slavery--and I must trust to your general knowledge of the history
of that question to make intelligible the attitude and leadership of
Lincoln as the champion of the hosts of freedom in the final contest.
Negro slavery had been firmly established in the Southern States from
an early period of their history. In 1619, the year before the Mayflower
landed our Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had
discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown in Virginia: All
through the colonial period their importation had continued. A few had
found their way into the Northern States, but none of them in sufficient
numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis for political power.
At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there is no
doubt that the principal members of the convention not only condemned
slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, but believed that by
the suppression of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual
extinction in the South, as it certainly was in the North. Washington,
in his will, provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and
said to Jefferson that it "was among his first wishes to see some plan
adopted by which slavery in his country might be abolished." Jefferson
said, referring to the institution: "I tremble for my country when I
think that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever,"--and
Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry were all utterly opposed
to it. But it was made the subject of a fatal compromise in the Federal
Constitution, whereby its existence was recognized in the States as a
basis of representation, the prohibition of the importation of slaves
was postponed for twenty years, and the return of fugitive slaves
provided for. But no imminent danger was apprehended from it till, by
the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture by negro labor
became at once and forever the leading industry of the South, and gave
a new impetus to the importation of slaves, so that in 1808, when
the constitutional prohibition took effect, their numbers had vastly
increased. From that time forward slavery became the basis of a great
political power, and the Southern States, under all circumstances and at
every opportunity, carried on a brave and unrelenting struggle for its
maintenance and extension.
The conscience of the North was slow to rise against it, though bitter
controversies from time to time took place. The Southern leaders
threatened disunion if their demands were not complied with. To save the
Union, compromise after compromise was made, but each one in the end was
broken. The Missouri Compromise, made in 1820 upon the occasion of
the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave State, whereby, in
consideration of such admission, slavery was forever excluded from the
Northwest Territory, was ruthlessly repealed in 1854, by a Congress
elected in the interests of the slave power, the intent being to force
slavery into that vast territory which had so long been dedicated to
freedom. This challenge at last aroused the slumbering conscience and
passion of the North, and led to the formation of the Republican party
for the avowed purpose of preventing, by constitutional methods, the
further extension of slavery.
In its first campaign, in 1856, though it failed to elect its
candidates; it received a surprising vote and carried many of the
States. No one could any longer doubt that the North had made up its
mind that no threats of disunion should deter it from pressing its
cherished purpose and performing its long neglected duty. From the
outset, Lincoln was one of the most active and effective leaders and
speakers of the new party, and the great debates between Lincoln and
Douglas in 1858, as the respective champions of the restriction and
extension of slavery, attracted the attention of the whole country.
Lincoln's powerful arguments carried conviction everywhere. His moral
nature was thoroughly aroused his conscience was stirred to the quick.
Unless slavery was wrong, nothing was wrong. Was each man, of whatever
color, entitled to the fruits of his own labor, or could one man live
in idle luxury by the sweat of another's brow, whose skin was darker?
He was an implicit believer in that principle of the Declaration of
Independence that all men are vested with certain inalienable rights
the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On this
doctrine he staked his case and carried it. We have time only for one or
two sentences in which he struck the keynote of the contest.
"The real issue in this country 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.'"
He foresaw with unerring vision that the conflict was inevitable and
irrepressible--that one or the other, the right or the wrong, freedom
or slavery, must ultimately prevail and wholly prevail, throughout the
country; and this was the principle that carried the war, once begun, to
a finish.
One sentence of his is immortal:
"Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the slavery 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."
During the entire decade from 1850 to 1860 the agitation of the
slavery question was at the boiling point, and events which have become
historical continually indicated the near approach of the overwhelming
storm. No sooner had the Compromise Acts of 1850 resulted in a temporary
peace, which everybody said must be final and perpetual, than new
outbreaks came. The forcible carrying away of fugitive slaves by Federal
troops from Boston agitated that ancient stronghold of freedom to its
foundations. The publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which truly exposed
the frightful possibilities of the slave system; the reckless attempts
by force and fraud to establish it in Kansas against the will of the
vast majority of the settlers; the beating of Summer in the Senate
Chamber for words spoken in debate; the Dred Scott decision in the
Supreme Court, which made the nation realize that the slave power had at
last reached the fountain of Federal justice; and finally the execution
of John Brown, for his wild raid into Virginia, to invite the slaves to
rally to the standard of freedom which he unfurled:--all these events
tend to illustrate and confirm Lincoln's contention that the nation
could not permanently continue half slave and half free, but must become
all one thing or all the other. When John Brown lay under sentence of
death he declared that now he was sure that slavery must be wiped out in
blood; but neither he nor his executioners dreamt that within four years
a million soldiers would be marching across the country for its final
extirpation, to the music of the war-song of the great conflict:
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on."
And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the wilderness, this
farm laborer, rail-sputter, flatboatman, this surveyor, lawyer, orator,
statesman, and patriot, found himself elected by the great party which
was pledged to prevent at all hazards the further extension of slavery,
as the chief magistrate of the Republic, bound to carry out that
purpose, to be the leader and ruler of the nation in its most trying
hour.
Those who believe that there is a living Providence that overrules and
conducts the affairs of nations, find in the elevation of this plain man
to this extraordinary fortune and to this great duty, which he so
fitly discharged, a signal vindication of their faith. Perhaps to this
philosophical institution the judgment of our philosopher Emerson will
commend itself as a just estimate of Lincoln's historical place.
"His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense of
mankind and of the public conscience. He grew according to the need; his
mind mastered the problem of the day: and as the problem grew, so did
his comprehension of it. In the war there was no place for holiday
magistrate, nor fair-weather sailor. The new pilot was hurried to
the helm in a tornado. In four years--four years of battle days--his
endurance, his fertility of resource, his magnanimity, were sorely
tried, and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his
even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure
in the centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
people in his time, the true representative of this continent--father
of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the
thought of their mind--articulated in his tongue."
He was born great, as distinguished from those who achieve greatness or
have it thrust upon them, and his inherent capacity, mental, moral, and
physical, having been recognized by the educated intelligence of a free
people, they happily chose him for their ruler in a day of deadly peril.
It is now forty years since I first saw and heard Abraham Lincoln, but
the impression which he left on my mind is ineffaceable. After his great
successes in the West he came to New York to make a political address.
He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people
among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing
impressive or imposing about him--except that his great stature singled
him out from the crowd: his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame;
his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of color; his
seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle;
his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave
little evidence of that brain power which had raised him from the lowest
to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before
the meeting, he seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which
a young man might feel before presenting himself to a new and strange
audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded. It was a great
audience, including all the noted men--all the learned and cultured of
his party in New York editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants,
critics. They were all very curious to hear him. His fame as a powerful
speaker had preceded him, and exaggerated rumor of his wit--the worst
forerunner of an orator--had reached the East. When Mr. Bryant presented
him, on the high platform of the Cooper Institute, a vast sea of eager
upturned faces greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this
rude child of the people was like. He was equal to the occasion. When
he spoke he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face
shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half
he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and
manner of delivery were severely simple. What Lowell called "the
grand simplicities of the Bible," with which he was so familiar, were
reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric,
without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point. If any came
expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they
must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his
utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere
self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all
meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur and strength of
absolute simplicity.
He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thoroughly. He
demonstrated by copious historical proofs and masterly logic that the
fathers who created the Constitution in order to form a more perfect
union, to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty
to themselves and their posterity, intended to empower the Federal
Government to exclude slavery from the Territories. In the kindliest
spirit he protested against the avowed threat of the Southern States to
destroy the Union if, in order to secure freedom in those vast regions
out of which future States were to be carved, a Republican President
were elected. He closed with an appeal to his audience, spoken with all
the fire of his aroused and kindling conscience, with a full outpouring
of his love of justice and liberty, to maintain their political purpose
on that lofty and unassailable issue of right and wrong which alone
could justify it, and not to be intimidated from their high resolve and
sacred duty by any threats of destruction to the government or of ruin
to themselves. He concluded with this telling sentence, which drove the
whole argument home to all our hearts: "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." That night the great hall, and the next day the whole
city, rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who had
come as a stranger departed with the laurels of great triumph.
Alas! in five years from that exulting night I saw him again, for the
last time, in the same city, borne in his coffin through its draped
streets. With tears and lamentations a heart-broken people accompanied
him from Washington, the scene of his martyrdom, to his last
resting-place in the young city of the West where he had worked his way
to fame.
Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than Lincoln when
he entered office on the fourth of March, 1861, four months after his
election, and took his oath to support the Constitution and the Union.
The intervening time had been busily employed by the Southern States in
carrying out their threat of disunion in the event of his election.
As soon as the fact was ascertained, seven of them had seceded and had
seized upon the forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other public property
of the United States within their boundaries, and were making every
preparation for war. In the meantime the retiring President, who had
been elected by the slave power, and who thought the seceding States
could not lawfully be coerced, had done absolutely nothing. Lincoln
found himself, by the Constitution, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and
Navy of the United States, but with only a remnant of either at hand.
Each was to be created on a great scale out of the unknown resources of
a nation untried in war.
In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while appealing to the
seceding States to return to their allegiance, he avowed his purpose to
keep the solemn oath he had taken that day, to see that the laws of the
Union were faithfully executed, and to use the troops to recover the
forts, navy yards, and other property belonging to the government. It
is probable, however, that neither side actually realized that war
was inevitable, and that the other was determined to fight, until the
assault on Fort Sumter presented the South as the first aggressor
and roused the North to use every possible resource to maintain the
government and the imperilled Union, and to vindicate the supremacy of
the flag over every inch of the territory of the United States. The
fact that Lincoln's first proclamation called for only 75,000 troops, to
serve for three months, shows how inadequate was even his idea of what
the future had in store. But from that moment Lincoln and his loyal
supporters never faltered in their purpose. They knew they could win,
that it was their duty to win, and that for America the whole hope
of the future depended upon their winning; for now by the acts of the
seceding States the issue of the election to secure or prevent the
extension of slavery--stood transformed into a struggle to preserve or
to destroy the Union.
We cannot follow this contest. You know its gigantic proportions; that
it lasted four years instead of three months; that in its progress,
instead of 75,000 men, more than 2,000,000 were enrolled on the side
of the government alone; that the aggregate cost and loss to the nation
approximated to 1,000,000,000 pounds sterling, and that not less than
300,000 brave and precious lives were sacrificed on each side. History
has recorded how Lincoln bore himself during these four frightful years;
that he was the real President, the responsible and actual head of the
government, through it all; that he listened to all advice, heard all
parties, and then, always realizing his responsibility to God and the
nation, decided every great executive question for himself. His absolute
honesty had become proverbial long before he was President. "Honest Abe
Lincoln" was the name by which he had been known for years. His every
act attested it.
In all the grandeur of the vast power that he wielded, he never ceased
to be one of the plain people, as he always called them, never lost or
impaired his perfect sympathy with them, was always in perfect touch
with them and open to their appeals; and here lay the very secret of
his personality and of his power, for the people in turn gave him their
absolute confidence. His courage, his fortitude, his patience, his
hopefulness, were sorely tried but never exhausted.
He was true as steel to his generals, but had frequent occasion to
change them, as he found them inadequate. This serious and painful duty
rested wholly upon him, and was perhaps his most important function as
Commander-in-Chief; but when, at last, he recognized in General Grant
the master of the situation, the man who could and would bring the war
to a triumphant end, he gave it all over to him and upheld him with all
his might. Amid all the pressure and distress that the burdens of office
brought upon him, his unfailing sense of humor saved him; probably it
made it possible for him to live under the burden. He had always been
the great story-teller of the West, and he used and cultivated this
faculty to relieve the weight of the load he bore.
It enabled him to keep the wonderful record of never having lost his
temper, no matter what agony he had to bear. A whole night might be
spent in recounting the stories of his wit, humor, and harmless sarcasm.
But I will recall only two of his sayings, both about General Grant, who
always found plenty of enemies and critics to urge the President to oust
him from his command. One, I am sure, will interest all Scotchmen. They
repeated with malicious intent the gossip that Grant drank. "What
does he drink?" asked Lincoln. "Whiskey," was, of course, the answer;
doubtless you can guess the brand. "Well," said the President, "just
find out what particular kind he uses and I'll send a barrel to each of
my other generals." The other must be as pleasing to the British as
to the American ear. When pressed again on other grounds to get rid of
Grant, he declared, "I can't spare that man, he fights!"
He was tender-hearted to a fault, and never could resist the appeals of
wives and mothers of soldiers who had got into trouble and were under
sentence of death for their offences. His Secretary of War and other
officials complained that they never could get deserters shot. As surely
as the women of the culprit's family could get at him he always gave
way. Certainly you will all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the
suffering relatives of those who had fallen in battle. His heart bled
with theirs. Never was there a more gentle and tender utterance than his
letter to a mother who had given all her sons to her country, written at
a time when the angel of death had visited almost every household in the
land, and was already hovering over him.
"I have been shown," he says, "in the files of the War Department a
statement 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 your grief for a
loss so overwhelming but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the
consolation which 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 the
lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a
sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."
Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her queenly
and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and tender to soothe
the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.
The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted the
country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will doubtless
secure for him a foremost place in history among the philanthropists
and benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading
slavery, so many millions of his fellow-beings described in the law and
existing in fact as "chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners
and possessors, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever."
Rarely does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service
to his kind--to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.
Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more signal instance of this
triumph of an idea than here. William Lloyd Garrison, who thirty years
before had begun his crusade for the abolition of slavery, and had lived
to see this glorious and unexpected consummation of the hopeless cause
to which he had devoted his life, well described the proclamation as
a "great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and
beneficent in its far-reaching consequences, and eminently just and
right alike to the oppressor and the oppressed."
Lincoln had always been heart and soul opposed to slavery. Tradition
says that on the trip on the flatboat to New Orleans he formed his
first and last opinion of slavery at the sight of negroes chained and
scourged, and that then and there the iron entered into his soul. No
boy could grow to manhood in those days as a poor white in Kentucky and
Indiana, in close contact with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a
growing consciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as
of its frightful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois,
where the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution and
violently against every movement for its abolition or restriction, upon
the passage of resolutions to that effect he had the courage with one
companion to put on record his protest, "believing that the institution
of slavery is founded both in injustice and bad policy." No great
demonstration of courage, you will say; but that was at a time when
Garrison, for his abolition utterances, had been dragged by an angry mob
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in
the very year that Lovejoy in the same State of Illinois was slain by
rioters while defending his press, from which he had printed antislavery
appeals.
In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition in the District
of Columbia, with compensation to the owners, for until they raised
treasonable hands against the life of the nation he always maintained
that the property of the slaveholders, into which they had come by two
centuries of descent, without fault on their part, ought not to be taken
away from them without just compensation. He used to say that, one way
or another, he had voted forty-two times for the Wilmot Proviso, which
Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania moved as an addition to every bill which
affected United States territory, "that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall ever exist in any part of the said territory," and it is
evident that his condemnation of the system, on moral grounds as a crime
against the human race, and on political grounds as a cancer that was
sapping the vitals of the nation, and must master its whole being or
be itself extirpated, grew steadily upon him until it culminated in his
great speeches in the Illinois debate.