Western Waters.
It is out of this light and shade gathered by the Father of Waters--the
Mississippi--along its banks, that there comes silently one day in 1831,
the lank, bony, awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a young man of
twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden with prairie products down this same
tortuous waterway, from the Sangamon to the sea. He was six feet four
inches tall, homely, sad-faced, handy, and as little promising outwardly
as any other pilot or boatman of those days. It is still remembered in
prairie legends, however, that at the beginning of the voyage, his boat
being stuck midway across a dam, he had ingeniously managed to release it
and save all from shipwreck. It seems now an incident fraught with
prophecy. And it is said that many years later he made designs of a
contrivance that would lift flatboats over shoals and even let them
navigate on ice--an intimation of the resourcefulness of men left to fight
alone with the forces of nature.
He was not a "Yankee," as one writing me in Paris characterized the men of
that valley. This awkward landsman on water was born in a cabin in the
Kentucky wilderness, a house replaced by one of unhewn timber, without
door or floor or window, probably not better than the meanest of the gypsy
houses just outside the fortifications of Paris. He accompanied his
restless, migratory father from one squatter home to another until he
settled in Illinois, where the timber-land and prairie meet, near the
Sangamon, and there built another cabin, made rails to fence ten acres of
land--which gave him the sobriquet the "rail-splitter"--"broke" the
ground, and raised a crop of corn on it the first year. You may remember
that Joliet made report of such a possibility there.
Lincoln's origin you will recognize as typical of that frontier, except
that the character which asserted itself in the son, if there is
transmission of acquired character, seems to have come from the mother and
the nurturing of his stepmother rather than from the shiftless, paternal
pioneer who gave the wilderness environment and soil to the nurturing of
this stock and was as little paternalistic as the government. Perhaps this
ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de
bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier
posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the
temptations of the open country to a man without a slave. When he started
down the Ohio into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his
household goods, and a considerable quantity of whiskey, he was going to
treat, not as the coureurs de bois, with the Indians, the savage men of
the forests; he was going to treat with the savage forces of nature
themselves. And one must, as I have said of Nicolet and Perrot and Du
Lhut, judge charitably these men who made the reconciliations of the edges
of things. They made the paths to western cities; he, to a western
character; that only need be remembered.
Certain trees depend for the spread of their kind on seeds equipped with
spiral wings that when they fall they may reach the ground outside the
shadow of the parent tree and so have a chance to grow into wide-spreading
trees. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was as the spirals that
carried the precious seed where it could have free air and an unshadowed
soil to grow in.
And there the tuition of the experiences that made all men kin and so made
a natural democracy possible began. He had little teaching of the formal
sort. Six months or a year in a log schoolhouse probably measured its
duration. He had the sterner discipline of the fields, the waters, and the
trees, for their very temptations became disciplines to those who
resisted, as his father did not. He learned his parables of the fields and
of the natural instincts of his neighbors. He knew both physical and human
nature about him, and this he illustrated, expressed, in such manner as to
make him a faithful and favorite exponent of its coarseness, its
kindliness, its gallantry, its sympathies, and its heroisms.
These neighborly fellowships, not affected but genuine, equipped him not
only with a vital and never-failing sense of brotherhood but with a faith
in those whom he called the "plain people," the common man. His creed was,
if not innate, innurtured. That fellowship and that faith were at the
bottom of his democracy--not merely patient love of his neighbors but
faith in their ultimate judgments--democracy that made him a nationalist
and a world humanist.
But in the making of Lincoln there were more than the usual disciplines.
He had also the tuition of the "solemn solitude," as Bancroft says. He
sought the fellowships of the past--of that "invisible multitude of the
spirits of yesterday." He read every book that he could get within fifty
miles, it is said. But what is more certain is that he read thoroughly and
"inwardly digested" a few books. He knew the Bible, Shakespeare, and
Burns, Aesop's "Fables," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," and "Robinson
Crusoe." He read a history of the United States and a life of Washington,
and he learned by heart the statutes of the State of Indiana. Moreover, he
studied without guidance algebra and geometry. It is said that later in
life, when his political career was beginning, he continued his studies
even more seriously and attempted to master a foreign language.
So he had companionship of the patriarchs and prophets and poets of
Israel. And it was the experience of many another prairie boy that he knew
intimately these Asiatic heroes of history before he consciously heard of
modern or contemporary heroes. I knew of Joshua before I was aware of
Napoleon, and I remember carving upon a primitive arch of triumph--which
was only the stoop at the roadside, but the most, conspicuous public place
accessible to my knife--the name of one of the cities taken in the
conquest of Canaan, an instinct of hero-worship--so splendidly illustrated
in French art and monuments.
Lincoln the youth had not only those ancient companionships but the
intimate counsel of the greatest of teachers of democracy. He knew, too,
the homely wisdom of Greece as well as he knew the treasured sayings of
his own people handed on from generation to generation. He was as familiar
with the larger-horizoned gossip and philosophies of Shakespeare's plays
as with those which gathered around the post-office of Clary's Grove,
where later this youth as postmaster carried the letters in his hat and
read the newspapers before they were delivered. He loved Burns for his
philosophy that "a man's a man for a' that." So with these and others he
found his high fellowships, even while he "swapped" stories (enriched of
his reading) with his neighbors at the store or his fellow lawyers at the
primitive taverns.
But there were less personal associations. He made the fundamental laws of
a wilderness State an acquisition of his instincts. There is preserved in
a law library in New York the much-worn copy of the statutes of Indiana
enacted in the first years of the existence of that State. It is stated
that he learned these statutes by copying extracts from them--and from the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and
the Ordinance of the Northwest, included in the same volume--on a shingle
when paper was scarce, using ink made of the juice of brier-root and a pen
made from the quill of a turkey-buzzard, and shaving the shingle clean for
another extract when one was learned, till his primitive palimpsest was
worn out. But whatever the medium of their transmigration from matter to
mind, they became the law of his democracy, sacred as if they had been
brought to him on tables of stone by a prophet with shining face. It was
in that school, I believe, that he learned his nationalism, his devotion
to the Constitution--to which in maturer years he gave this famed
expression: "I would save the Union, I would save it in the shortest way
under the Constitution.... My paramount object in this struggle is to save
the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do
it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and
if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also
do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I
believe it helps to save the Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because
I do not believe it would help to save the Union." [Footnote: Letter to
Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862.]
And when he had freed the negro by a proclamation that violated the letter
of the Constitution, it was still that boy of the woods speaking in the
man--the boy who had learned his lesson beyond all possibility of
forgetting or misunderstanding--"I felt that measures otherwise
unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the
preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation."
It was from those shingles that he learned, too, the place of the State in
this nationalism. Its paternalism has grown tremendously since 1824, when
democracy was a negative, a repressive and not a positive, aggressive
political and social spirit, but, as it was, it gave him the foundation of
the political structure within whose lines he had to build later.
And with all this was a self-discipline in the two great knowledges by
which men have climbed from savages to gods--language and mathematics. He
was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles
from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied
geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing,
but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon
acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only
the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, I am able to appreciate
what the hardship of that self-schooling was. It was more agreeable to
watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to
address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of
the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then
known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in
revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic
symbols.
But his private personal culture, as one [Footnote: Herbert Croly, Lincoln
as more than an American in his "Promise of American Life," pp. 89-99.]
has observed, had no "embarrassing effects," because he shared so
completely and genuinely the amusements and occupations of his
neighborhood. No "taint of bookishness" disturbed the local fellowships
which gave him opportunity to express in "familiar and dramatic form" of
story and illustration his more substantial philosophy and so find for it
the perfect speech. His neighbors called him by homely, affectionate
names, thinking he was entirely one of them--a little more clever, a
little less ambitious in the usual channels of business and enterprise. He
had no "moral strenuousness of the reformer" and no "exclusiveness" of
learning. He "accepted the fabric of traditional American political
thought." He seemed "but the average product," and yet, as this same
writer has said, "at bottom Abraham Lincoln differed as essentially from
the ordinary western American of the middle period as St. Francis of
Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the thirteenth
century." [Footnote: Croly, "Promise of American Life," p. 90.] He was
not, like Jackson, simply a large, forceful version of the plain American
trans-Alleghany citizen; he made no clamorous, boastful show of strength,
powerful as he was physically and intellectually. He shared genuinely,
with no consciousness of his own distinction, the "good-fellowship of his
neighbors, their strength of will, their excellent faith, and above all
their innocence." But he made himself, by discipline of his own,
"intellectually candid, concentrated, and disinterested and morally
humane, magnanimous and humble." This is not the picture of a
conventional, generic democrat; and this is not, we are assured by the
earlier writers, the picture of the westerner of that period. Indeed, Mr.
Croly insists that while these Lincolnian qualities are precisely the
qualities which Americans, in order to become better democrats, should add
to their strength, homogeneity, and innocence, they are just the qualities
(high intelligence, humanity, magnanimity, and humility) which Americans
are "prevented by their individualistic practice and tradition from
attaining or properly valuing." "Their deepest convictions," he contends,
"make the average unintelligent man the representative democrat, and the
aggressive, successful individual the admired national type." To them
Lincoln is simply "a man of the people" and an example of strong will.
But the man who said this did not know that land of Lincoln--which was the
valley of La Salle, and even before that the valley of the tribe of men--
for I believe its inhabitants knew that he was the embodiment of what they
coveted for themselves; that he was not their ordinary average but their
best selves.
Their individualism has been, I must say again, under practical
compulsions and has had fruits that deceive the eye. It is so insistent
upon national productivity, but none the less is it joined to a high
idealism that worships just the qualities that were so miraculously united
in Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, some remember for their own excuse his
coarse stories; some recall for their own justification his acceptance of
the political standards that he found; but the great body of the people
keep him in reverence and affection as the incarnation of patience,
honesty, fairness, magnanimity, humility; not for his strength of will
primarily, but for his strength of charity and honesty, and in so doing
they reveal the ideal that is in and under their own individual struggle.
Montalembert said that "a social constitution which produced a Lincoln and
others like him is a good tree whose sure fruit leaves nothing to envy in
the product of any monarchy or aristocracy." Lincoln was not, we want to
believe, a freak, a sport of nature, but the "sure fruit" that should not
only leave nothing to envy in others, but leave nothing to question in the
soundness of a democracy that gives evidence of its spirit in remembering
Abraham Lincoln more tenderly, more affectionately, more reverentially
than any one else in its history. It is less to his praise but more
accurate, I think, that, as his biographer put it: "His day and generation
uttered itself through him." He expressed their ugliest forms and their
most beautiful developments.
None the less is it remarkable that not only should the virility and
nobility of the frontier have been exhibited in him, but that the
consummate skill and character known to the world's centres of culture
should have had, in his speech and intellectual attitude and grasp, a new
example.
When he wrote his letter in acceptance of the nomination to the
presidency, he showed it to the superintendent of public instruction in
Illinois, whom he called "Mr. Schoolmaster" (and who was years after my
own beloved schoolmaster) saying: "I am not very strong on grammar and I
wish you would see if it is all right." The schoolmaster had only to
repair what we call a "split infinitive." But the great utterances of his
life had no tuition or revision of schoolmasters. They were his own in
conception and expression. He sent his Cooper Union speech in advance to
several for advice, and they, I am told, changed not a word.
Of his debates with Douglas (1858), his speech in Cooper Union, New York,
1860, his oration at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery at
Gettysburg, and of his second inaugural address, it has been said that no
one of them has been surpassed in its separate field. Goldwin Smith said
of the Gettysburg speech: "Saving one very flat expression, the address
has no superior in literature." [Footnote: Goldwin Smith, "Early Years of
A. Lincoln." In R. D. Sheppard, "Abraham Lincoln," p. 132.] These
appraisements I would hesitate to repeat in France, where all letters come
finally to be adjudged, if I did not know that this last document (the
Gettysburg speech), at least, had been admitted to the seat of the
immortal classics. It is said to have been written on scraps of paper, as
the great care-worn man rode in the car from Washington to Gettysburg, and
I have been told by one who was present at the ceremonies that the quiet
had hardly come over the vast audience, stirred by the eloquence of Edward
Everett's oration which had lasted two hours, before this briefest and
noblest of American orations, spoken in a high and unmusical voice by the
great lank figure, consulting his manuscript, was over. It is heard now in
the memory of millions of school-children from the Atlantic to the
Pacific:
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or
any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a
great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that
field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that
that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should
do this.
"But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we
cannot hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here have consecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take
increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure
of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth."
Bronze tablets bearing this oration for their inscription have been put on
the walls of schoolhouses and public buildings all the way across the
continent--plates in renewal of possession, that are another fruitage of
the valley where the French planted their plates of possession and
repossession a century before.
But I would also have read--especially in France, where letters are still
being written that have the quality of literature--a letter of this
frontiersman. The professor of history in the College of the City of New
York, showing me his museum, would have me read again this letter in the
hand of Abraham Lincoln; and I would have those beyond America, as well as
in that valley, hear what a man of the western waters could write before
the coming of the typewriter:
"DEAR MADAM: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a
statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother
of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how
weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to
beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain
from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of
the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may
assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished
memory of the loved and lost and the solemn pride that must be yours to
have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
"Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
"ABRAHAM LINCOLN." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works" (Nicolay and Hay
edition), 2:600. To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass., November 1, 1864.]
These two examples illustrate not only the form of his speech and writing,
but the sympathy and the temper of the soul of the man. They need only the
supplement of a comment on the strength of his thought in expression. It
is said of his Cooper Union speech (his first speech before a large
eastern urban audience, I think): "From the first line to the last, from
his premises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift, unerring
directness which no logician ever excelled, an argument complete and full,
without the affectation of learning.... A single, easy, simple sentence
... contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days
of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of
investigation to acquire.... Commencing with this address as a political
pamphlet, the reader will leave it as an historical work, brief, complete,
profound, truthful--which will survive the time and occasion that called
it forth and be esteemed hereafter, no less for its intrinsic worth than
its unpretending modesty." [Footnote: Pamphlet edition with notes and
prefaces by C. C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, September, 1860. Quoted in
Nicolay and Hay, "Abraham Lincoln," 2:225.]
His first wide fame grew from a speech which he delivered on October 16,
1854, in Peoria, the city that had grown on the Illinois River by the side
of La Salle's Fort Crèvecoeur. "When the white man governs himself," he
said there, "that is self-government; but when the white man governs
himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government--
that is despotism." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works," ed. by Nicolay
and Hay, 2:227.] Two years later he made near there an address so
irresistible in its eloquence that the reporters forgot why they were
there and failed to take notes. So there are but fragments preserved of
what is known as "the lost speech."
The minor anecdotes of his life that are treasured and the stories which
he is said to have told would fill a volume--perhaps volumes. They all
tell of a genius who through adversity became resourceful, who through the
neighborly exchanges of a village learned a sympathy as wide as humanity,
and who with an infinite patience and kindliness and good sense dealt with
a divided people.
The world outside the valley at first thought him a buffoon because it
heard only the echo of the hoarse laughter after his stories. They found
when he spoke in Cooper Union that he had a mind that would have sat
unembarrassed and luminous in the company of the men of the age of
Pericles. But he had a sense of humor that, had he been there, would have
saved Socrates from the hyssop. Mr. Bryce says, that all the world knows
the Americans to be a humorous people. [Footnote: Bryce, "American
Commonwealth," 2:286.] "They are," he has said, "as conspicuously the
purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as the French were the
purveyors of wit to the eighteenth.... [This sense] is diffused among the
whole people; it colors their ordinary life and gives to their talk that
distinctively new flavor which a European palate enjoys." And he adds:
"Much of President Lincoln's popularity, and much also of the gift he
showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the
war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the
impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so." Yet it
was no mask, it was instinctive.
On one of those days when the anxiety was keenest and the sky darkest a
delegation of prohibitionists came to him and insisted that the reason the
north did not win was because the soldiers drank so much whiskey and thus
brought the curse of the Lord down upon them. There was, we are told, a
mischievous twinkle in his eye when he replied that he considered it very
unfair on the part of the Lord, because the southerners drank a good deal
worse whiskey and more of it than the soldiers of the north.
Most of these stories and parables had a flavor of the west and of the
fields where they were collected in the days when, as a lawyer, he
followed the court from one town to another, and spent the nights in talk
around the tavern stove.
When asked one day how he disposed of a caller who had come to him in a
towering rage, he told of the farmer in Illinois who announced one Sunday
to his neighbors that he had gotten rid of a great log in the middle of
his field. They were anxious to know how, since it was too big to haul
out, too knotty to split, too wet and soggy to burn. And the farmer
announced: "I ploughed around it." "And so," he said, "I got rid of
General----. I ploughed around him, but it took me three hours to do it."
This, then, was the lank boatman who came down the river (that was once
the River Colbert) and who, seeing the horrors of the slave markets in New
Orleans, went back to the Sangamon with a memory of them that was a
"continual torment," as he said, and with a vow to hit that institution
hard if ever he had a chance. It was this boatman who was twenty years
later to have, of all men, the chance.
One cannot tell here, even in outline, the story of that irrepressible
conflict in which this western ploughman and lawyer became commander-in-
chief of an army of a million men and carried on a war involving the
expenditure of three billion dollars. One need not tell it. It need only
to be recalled that it was this man of the western waters who first saw
clearly, or first made it clearly seen, that the nation could not endure
permanently half slave and half free. "I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved," he said, "but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will
become all one thing or the other." And it was he who more than any one
single force brought the fulfilment of his prophecy--of a nation reunited
and all free.
He hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong."
But he wanted to get rid of it without injustice to those to whom it was
an inherited, if cherished, institution. If he saw a venomous snake in the
road he would take the nearest stick and kill it, but if he found it in
bed with his children, "I might hurt the children," he said, "more than
the snake and it might bite them." He was as tender and considerate of the
south as ever he was of an erring neighbor in Illinois, where it is
remembered that he carried home with his giant strength one whom his
comrades would have left to freeze, and nursed him through the night. So
he sat almost sleepless, sad-hearted, through the four dark years, but
resolute, cheering his own heart and those about him with a broad humor
that came as "Aesop's Fables" out of the fields and their elemental
wisdoms.
One summer's day, when ploughing in the fields of that land of Lincoln, I
heard a sound of buzzing in the air and, looking up, I saw a faint cloud
against the clear sky. I recognized it as a swarm of bees making their way
from a hive, they knew not where, and with an instinct born of the plains
at once I began to follow them and to throw up clods of earth to stop
their flight, bringing them down finally on the edge of the field upon a
branch of a tree, where they were at evening gathered into a new hive and
persuaded back to profitable industry instead of wasting their substance
in the forest. So this great ploughman used the clods of earth, the things
at his hand, illustrations from the fields, to bring the thoughts of his
countrymen down to contentful co-operation again.
"You may," said Alcibiades, speaking of Socrates, "imagine Brasidas and
others to have been like Achilles, or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor
to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men.
But of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness,
however remote, either among men that now are or who ever have been--other
than ... Silenus and the Satyrs, and they represent in a figure not only
himself but his words. For his words are like the images of Silenus which
open. They are ridiculous when you first hear them.... His talk is of
pack-beasts and smiths and cobblers and curriers.... But he who opens the
bust and sees what is within will find they are the only words which have
a meaning in them and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of
virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole
duty of a good and honorable man." [Footnote: Plato, "Symposium," Jowett's
trans., 1:592.]
The twenty-three centuries since Socrates do not furnish me with a fitter
characterization of Lincoln. His image was as homely as that of Silenus
was bestial. His talk was of ploughs and boats, polecats and whiskey. But
those who opened this homely image found in him a likeness as of no other
man, and in his words a meaning that was of widest and most ennobling
comprehension. And, as Crito said for all ages, after the sun that was on
the hilltops when Socrates took the poison had set and darkness had come:
"Of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best." So
has the poet of that western democracy given to all time this phrase, sung
in the evening of the day of Lincoln's martyrdom, at the time when the
lilac bloomed and the great star early dropped in the western sky and the
thrush sang solitary: "The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and
lands." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last."]
We ask ourselves if he was the gift of democracy. And we find ourselves
answering: his peculiar excellence could have come of no other order of
society. We ask ourselves anxiously if democracy has the unerring instinct
to find such men to embody its wishes, or did it take him only for a
talented rail-splitter--an average man? But we have no certain answer to
this anxious questioning. What gives most hope in new confusions and
problems, unknown to his day, however, is that the more clearly his
disinterestedness and forbearance and magnanimity and humility are
revealed, the wider and deeper is the feeling of admiration and love for
his character, which perhaps assures us, after all, better than anything
else, of the soundness and nobility of the ideals of democracy.
They carried this man at death over into the valley of his birth, into the
land of the men of the western waters that was Nouvelle France, and there
buried him among his neighbors, of whom he learned his spirit of
democracy, in the midst of scenes where he had mastered its language, in
the very ground that had taught him his parables, by the side of the
stream that gave him sight of his supreme mission. It is the greatest
visible monument to his achievement that the "Father of Waters ... goes
unvexed to the sea" [Footnote: Letter to John C. Conkling, August 25,
1863.] through one country instead of the territory of two or more nations
and that the slavery he witnessed is no more. But it is a greater monument
to him, as it is a nobler monument to those who have erected it in their
own hearts, that he is revered the length of the course of the river first
traced by La Salle, and through all the reach of the rivers of his claim
from its source, even as far as its mouth at the limitless sea.