Four score 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 above 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 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, and for the people
Shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln attained this classic perfection of ordered thought, and with
it, as an inevitable accompaniment this classic beauty of expression,
only by great struggle. He became a poet of the first rank only by
virtue of his moral spirit. He was continually correcting deficiencies
in his character, which were far greater than is generally received,
owing to the tendency of American historians of the tribe of Parson
Weems to find by force illustrations of moral heroism in the youth of
our great men. Thus Lincoln is represented as a noble lad, who, having
allowed a borrowed book to be ruined by rain, went to the owner and
offered to "pull fodder" to repay him, which the man ungenerously
permitted him to do. The truth is, that the neighbor, to whom the book
was a cherished possession, required him to do the work in repayment,
and that Lincoln not only did it grudgingly, but afterwards lampooned
the man so severely in satiric verse that he was ashamed to show himself
at neighborhood gatherings. All the people about Gentryville feared
Lincoln's caustic wit, and disliked him for it, although they were
greatly impressed with his ability exhibited thereby. Lincoln recognized
his moral obliquity, and curbed his propensity for satire, which was a
case of that "exercise of natural faculty" which affects all gifted
persons. And when he left that region he visited all the neighbors, and
asked pardon of those whom he had ridiculed. The true Lincoln is a far
better example to boys than the fictitious one, in that he had more
unlovely traits at first than the average lad, yet he reformed, with the
result that, when he went to new scenes, he speedily became the most
popular young man in the neighborhood. He was one of those who
"rise on stepping stones
Of their dead selves to higher things."
The reformation of his character by self examination and determination
not to make the same mistake again seems to have induced similar
effects and methods for their attainment in the case of his
intellectual development. Whatever the connection, both regenerations
proceeded apace. Lincoln at first was a shallow thinker, accepting
without examination the views of others, especially popular statesmen,
such as Henry Clay, whose magnetic personality was drawing to himself
the high-spirited young men of the West. Some of the political
doctrines which Lincoln then adopted he retained to the end, these
being on subjects such as taxation and finance whose moral bearing was
not apparent, and therefore into which he never inquired closely, for
Lincoln's mind could not be profoundly interested in any save a moral
question. When he found that a revered statesman was weak upon a
crucial moral issue, he repressed his innate tendency to loyalty and
rejected him. Thus, after a visit to Henry Clay in Kentucky, when the
slavery question was arising to vex the country despite the efforts
the aged statesman had made to settle it by the compromise of 1850,
Lincoln returned disillusioned, having found that the light he himself
possessed on the subject was clearer than that of his old leader. The
eulogy which he delivered on the death of Clay, which occurred shortly
afterward (in 1852), is the most perfunctory of all his addresses.
Indeed, not till the time of the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise of
1854, which brought Lincoln back into politics by its overthrow of
what he regarded as the constitutional exclusion of slavery from the
Territories, did he rise to his highest powers as a thinker and
speaker. Lincoln had been defeated for reelection to Congress because
of his opposition, though not highly moral in character, to the
popular Mexican war, and, regarding himself as a political failure, he
had devoted himself to law. His most notable speech in the House of
Representatives, a well composed satirical arraignment of President
Polk for throwing the country into war, had failed utterly of its
intended effect, probably because of its trimming partisan tone. In
1854 he was relieved of the trammels of party, the Whigs having gone
to smash. Anti-slavery had become a great moral movement, and he was
drawn into its current. Almost at once he became its Western leader.
His speech against the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise which had
been effected by his inveterate antagonist, Senator Stephen A.
Douglas, was his first classic achievement in argumentative oratory.
While in the greater aspect of artistic composition, the form of the
address as a whole, his master was Euclid, in minor points the
influence of Shakespeare, of whom Lincoln had become a great reader,
was apparent, as indicated by a quotation from the dramatist, and an
application to Senator Douglas of the scene of Lady Macbeth trying to
wash out the indelible stain upon her hand. Also the Bible was the
source of strong and telling phrases and figures of speech. Thus he
denominated slavery as "the great Behemoth of danger," and asked,
"shall the strong grip of the nation be loosened upon him, to intrust
him to the hands of his feeble keepers?"
And, in the following passage, characteristic of the new Lincoln, I
think that either Shakespeare and the Bible had combined to inspire
him with graphic description of character and moral indignation, or
they enforced these native powers.
"Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of
native tyrants known as the 'Slave-Dealer'. He watches your
necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculative price.
If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you
drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not
recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children
must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little
negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged
to deal with him you try to get through the job without so much as
touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you
meet, but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony--instinctively
shrinking from the snaky contact."
Of Lincoln's critical appreciation of Shakespeare Frank B. Carpenter,
the artist of the "First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation"
(see illustration on page 206), writes in his "Six Months at the White
House with Abraham Lincoln" as follows:
"Presently the conversation turned upon Shakspeare, of whom it is well
known Mr. Lincoln was very fond. He once remarked, 'It matters not to
me whether Shakspeare be well or ill acted; with him the thought
suffices.' Edwin Booth was playing an engagement at this time at
Grover's Theatre. He had been announced for the coming evening in his
famous part of _Hamlet_. The President had never witnessed his
representation of this character, and he proposed being present. The
mention of this play, which I afterward learned had at all times a
peculiar charm for Mr. Lincoln's mind, waked up a train of thought I
was not prepared for. Said he,--and his words have often returned to
me with a sad interest since his own assassination,--'There is one
passage of the play of "Hamlet" which is very apt to be slurred over
by the actor, or omitted altogether, which seems to me the choicest
part of the play. It is the soliloquy of the King, after the murder.
It always struck me as one of the finest touches of nature in the
world.'
"Then, throwing himself into the very spirit of the scene, he took
up the words:--
"'O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon't,
A brother's murder!--Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will;
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother's blood?
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence;
And what's in prayer but this twofold force--
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardoned, being down? Then I'll look up;
My fault is past. But O what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder?--
That cannot be; since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder,--
My crown, my own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardoned and retain the offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world,
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law; but 'tis not so _above_.
There is no shuffling; there the action lies
In its true nature; and we ourselves compelled,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? What rests?
Try what repentance can; what can it not?
Yet what can it when one cannot repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O bruised soul that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels, make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees! And heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe;
All may be well!'
"He repeated this entire passage from memory, with a feeling and
appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.
Remaining in thought for a few moments, he continued:--
"'The opening of the play of "King Richard the Third" seems to me often
entirely misapprehended. It is quite common for an actor to come upon
the stage, and, in a sophomoric style, to begin with a flourish:--
"'Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York,
And all the clouds that lowered upon our house,
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.'
"'Now,' said he, 'this is all wrong. Richard, you remember, had been,
and was then plotting the destruction of his brothers, to make room
for himself. Outwardly, the most loyal to the newly crowned king,
secretly he could scarcely contain his impatience at the obstacles
still in the way of his own elevation. He appears upon the stage, just
after the crowning of Edward, burning with repressed hate and
jealousy. The prologue is the utterance of the most intense bitterness
and satire.' Then, unconsciously assuming the character, Mr. Lincoln
repeated, also from memory, Richard's soliloquy, rendering it with a
degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation to me.
Though familiar with the passage from boyhood, I can truly say that
never till that moment had I fully appreciated its spirit. I could not
refrain from laying down my palette and brushes, and applauding
heartily upon his conclusion, saying, at the same time, half in
earnest, that I was not sure but that he had made a mistake in the
choice of a profession, considerably, as may be imagined, to his
amusement. Mr. Sinclair has since repeatedly said to me that he never
heard these choice passages of Shakspeare rendered with more effect by
the most famous of modern actors."
Lincoln's sense of the classic phrase seems to have been native with
him, for we find it in his earliest utterances. Such a phrase appears
in homely proverbial form in his first speech: "My politics are short
and sweet, like the old woman's dance." Impaired in rhythm of thought
and sound by an awkward, though logical, parenthetical expression,
another phrase stands out in a "spread-eagle" passage from his first
formal address, that on "The Perpetuation of Our Political
Institutions."
"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the
treasure of earth (our own excepted) in its military chest, with a
Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force _take a drink from the
Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge_ in a trial of a thousand
years."
And in a eulogy on Washington, Lincoln early achieved a line which in
phonetic quality, rhetorical figure and rhythmic cadence is pure
poetry, though not of an exceptional order.
"In solemn awe we pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless
splendor leave it shining on."
In an article entitled "Lincoln's Literary Experiments," by John G.
Nicolay, one of Lincoln's two private secretaries, which was published
in the Century Magazine for April, 1894, are reproduced Lincoln's
notes of one lyceum lecture on "Niagara Falls," and the text of
another on "Discoveries, Inventions and Improvements." These, however,
detract, if anything, from Lincoln's reputation as a writer, for in
choice of subjects and in style of treatment there is seen an almost
discreditable stooping of a man of genius, even in his function of
teacher, to the low popular taste of the West at the time. In the
first lecture Lincoln presented the statistics of the water power of
Niagara Falls for each minute, and led his hearers from this base to
the "contemplation of the vast power the sun is constantly exerting in
the quiet noiseless operation of lifting water up to be rained down
again." Yet at this point he stopped short of his duty as an educator,
for he made no suggestion as to the utilization of this power. He was
satisfied with giving the people what they had come for--the pleasant
excitation of a mental faculty, that of the imagination in its primary
form of wonder at the grandeur of the material universe. In short, he
was acting as a mere entertainer--as so many of our public men do now
at "Chautauquas."
In the second lecture he performed this function in a still more
discreditable manner, by catering to the unworthy demand of his
hearers for obvious and familiar humorous conceptions to grasp which
would cause them no mental exertion. Thus, in speaking of the
inventions of the locomotive and telegraph, already old enough for the
first inevitable similitudes and jocose remarks about them to be
current, he said:
"The iron horse is panting and impatient to carry him (man) everywhere
in no time; and the lightning stands ready harnessed to take and bring
his tidings in a trifle less than no time."
This reveals Lincoln's taste for the characteristic American humor of
exaggeration, which was later to afford him relief from the stress and
strain of his duties as President in the works of "Petroleum V. Nasby"
and "Artemus Ward," writers, however, with a quaint originality which
lifted them and their admirers above the plane of humorous composition
and appreciation of the preceding decade. Indeed, Lincoln developed
his own power of witty expression to a degree excelling that of the
writers he admired, and in quality of product, if not in quantity (for
the greater part of the "funny stories" attributed to him, thank
heaven, are apocryphal) he stands in the front rank of the American
humorists of his generation.
And as the poet and the wit are near akin through this common appeal
to the imagination, Lincoln, had he overcome the obsession of
melancholy in his nature which was the mood in which he resorted to
poetry, and which early limited his taste for it to verse of a sad and
reflective kind, might have become a literary craftsman of the order
of Holmes, whose poetry in the main was bright and joyous, and, even
when he occasionally touched upon such subjects as death, was, as we
have seen, informed with inspiring Hellenic beauty rather than
depressing Hebraic moralization. It was in his sad moments, says Henry
C. Whitney, that the mind of Lincoln "gravitated toward the weird,
sombre and mystical. In his normal and tranquil state of mind, 'The
Last Leaf,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was his favorite" (poem). It was
Lincoln's happy lot to rise in the realm of oratory by the power of
his poetic spirit higher than any American, save probably Emerson, has
done in other fields of literature. On the theme of slavery, where his
unerring moral sense had free sway, he became our supreme orator,
transcending even Webster in grandeur of thought and beauty of its
expression. His periods are not as sonorous as the Olympian New
England orator's, but their accents will reach as far and resound even
longer by the carrying and sustaining power of the ideas which they
express. Indeed, it is on the wings supplied by Lincoln that Webster's
most significant conception, that of the nature of the Constitution,
is even now borne along, because of the uplifting ideality which
Lincoln gave it by more broadly applying it to the nation itself as an
examplar and preserver to the world of ideal government.
Webster said: "It is, sir, the people's Constitution, the people's
Government; made for the people; made by the people; and answerable to
the people."
This he made the thesis for an argument which was to be followed by a
magnificent peroration ending with a sentiment, calculated for use as
a toast at political banquets, and as a patriotic slogan: "Liberty and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"
Lincoln with purer taste, the expression of which, be it said to
Webster's credit, had been made possible by the acceptance of the
earlier statesman's contention, assumed the thesis as placed beyond
all controversy, and, making it the exhortation of his speech, gave
to it the character of a sacred adjuration: "That we here highly
resolve ... that government of the people, by the people, and for
the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Another example of Lincoln's ability to improve the composition of
another writer is the closing paragraph of his first inaugural
address. The President-elect had submitted the manuscript of this most
important speech, which would be universally scrutinized to find what
policy he would adopt toward the seceded States, to Seward, his chosen
Secretary of State, for criticism and suggestion. Mr. Seward approved
the argument, but advised the addition of a closing paragraph "to meet
and remove prejudice and passion in the South; and despondency in the
East." He submitted two paragraphs of his own as alternative models.
The second was in that poetic vein which occasionally cropped out in
Seward's speeches, and over which Lincoln on better acquaintance was
wont good-naturedly to rally him. It is evidence of Lincoln's
predilection for poetic language, at least at the close of a speech,
that he adopted the latter paragraph. It ran:
"I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but
fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our
bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not,
be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many
battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts
and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again
harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian
angel of the nation."
Lincoln, by deft touches which reveal a literary taste beyond that of
any statesman of his time, indeed beyond that which he himself had yet
exhibited, transformed this passage into his peroration. His
emendations were largely in the way of excision of unnecessary
phrases, resolution of sentences broken in construction into several
shorter, more direct ones, and change of general and vague terms in
rhetorical figure to concrete and picturesque words. He wrote:
"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be
enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds
of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every
battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone
all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when
again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our
nature."
More than the persuasive argument and gentle yet determined spirit of
the address, it was the chaste beauty and tender feeling of these
closing words which convinced the people that Lincoln measured up to
the high mental and moral stature demanded of one who was to be their
leader through the most critical period that had arisen in the life of
the nation.
The second inaugural address, coming so shortly before the President's
death, formed unintentionally his farewell address. It has the spirit
and tone of prophecy. The Bible, in thought and expression, was its
inspiration. The first two of its three paragraphs ring like a chapter
from Isaiah, chief of the poet seers of old. The concluding paragraph
is an apostolic benediction such as Paul or John might have delivered.
"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the
work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who
shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan--to do
all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves, and with all nations."
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