His death seemed to have marked a step in the education of the people
everywhere. It requires years, perhaps centuries, to build the
structure of a reputation which rests upon the opinion of those
distinguished for learning or intelligence; the progress of opinion
from the few to the many is slow and painful. But in the case of
Lincoln the many imposed their opinion all at once; he was canonized,
as he lay on his bier, by the irresistible decree of countless
millions. The greater part of the aristocracy of England thought
little of him; but the burst of grief from the English people silenced
in an instant every discordant voice. It would have been as imprudent
to speak slightingly of him in London as it was in New York.
Especially among the Dissenters was honor and reverence shown to his
name. The humbler people instinctively felt that their order had lost
its wisest champion.
[Footnote 61: From Volume X, Chapter XVIII, of "Abraham Lincoln: a
History." Copyright, 1886, 1890, by John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
Published by the Century Co.]
Not only among those of Saxon blood was this outburst of emotion seen.
In France a national manifestation took place, which the government
disliked but did not think it wise to suppress. The students of Paris
marched in a body to the American Legation to express their sympathy.
A two-cent subscription was started to strike a massive gold medal;
the money was soon raised, but the committee was forced to have the
work done in Switzerland. A committee of French liberals brought the
medal to the American minister, to be sent to Mrs. Lincoln. "Tell
her," said Eugene Pelletan, "the heart of France is in that little
box." The inscription had a double sense; while honoring the dead
republican, it struck at the Empire: "Lincoln--the Honest Man;
abolished Slavery, reestablished the Union; Saved the Republic,
without veiling the Statue of Liberty."
Everywhere on the Continent the same swift apotheosis of the people's
hero was seen. An Austrian deputy said to the writer, "Among my people
his memory has already assumed superhuman proportions; he has become a
myth, a type of ideal democracy." Almost before the earth closed over
him he began to be the subject of fable. The Freemasons of Europe
generally regard him as one of them--his portrait in masonic garb is
often displayed; yet he was not one of that brotherhood. The
spiritualists claim him as their most illustrious adept, but he was
not a spiritualist; and there is hardly a sect in the Western world,
from the Calvinist to the atheist, but affects to believe he was of
their opinion.
A collection of the expressions of sympathy and condolence which came
to Washington from foreign governments, associations, and public
bodies of all sorts, was made by the State Department, and afterward
published by order of Congress. It forms a large quarto of a thousand
pages, and embraces the utterances of grief and regret from every
country under the sun, in almost every language spoken by man.
But admired and venerated as he was in Europe, he was best understood
and appreciated at home. It is not to be denied that in his case, as
in that of all heroic personages who occupy a great place in history,
a certain element of legend mingles with his righteous fame. He was a
man, in fact, especially liable to legend....
Because Lincoln kept himself in such constant sympathy with the common
people, whom he respected too highly to flatter or mislead, he was
rewarded by a reverence and a love hardly ever given to a human being.
Among the humble working people of the South whom he had made free
this veneration and affection easily passed into the supernatural. At
a religious meeting among the negroes of the Sea Islands a young man
exprest the wish that he might see Lincoln. A gray-headed negro
rebuked the rash aspiration: "No man see Linkum. Linkum walk as Jesus
walk; no man see Linkum."...
The quick instinct by which the world recognized him even at the
moment of his death as one of its greatest men, was not deceived. It
has been confirmed by the sober thought of a quarter of a century.
The writers of each nation compare him with their first popular hero.
The French find points of resemblance in him to Henry IV; the Dutch
liken him to William of Orange: the cruel stroke of murder and treason
by which all three perished in the height of their power naturally
suggests the comparison, which is strangely justified in both cases,
tho the two princes were so widely different in character. Lincoln had
the wit, the bonhomie, the keen practical insight into affairs, of the
Bearnais; and the tyrannous moral sense, the wide comprehension, the
heroic patience of the Dutch patriot, whose motto might have served
equally well for the American President--_"Saevis tranquillus in
undis."_ European historians speak of him in words reserved for the
most illustrious names.
In this country, where millions still live who were his
contemporaries, and thousands who knew him personally; where the
envies and jealousies which dog the footsteps of success still linger
in the hearts of a few; where journals still exist that loaded his
name for four years with daily calumny, and writers of memoirs vainly
try to make themselves important by belittling him--his fame has
become as universal as the air, as deeply rooted as the hills. The
faint discords are not heard in the wide chorus that hails him second
to none and equaled by Washington alone. The eulogies of him form a
special literature. Preachers, poets, soldiers, and statesmen employ
the same phrases of unconditional love and reverence. Men speaking
with the authority of fame use unqualified superlatives....
It is not difficult to perceive the basis of this sudden and
world-wide fame, nor rash to predict its indefinite duration. There
are two classes of men whose names are more enduring than any
monument: the great writers, and the men of great achievement--the
founders of states, the conquerors. Lincoln has the singular fortune
to belong to both these categories; upon these broad and stable
foundations his renown is securely built. Nothing would have more
amazed him while he lived than to hear himself called a man of
letters; but this age has produced few greater writers. We are only
recording here the judgment of his peers. Emerson ranks him with AEsop
and Pilpay, in his lighter moods....
The more his writings are studied in connection with the important
transactions of his age, the higher will his reputation stand in the
opinion of the lettered class. But the men of study and research are
never numerous; and it is principally as a man of action that the
world at large will regard him. It is the story of his objective life
that will forever touch and hold the heart of mankind. His birthright
was privation and ignorance--not peculiar to his family, but the
universal environment of his place and time; he burst through those
enchaining conditions by the force of native genius and will: vice had
no temptation for him; his course was as naturally upward as the
skylark's; he won, against all conceivable obstacles, a high place in
an exacting profession and an honorable position in public and private
life; he became the foremost representative of a party founded on an
uprising of the national conscience against a secular wrong, and thus
came to the awful responsibilities of power in a time of terror and
gloom. He met them with incomparable strength and virtue. Caring for
nothing but the public good, free from envy or jealous fears, he
surrounded himself with the leading men of his party, his most
formidable rivals in public esteem, and through four years of
stupendous difficulties he was head and shoulders above them all in
the vital qualities of wisdom, foresight, knowledge of men, and
thorough comprehension of measures. Personally opposed, as the
radicals claim, by more than half of his own party in Congress, and
bitterly denounced and maligned by his open adversaries, he yet bore
himself with such extraordinary discretion and skill that he obtained
for the government all the legislation it required, and so imprest
himself upon the national mind that without personal effort or
solicitation he became the only possible candidate of his party for
reelection, and was chosen by an almost unanimous vote of the
electoral colleges....
To these qualifications of high literary excellence, and easy
practical mastery of affairs of transcendent importance we must add,
as an explanation of his immediate and world-wide fame, his possession
of certain moral qualities rarely combined in such high degree in one
individual. His heart was so tender that he would dismount from his
horse in a forest to replace in their nest young birds which had
fallen by the roadside; he could not sleep at night if he knew that a
soldier-boy was under sentence of death; he could not, even at the
bidding of duty or policy, refuse the prayer of age or helplessness in
distress. Children instinctively loved him; they never found his
rugged features ugly; his sympathies were quick and seemingly
unlimited. He was absolutely without prejudice of class or condition.
Frederick Douglass says he was the only man of distinction he ever met
who never reminded him, by word or manner, of his color; he was as
just and generous to the rich and well-born as to the poor and
humble--a thing rare among politicians. He was tolerant even of evil:
tho no man can ever have lived with a loftier scorn of meanness and
selfishness, he yet recognized their existence and counted with them.
He said one day, with a flash of cynical wisdom worthy of a La
Rochefoucauld, that honest statesmanship was the employment of
individual meanness for the public good. He never asked perfection of
any one; he did not even insist, for others, upon the high standards
he set up for himself. At a time before the word was invented he was
the first of opportunists. With the fire of a reformer and a martyr in
his heart, he yet proceeded by the ways of cautious and practical
statecraft. He always worked with things as they were, while never
relinquishing the desire and effort to make them better. To a hope
which saw the delectable mountains of absolute justice and peace in
the future, to a faith that God in his own time would give to all men
the things convenient to them, he added a charity which embraced in
its deep bosom all the good and the bad, all the virtues and the
infirmities of men, and a patience like that of nature, which in its
vast and fruitful activity knows neither haste nor rest.
A character like this is among the precious heirlooms of the
republic; and by a special good fortune every part of the country has
an equal claim and pride in it. Lincoln's blood came from the veins of
New England emigrants, of Middle State Quakers, of Virginia planters,
of Kentucky pioneers; he himself was one of the men who grew up with
the earliest growth of the great West. Every jewel of his mind or his
conduct sheds radiance on each portion of the nation. The marvelous
symmetry and balance of his intellect and character may have owed
something to this varied environment of his race, and they may fitly
typify the variety and solidity of the republic. It may not be
unreasonable to hope that his name and his renown may be forever a
bond of union to the country which he loved with an affection so
impartial, and served, in life and in death, with such entire
devotion.