The might that slumbers in a peasant's arm!
the majestic heritage, the measureless opportunity, of the humblest
American youth. Here was an heir of poverty and insignificance,
obscure, untaught, buried throughout his childhood in the frontier
forests, with no transcendent, dazzling abilities, such as make their
way in any country, under any institutions, but emphatically in
intellect, as in station, one of the millions of strivers for a rude
livelihood, who, though attaching himself stubbornly to the less
popular party, and especially so in the State which he has chosen as
his home, did nevertheless become a central figure of the Western
Hemisphere, and an object of honor, love, and reverence throughout the
civilized world. Had he been a genius, an intellectual prodigy, like
Julius Caesar, or Shakespeare, or Mirabeau, or Webster, we might say:
"This lesson is not for us--with such faculties any one could achieve
and succeed"; but he was not a born king of men, ruling by the
resistless might of his natural superiority, but a child of the
people, who made himself a great persuader, therefore a leader by dint
of firm resolve, and patient effort, and dogged perseverance. He
slowly won his way to eminence and renown by ever doing the work that
lay next to him--doing it with all his growing might--doing it as well
as he could, and learning by his failure, when failure was
encountered, how to do it better. Wendell Phillips once coarsely said,
"He grew because we watered him"; which was only true in so far as
this--he was open to all impressions and influences, and gladly
profited by all the teachings of events and circumstances, no matter
how adverse or unwelcome. There was probably no year of his life in
which he was not a wiser, larger, better man than he had been the year
preceding. It was of such a nature--patient, plodding, sometimes
groping, but ever towards the light--that Tennyson sings:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
There are those who profess to have been always satisfied with his
conduct of the war, deeming it prompt, energetic, vigorous, masterly.
I did not, and could not, so regard it. I believed then--I believe
this hour,--that a Napoleon I., a Jackson, would have crushed
secession out in a single short campaign--almost in a single victory.
I believed that an advance to Richmond 100,000 strong might have been
made by the end of June, 1861; that would have insured a
counter-revolution throughout the South, and a voluntary return of
every State, through a dispersion and disavowal of its rebel chiefs,
to the councils and the flag of the Union. But such a return would
have not merely left slavery intact--it would have established it on
firmer foundations than ever before. The momentarily alienated North
and South would have fallen on each other's necks, and, amid tears and
kisses, have sealed their reunion by ignominiously making the Black
the scapegoat of their bygone quarrel, and wreaking on him the spite
which they had purposed to expend on each other. But God had higher
ends, to which a Bull Run, a Ball's Bluff, a Gaines's Mill, a
Groveton, were indispensable: and so they came to pass, and were
endured and profited by. The Republic needed to be passed through
chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came
and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs
greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes. Other men were helpful to the
great renovation, and nobly did their part in it; yet, looking back
through the lifting mists of seven eventful, tragic, trying, glorious
years, I clearly discern that the one providential leader, the
indispensable hero of the great drama--faithfully reflecting even in
his hesitations and seeming vacillations the sentiment of the
masses--fitted by his very defects and shortcomings for the burden
laid upon him, the good to be wrought out through him, was Abraham
Lincoln.