Lincoln's Early Environment--Its Effect on his Character--His Attitude
toward Slavery and the Slaveholder--His Schooling in Disappointment--His
Seeming Failures--His Real Successes--The Final Trial--His
Achievements--His Place in History
A child born to an inheritance of want; a boy growing into a narrow
world of ignorance; a youth taking up the burden of coarse manual labor;
a man entering on the doubtful struggle of a local backwoods
career--these were the beginnings of Abraham Lincoln, if we analyze them
under the hard practical cynical philosophy which takes for its motto
that "nothing succeeds but success." If, however, we adopt a broader
philosophy, and apply the more generous and more universal principle
that "everything succeeds which attacks favorable opportunity with
fitting endeavor," then we see that it was the strong vitality, the
active intelligence, and the indefinable psychological law of moral
growth that assimilates the good and rejects the bad, which Nature gave
this obscure child, that carried him to the service of mankind and to
the admiration of the centuries with the same certainty with which the
acorn grows to be the oak.
We see how even the limitations of his environment helped the end.
Self-reliance, that most vital characteristic of the pioneer, was his by
blood and birth and training; and developed through the privations of
his lot and the genius that was in him to the mighty strength needed to
guide our great country through the titanic struggle of the Civil War.
The sense of equality was his, also by virtue of his pioneer training--a
consciousness fostered by life from childhood to manhood in a state of
society where there were neither rich to envy nor poor to despise, where
the gifts and hardships of the forest were distributed impartially to
each, and where men stood indeed equal before the forces of unsubdued
nature.
The same great forces taught liberality, modesty, charity, sympathy--in
a word, neighborliness. In that hard life, far removed from the
artificial aids and comforts of civilization, where all the wealth of
Croesus, had a man possessed it, would not have sufficed to purchase
relief from danger, or help in time of need, neighborliness became of
prime importance. A good neighbor doubled his safety and his resources,
a group of good neighbors increased his comfort and his prospects in a
ratio that grew like the cube root. Here was opportunity to practise
that virtue that Christ declared to be next to the love of God--the
fruitful injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
Here, too, in communities far from the customary restraints of organized
law, the common native intelligence of the pioneer was brought face to
face with primary and practical questions of natural right. These men
not only understood but appreciated the American doctrine of
self-government. It was this understanding, this feeling, which taught
Lincoln to write: "When the white man governs himself, that is
self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another
man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism"; and its
philosophic corollary: "He who would be no slave must consent to have no
slave."
Abraham Lincoln sprang from exceptional conditions--was in truth, in
the language of Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil." But this
distinction was not due alone to mere environment. The ordinary man,
with ordinary natural gifts, found in Western pioneer communities a
development essentially the same as he would have found under colonial
Virginia or Puritan New England: a commonplace life, varying only with
the changing ideas and customs of time and locality. But for the man
with extraordinary powers of body and mind; for the individual gifted by
nature with the genius which Abraham Lincoln possessed; the pioneer
condition, with its severe training in self-denial, patience, and
industry, was favorable to a development of character that helped in a
preëminent degree to qualify him for the duties and responsibilities of
leadership and government. He escaped the formal conventionalities which
beget insincerity and dissimulation. He grew up without being warped by
erroneous ideas or false principles; without being dwarfed by vanity, or
tempted by self-interest.
Some pioneer communities carried with them the institution of slavery;
and in the slave State of Kentucky Lincoln was born. He remained there
only a short time, and we have every reason to suppose that wherever he
might have grown to maturity his very mental and moral fiber would have
spurned the doctrine and practice of human slavery. And yet so subtle is
the influence of birth and custom, that we can trace one lasting effect
of this early and brief environment. Though he ever hated slavery, he
never hated the slaveholder. This ineradicable feeling of pardon and
sympathy for Kentucky and the South played no insignificant part in his
dealings with grave problems of statesmanship. He struck slavery its
death-blow with the hand of war, but he tendered the slaveholder a
golden equivalent with the hand of friendship and peace.
His advancement in the astonishing career which carried him from
obscurity to world-wide fame; from postmaster of New Salem village to
President of the United States; from captain of a backwoods volunteer
company to commander-in-chief of the army and navy, was neither sudden,
nor accidental, nor easy. He was both ambitious and successful, but his
ambition was moderate and his success was slow. And because his success
was slow, his ambition never outgrew either his judgment or his powers.
From the day when he left the paternal roof and launched his canoe on
the head waters of the Sangamon River to begin life on his own account,
to the day of his first inauguration, there intervened full thirty years
of toil, of study, self-denial, patience; often of effort baffled, of
hope deferred; sometimes of bitter disappointment. Given the natural
gift of great genius, given the condition of favorable environment, it
yet required an average lifetime and faithful unrelaxing effort to
transform the raw country stripling into a competent ruler for this
great nation.
Almost every success was balanced--sometimes overbalanced by a seeming
failure. Reversing the usual promotion, he went into the Black Hawk War
a captain and, through no fault of his own, came out a private. He rode
to the hostile frontier on horseback, and trudged home on foot. His
store "winked out." His surveyor's compass and chain, with which he was
earning a scanty living, were sold for debt. He was defeated in his
first campaign for the legislature; defeated in his first attempt to be
nominated for Congress; defeated in his application to be appointed
commissioner of the General Land Office; defeated for the Senate in the
Illinois legislature of 1854, when he had forty-five votes to begin
with, by Trumbull, who had only five votes to begin with; defeated in
the legislature of 1858, by an antiquated apportionment, when his joint
debates with Douglas had won him a popular plurality of nearly four
thousand in a Democratic State; defeated in the nomination for
Vice-President on the Frémont ticket in 1856, when a favorable nod from
half a dozen wire-workers would have brought him success.
Failures? Not so. Every seeming defeat was a slow success. His was the
growth of the oak, and not of Jonah's gourd. Every scaffolding of
temporary elevation he pulled down, every ladder of transient
expectation which broke under his feet accumulated his strength, and
piled up a solid mound which raised him to wider usefulness and clearer
vision. He could not become a master workman until he had served a
tedious apprenticeship. It was the quarter of a century of reading
thinking, speech-making and legislating which qualified him for
selection as the chosen champion of the Illinois Republicans in the
great Lincoln-Douglas joint debates of 1858. It was the great
intellectual victory won in these debates, plus the title "Honest old
Abe," won by truth and manhood among his neighbors during a whole
generation, that led the people of the United States to confide to his
hands the duties and powers of President.
And when, after thirty years of endeavor, success had beaten down
defeat; when Lincoln had been nominated elected, and inaugurated, came
the crowning trial of his faith and constancy. When the people, by free
and lawful choice, had placed honor and power in his hands; when his
signature could convene Congress, approve laws, make ministers, cause
ships to sail and armies to move; when he could speak with potential
voice to other rulers of other lands, there suddenly came upon the
government and the nation the symptoms of a fatal paralysis; honor
seemed to dwindle and power to vanish. Was he then, after all, not to be
President? Was patriotism dead? Was the Constitution waste paper? Was
the Union gone?
The indications were, indeed, ominous. Seven States were in rebellion.
There was treason in Congress, treason in the Supreme Court, treason in
the army and navy. Confusion and discord rent public opinion. To use
Lincoln's own forcible simile, sinners were calling the righteous to
repentance. Finally, the flag, insulted on the _Star of the West_,
trailed in capitulation at Sumter and then came the humiliation of the
Baltimore riot, and the President practically for a few days a prisoner
in the capital of the nation.
But his apprenticeship had been served, and there was no more failure.
With faith and justice and generosity he conducted for four long years a
civil war whose frontiers stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande;
whose soldiers numbered a million men on each side; in which, counting
skirmishes and battles small and great, was fought an average of two
engagements every day; and during which every twenty-four hours saw an
expenditure of two millions of money. The labor, the thought, the
responsibility, the strain of intellect and anguish of soul that he gave
to this great task, who can measure?
The sincerity of the fathers of the Republic was impugned he justified
them. The Declaration of Independence was called a "string of glittering
generalities" and a "self-evident lie"; he refuted the aspersion. The
Constitution was perverted; he corrected the error. The flag was
insulted; he redressed the offense. The government was assailed? he
restored its authority. Slavery thrust the sword of civil war at the
heart of the nation? he crushed slavery, and cemented the purified Union
in new and stronger bonds.
And all the while conciliation was as active as vindication was stern.
He reasoned and pleaded with the anger of the South; he gave
insurrection time to repent; he forbore to execute retaliation; he
offered recompense to slaveholders; he pardoned treason.
What but lifetime schooling in disappointment; what but the pioneer's
self-reliance and freedom from prejudice; what but the patient faith,
the clear perceptions of natural right, the unwarped sympathy and
unbounding charity of this man with spirit so humble and soul so great,
could have carried him through the labors he wrought to the victory he
attained?
As the territory may be said to be its body, and its material activities
its blood, so patriotism may be said to be the vital breath of a nation.
When patriotism dies, the nation dies, and its resources as well as its
territory go to other peoples with stronger vitality.
Patriotism can in no way be more effectively cultivated than by studying
and commemorating the achievements and virtues of our great men--the men
who have lived and died for the nation, who have advanced its prosperity,
increased its power, added to its glory. In our brief history the United
States can boast of many great men, and the achievement by its sons of
many great deeds; and if we accord the first rank to Washington as
founder, so we must unhesitatingly give to Lincoln the second place as
preserver and regenerator of American liberty. So far, however from being
opposed or subordinated either to the other, the popular heart has
already canonized these two as twin heroes in our national pantheon, as
twin stars in the firmament of our national fame.