Transcriber’s Notes

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

This book does not have a Table of Contents. The links below were added during transcription.

CHAPTER

[I]
[II]
[III]
[IV]
[V]
[VI]
[VII]
[VIII]
[IX]
[X]
[XI]
[XII]
[XIII]
[XIV]
[XV]

WHY WE LOVE LINCOLN

From “The Life of Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright 1900, The McClure Co.

Lincoln early in 1861. This is supposed to be the first, or one of the first, portraits made of Lincoln after he began to wear a beard

WHY WE LOVE
LINCOLN

BY
JAMES CREELMAN
Author of “On the Great Highway”

“As, in spite of some rudeness, republicanism is the sole hope of a sick world, so Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ.”—John Hay.

NEW YORK
THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMIX

Copyright, 1909, by
THE OUTING PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1908, by
THE PEARSON PUBLISHING CO.
All Rights Reserved.

To
MY SON
ASHMERE
AND TO ALL AMERICAN BOYS
YOUNG OR OLD
I ADDRESS THIS LITTLE VOLUME

Acknowledgements are due to the excellent books on Lincoln by Herndon and Weik, Hay and Nicolay, Ida Tarbell, Mr. Lamon, Mr. Stoddard, and others.

ILLUSTRATIONS

WHY WE LOVE LINCOLN

I

While our great battleship fleet thundered peace and friendship to the world, as it moved from sea to sea, stinging pens and voices in one country after another answered that America had suddenly passed from blustering youth to cynical old age, and that the harmless effrontery of our nationality in the past was not to be confounded with the cold-brained, organized, money-worshipping greed of the new generation of Americans.

Meanwhile, in all parts of the American continent, preparations were being made to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the humblest, simplest and plainest of our national leaders, whose name no American can utter without emotion.

We think of Washington with pride, of Jefferson and Madison with intellectual reverence, and of Jackson and Grant with grateful consciousness of their strength.

But the memory of Lincoln, even now, so many years after his piteous death, stirs the tenderest love of the nation, thrills it with a sense of intimate relationship to his greatness and awakens a personal affection in the average American’s breast—not a mere political enthusiasm, but a peculiarly heartfelt sentiment that has no parallel in human history.

If it be true that the nation has at once become old, that it has grown sinister and corrupt, that it cringes before material success, stands in awe of multi-millionaires and prostrates itself before money, why is it that we love Lincoln?

If in the pride of wealth and strength we have forgotten our early republican ideals of simple justice and manhood, how is it that the movement to commemorate the birth of this lowly, clumsy backwoodsman and frontier lawyer turned President—a movement begun in the rich cities of New York and Chicago—instantly spread to the remotest villages, and all that seemed ugly and haggard, with all that seemed brave and fair and true, swarmed together, heart-naked, to make that twelfth day of February an unforgetable event?

Arches and statues; flower-strewn streets with endless processions; moving ceremonies in thousands of schools and colleges; multitudes kneeling in churches; other multitudes listening to orators; warships and fortresses roaring out salutes.

Yet these were the mere externals of Lincoln Day. The average American does not shout when he hears Lincoln’s name. Even the political demagogue, the stock gambler, the captain of industry, aye, the sorriest scarecrow of a yellow journalist, is likely to grow silent and reverential when that word is spoken.

With all our national levity, we do not jest about Lincoln. With all our political divisions, every party to-day reveres his memory and claims his spirit. It is sober truth to say that he struck the noblest, highest, holiest note in the inmost native soul of the American people. There is nothing so arrogant or sodden and sordid in that new paganism which has set its altars in Wall Street but will in some sense uncover and kneel at the sound of his name.

Our fleet, in its voyage around the world, found no record of such a man in any of the lands of its visitations. Each nation, each epoch, each race, has its hero. But there is none like Lincoln. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Cromwell—how cold their glory seems to his, how immeasurably smaller their place in the affections of mankind?

And, while America was getting ready to honor Lincoln, none might pretend to understand his people who had not first discovered what it is in his character and in ours that, even in this day of restless commercialism, makes us love him above comparison in the story of the world’s great men—love him for his poverty, for his simplicity, for his humanity, for his fidelity, for his justice, for his plainness, for his life and for his death.

By sheer force of character, conscience-inspired, Abraham Lincoln rose from abject depths of squalid environment to become the most august figure in American history, and perhaps the most significant and lovable personality in the annals of mankind.

In his amazing emergence to greatness from poverty and ignorance is to be found a supreme demonstration and justification of American institutions.

It was the common people who recognized the nobility and majesty in this singular man. He understood that always, and, even in his days of power, when great battles were fought at a nod of his head, and a whisk of his pen set a whole race free, it kept him humble.

Perhaps the profoundly tender love which the American people have for his memory is to be explained by the fact that in the secret recesses where every man communes with the highest, bravest and most unselfish elements of his own nature, the average American is an Abraham Lincoln to himself.

The power to recognize is not so far removed from the power to be recognized, and it is thrillingly significant, after all these dreary years of babble about the omnipotence of money, that the same people who raised Lincoln from penniless obscurity to his place of power and martyrdom, still cherish his name and example with a depth of devotion that increases with each year of national growth, confusing and confounding the learned foreign critics of the Republic, who miss the finest thing in American civilization when they fail to learn why we love Lincoln.

II

If Daniel Boone, the mighty hunter and Indian fighter, had not roused the imagination of Virginians and Carolinians by his wonderful and romantic deeds in the exploration of the Kentucky wilderness, the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln would not have left Rockingham County, Virginia, and “entered” seventeen hundred acres of land in Kentucky, where he was presently slain on his forest farm by a savage in the presence of his three sons.

The youngest of these sons, Thomas Lincoln, was the father of the future President of the United States.

In spite of an educated, well-to-do American ancestry of pure English Quaker stock—one was a member of the Boston Tea Party; another was a revolutionary minuteman, served in the Continental Congress and was Attorney General of the United States under Jefferson—this frontier boy, who was only six years old when his father was murdered before his eyes, grew up without education, to be a wandering work boy, who gradually picked up odd jobs of carpentering.

He became a powerfully built, square-set young man, somewhat indolent and improvident, who occasionally showed his temper and courage by knocking down a frontier rowdy.

The rough young carpenter in 1806 married Nancy Hanks, a niece of Joseph Hanks, in whose shop he worked at his trade. Nancy, who was the mother of Abraham Lincoln, was the daughter of a supposedly illiterate and superstitious family, but she was comely, intelligent, knew how to read and write and taught her husband to scrawl his name.

The great Lincoln always believed that he got his intellectual powers from his mother.

For a time this pair, who were to bring forth the savior of America, dwelt in a log hut, fourteen feet square, at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where they were married. Then a daughter was born. A year later the carpenter bought a small farm on the Big South Fork of Nolin Creek, in Hardin County.

Here, on wretched soil overgrown with stunted brush, Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks lived with their infant daughter in a rude log cabin, enduring profound poverty.

It was in this mere wooden hutch, which had an earth floor, one door and one window, that Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809.

What American, however poor, ignorant, unlettered or discouraged, can look upon the rude timbers of the home which sheltered the birth of the greatest man of the Western Hemisphere without a thrill of hope and a new realization of the opportunities that are co-eternal with conscience, courage and persistence?

What man of any race or country can stand before that cabin and be a coward?

Moses, the waif; Peter, the fisherman; Mahomet, the shepherd; Columbus, the sailor boy—each age has its separate message of the humanity of God and the divinity of man.

The gray-eyed boy Lincoln played alone in the forest near Knob Creek, where his father had secured a better farm. It was a solitary and cheerless life for a child. Sometimes he sat among the shavings of his father’s carpenter shanty—a silent, lean little boy, with long, black hair and grave, deep-set eyes, dressed in deerskin breeches and moccasins, without toys and almost without companions.

The Kentucky log cabin in which Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809

For a few months he attended log-cabin schools with his sister Sarah, but he learned little more than his letters. It is amazing to think that this man, whose Gettysburg address is accepted as one of the noblest classics of English literature, did not have much more than six months of schooling in his whole life.

In 1816 Thomas Lincoln decided to move from Kentucky to Indiana. He built a raft, loaded it with a kit of carpenter’s tools and four hundred gallons of whiskey, and, depending on his rifle for food, floated down into the Ohio River in search of a new home. Having picked out a place in the Indiana forest, he walked home and, with a borrowed wagon and two horses, he took his wife and children into the wilderness, actually cutting a way through the woods for them.

Near Little Pigeon Creek the carpenter and his wife, assisted by young Abraham, now seven years old, built a shed of logs and poles, partly open to the weather, and here the family lived for a year. Meanwhile a patch of land was cleared, corn was planted, and as soon as a log-cabin, without windows, could be built, the Lincolns moved into it.

The forest swarmed with game and the carpenter’s rifle kept his family supplied with venison and deer hides for clothing. They relied on the rifle and the corn patch for life. Little Lincoln “climbed at night to his bed of leaves in the loft by a ladder of wooden pins driven into the logs.”

Not only were the means of life hard to get, but it was a malarial country, and in 1818 the small group of pioneers who came to dwell at Pigeon Creek near the Lincolns were attacked by a pestilence known as the milk-sickness.

In October the mother of Abraham Lincoln died. Her husband sawed a coffin out of the forest trees and buried her in a little clearing. Several months later a wandering frontier clergyman preached a sermon over her lonely, snow-covered grave.

No wonder the countenance of the great Emancipator moved all who beheld it by its deep melancholy. He knew what sorrow was forty-five years before he paced his office in the White House all night, with white face and bowed head, sorrowing over the bloody defeat of Chancellorsville, wondering whether he was to be the last President of the United States, and praying for the victory that came at Gettysburg.

All that year the sensitive boy grieved for the mother who had gone out of his life; but in time his father went back to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he married the widow of the town jailer, and presently a four-horse wagon creaked up to the door of the Lincoln cabin in the Indiana forest, with the bride, her son and two daughters, and a load of comfortable household goods, including a feather bed and a walnut bureau, valued at fifty dollars.

Sarah Bush Lincoln, the stepmother of Abraham Lincoln, was a woman of thrift and energy, tall, straight, fair, and a kind-hearted motherly Christian. The American people owe a debt to this noble matron who did so much to influence and develop the character of the boy who was yet to save the nation from destruction.

She was good to the Lincoln orphans whose mother lay out in the wild forest grave. She gave them warm clothes. She threw away the mat of corn husks and leaves on which they slept and replaced it with a soft feather tick. She loved little Abe, and the lonely boy returned her kindness and affection. In a primitive cabin, set in the midst of a savage country, she created that noblest and best result of a good woman’s heart and brain, a happy home.

Oh, pale woman of the twentieth century, sighing for a mission in the great world’s affairs! Perhaps there may be a suggestion for you in the simple story of what Sarah Bush did for Abraham Lincoln and, through him, for the ages. Did not the two malaria-racked and care-driven mothers who lived in the rough-hewn Lincoln cabin do more to influence the political institutions of mankind than all the speeches and votes of women since voting was first invented?

III

Even at the age of ten years the frontier lad was a hard worker. When he was not wielding the axe in the forest, he was driving the horses, threshing, ploughing, assisting his father as a carpenter. He also “hired out” to the neighbors as ploughboy, hostler, water-carrier, baby-minder or doer of odd chores, at twenty-five cents a day. He suddenly began to grow tall, and there was no stronger youth in the community than the lank, loose-limbed boy in deerskins, linsey-woolsey, and coonskin cap, who could make an axe bite so deep into a tree.

His stepmother sent him to school again for several months. In 1826, too, he walked nine miles a day to attend a log-house school. He had new companions at home now, a stepbrother, two stepsisters, and his cousins, John and Dennis Hanks.

As young Lincoln grew taller his skill and strength as a woodchopper and rail-splitter, and his willingness to do any kind of work, however drudging or menial—in spite of a natural meditative indolence—made him widely known. His kindly, helpful disposition and simple honesty gave him a distinct popularity, and he was much sought after as a companion, notwithstanding his ungainly figure and rough ways.

But it was his extraordinary thirst for knowledge, his efforts to raise himself out of the depths of ignorance, that showed the inner power struggling against adverse surroundings.

He grew to a height of six feet and four inches by the time he was seventeen years old. His legs and arms were long, his hands and feet big, and his skin was dry and yellow. His face was gaunt, and his melancholy gray eyes were sunk in cavernous sockets above his prominent cheek bones. A girl schoolmate has described him: “His shoes, when he had any, were low. He wore buckskin breeches, linsey-woolsey shirt, and a cap made of the skin of a squirrel or coon. His breeches were baggy and lacked by several inches meeting the tops of his shoes, thereby exposing his shin-bone, sharp, blue and narrow.”

This is the real Abraham Lincoln, who read, and read, and read; whose constant spells of brooding abstraction, eyes fixed, dreaming face, gave him a reputation for laziness among some of his shallow fellows; who would crouch down in the forest or sit on a fence-rail for hours to study a book; who would lie on his stomach at night in front of the fireplace and, having no paper or slate, would write and cipher with charcoal on the wooden shovel, on boards and the hewn sides of logs, shaving them clean when he wanted to write again.

Here is his cousin’s picture of him at the age of fourteen:

“When Abe and I returned to the house from work he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, sit down, take a book, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read. We grubbed, plowed, mowed and worked together barefooted in the field. Whenever Abe had a chance in the field while at work, or at the house, he would stop and read.”

His principal books were an arithmetic, the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” Weems’ “Life of Washington,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and a history of the United States. He became the best speller and penman in his neighborhood. Yet there was a vein of waggery in him which occasionally found a vent in such written verse as this:

Abraham Lincoln,

His hand and pen,

He will be good,

But God knows when.

All this has been told of him many times and in many ways; yet the nation he saved loves to dwell on the picture of the tall, tanned, awkward woodchopper and farm drudge; gawky, angular, iron-muscled, with bare feet or moccasins, deerhide breeches and coonskin cap, battling out in the forest against his own ignorance and, by sheer force of will power, conquering knowledge and commanding destiny.

Not a whimper against fate, not a word against youths more successful than himself, no complaint of the hard work and coarse food—simply the strivings of a soul not yet conscious of its own greatness, but already superior to its squalid environments.

It is probable that there is not a youth in all America to-day, however poor, ignorant, and forlorn, that has not a better chance to rise in life than Abraham Lincoln had when he started to climb the ladder of light by courage and persistent application.

He attended spelling matches, log-rollings and horse races. He wrote vulgar and sometimes silly verse. He outraged the farmers who employed him by delivering comic addresses and buffoonery in the form of sermons from tree-stumps, to the snickering field hands. Sometimes he thrashed a bully. His strength was tremendous. No man in the country could withstand him. It is said that he once lifted half a ton. Yet his temper was cool, his heart gentle and generous, and back of his singsongy, rollicking, spraddling youth, with its swinging axe-blows, forest-prowlings, and coarse humor, there was a gravity, dignity, sanity, fairness, generosity and deep, straightout eloquence that made him a power in that small community.

Think of a young man of six feet and four inches in coonskin and deerhide, who could sink an axe deeper into a tree than any pioneer in that heroic region, and who yet had perseverance enough in his cabin home to read “The Revised Statutes of Indiana” until he could almost repeat them by heart!

He became a leader and could gather an audience by merely mounting a stump and waving his hands. Nor was that all. He frequently stopped brawls and acted as umpire between disputants. Another side of his nature was displayed when he found the neighborhood drunkard freezing by the roadside, carried him in his arms to the tavern and worked over him for hours.

When Lincoln’s sister Sarah married Aaron Grigsby in 1826, the seventeen-year-old giant composed a song and sang it at the wedding. Here are the concluding verses:

The woman was not taken

From Adam’s feet we see,

So he must not abuse her,

The meaning seems to be.

The woman was not taken

From Adam’s head we know,

To show she must not rule him—

’Tis evidently so.

The woman she was taken

From under Adam’s arm,

So she must be protected

From injuries and harm.

Yet that dry volume of “The Revised Statutes of Indiana,” through which the woodchopper worked so bravely, contained the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Ordinance of 1787, and he bound them on his heart like a seal and wore them till the hour of his cruel death.

As time went on Lincoln developed into a popular story-teller and oracle at Jones’ grocery store in the nearby village of Gentryville. His oratory grew at the expense of his farm-work. He went to all the trials in the local courts, and trudged fifteen miles to Booneville for the sake of hearing a lawsuit tried. Between times he wrote an essay on the American Government and another on temperance. He made speeches, he gossiped, he argued public questions, he cracked jokes, he made everybody his friend—sometimes he worked. Already he was an American politician, although he did not know it.

Taken from an old print

Lincoln debating with Douglas in 1858

It is hard to realize that, even later in his career, and with all his mighty strength and courage, the man who preserved “government of the people, for the people, and by the people” to the world could earn only thirty-seven cents a day, and that he had “to split four hundred rails for every yard of brown jeans dyed with white walnut bark that would be necessary to make him a pair of trousers.”

When he was President of the United States he told Secretary Seward the story of how he had once taken two men and their trunks to a river steamer in a flatboat built by his own hands, and got a dollar for it.

“In these days it seems like a trifle to me,” he added, “but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar.”

In 1828 Mr. Gentry, of Gentryville, loaded a flatboat with produce, put his son in charge of it and hired Lincoln for eight dollars a month and board to work the bow oars and take it to New Orleans. Near Baton Rouge the young men tied the boat up at night and were asleep in a cabin when they were awakened to find a gang of negroes attempting to plunder the cargo. With a club Lincoln knocked several of the marauders into the river and chased the rest for some distance, returning bloody but victorious. The boat was then hurriedly cut loose, and they floated on all night.

That voyage was Lincoln’s first brief glimpse of the great world. Till then he had never seen a large city. In New Orleans he was yet to see human beings bought and sold, and hear the groans that were afterwards answered by the thunders of the Civil War.

IV

Two years later the milk-sickness which had robbed Lincoln of his mother again visited the Pigeon Creek settlers, and his father decided to move to Illinois, where rich lands were to be had cheap. Dennis Hanks and Levi Hall accompanied the Lincoln family.

The tall young woodchopper had just passed his twenty-first birthday, and it was he, in buckskin breeches and coonskin cap, who goaded on the oxen hitched to the clumsy wagon that creaked and lurched through the March mud and partly frozen streams on that terrible two weeks’ journey into the Sangamon country of Illinois.

He said good-bye to the old log-cabin. It was rude and mean, but, after all, it was his home. He shook hands with his friends in Gentryville. He took a last look at the unmarked grave of his mother. His boyhood was over.

Before setting out for his new home, Lincoln spent all his money, more than thirty dollars, in buying petty merchandise, knives, forks, needles, pins, buttons, thread and other things that might appeal to housewives. And on the voyage to Illinois the future President of the United States peddled his little wares so successfully that he doubled his money. Thus Abraham Lincoln entered the State which saw him rise to greatness—woodchopper, ox-driver, peddler, pioneer.

Even in that rough, heroic pilgrimage, the tender heart of the man showed itself again and again. One loves to remember Lincoln as Mr. Herndon, his law-partner, has described him, pulling off his shoes and stockings and wading a stream through broken ice to save a pet dog left whining on the other side.

“I could not bear to abandon even a dog,” he explained.

Presently the emigrants settled on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon River, five miles from Decatur, in Macon County. All promptly set to work. A clearing was made, trees felled, and a cabin built. Abraham and his cousin, John Hanks, ploughed fifteen acres of sod and split rails enough to fence the space in.

Some of the rails split by Lincoln at that time were thirty years later carried into the convention which nominated him for President.

Having reached his majority and seen his father and family safely housed, Lincoln started out to shift for himself. Among other things, he split three thousand rails for a Major Warnick, walking three miles a day to his work.

Then came the winter of “the deep snow,” a season so terrible that John Hay has thus described its effects:

“Geese and chickens were caught by the feet and wings and frozen to the wet ground. A drove of a thousand hogs, which were being driven to St. Louis, rushed together for warmth, and became piled in a great heap. Those inside smothered and those outside froze, and the ghastly pyramid remained there on the prairie for weeks; the drovers barely escaped with their lives. Men killed their horses, disemboweled them, and crept into the cavities of their bodies to escape the murderous wind.”

Lincoln left his father’s house empty-handed, save for his axe, and he had to face that blizzard winter as best he could. No man or woman ever heard him complain. In all his after years he looked back upon the struggles of his early career without a word of self-pity. Those were iron days, but they were not without romance, and life was honest and strengthening.

It is doubtful, after all, whether Lincoln’s son, who became rich, dined with kings and queens, and came to be president of the hundred-million-dollar Pullman Company, ever in his comfortable and successful career once felt half the sense of life in its deepest, grandest moods that thrilled his gaunt father facing that fearful winter.

Let the discouraged American, whose heart grows faint in the presence of “bad luck,” think of that rude frontiersman, to whom hardship brought only strength and renewed courage. In spite of everything, the sources of a man’s success are within him, and none can stay him but himself. Lincoln knew famine, and cold, and wandering. But he did not pity himself. Axe in hand, he confronted his fate in that smitten country with as great a soul as when he faced the armed Confederacy and saw his country riven and bleeding.

In the spring of 1831 Denton Offut hired Lincoln to go with him on a boat, with a load of stock and provisions, to New Orleans, and, after many adventures, in which his strength and ingenuity saved boat and cargo several times, he again found himself at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Here he first saw the hideous side of slavery. His law-partner thus refers to one of the scenes he witnessed:

“A vigorous and comely mulatto girl was being sold. She underwent a thorough examination at the hands of the bidders; they pinched her flesh and made her trot up and down the room like a horse.... Bidding his companions follow him, he said, ‘By God, boys, let’s get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I’ll hit it hard.’”

The grandest and bloodiest page of modern history is a record of how Lincoln fulfilled that promise.

That very summer he went to the village of New Salem, on the Sangamon River—a village that has long since vanished—and became clerk in a log-house general store opened by Offut, who was a restless commercial adventurer. Lincoln and an assistant slept in the store.

Here the tall clerk became famous for his stories and homely wit. His immense stature, his strength, his humor and his penetrating logic attracted attention at once. He talked in quaint, waggish parables, but he never failed to reach the heart or brain.

Offut’s store grew to be the common meeting place of the frontiersmen, and long-legged, droll, kindly Lincoln developed his natural genius for story-telling and argument.

But Offut bragged of his clerk’s strength. That angered the rough, rollicking youths of a nearby settlement known as Clary’s Grove, who picked out Jack Armstrong, their leader and a veritable giant, to “throw” Lincoln. At first Lincoln declined the challenge on the ground that he did not like “wooling and pulling.” But, although his inheritance of Quaker blood inclined him to avoid violence, he was finally taunted into the struggle. In the presence of all New Salem and Clary’s Grove he partly stripped his two hundred and fourteen pounds of muscle-ribbed body and conquered the bully of Sangamon County.

After that exhibition of strength and pluck, Lincoln was the hero of the community. Braggarts became silent in his presence. A ruffian swore one day in the store before a woman. Lincoln bade him stop, but he continued his abuse. “Well, if you must be whipped,” said the clerk, “I suppose I might as well whip you as any man.” And he did it. That was Lincoln.

His honesty became a proverb. It is said that, having overcharged a customer six cents, he walked three miles in the dark, after the store was closed, to give back the money. By mistake he sold four ounces of tea for a half-pound, and the next day trudged to the customer’s cabin with the rest of the tea.

Just when Lincoln became a conscious politician no man can say. His endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character. He was coarse in his speech and manners. But behind the joking and buffoonery, the primitive man in him was true, gentle, chivalrous. His tender-heartedness was real. His kindliness was not merely the result of a desire to catch friends.

He once illustrated himself by quoting an old man at an Indiana church meeting: “When I do good I feel good, when I do bad I feel bad, and that’s my religion.”

But in New Salem it soon became evident that Lincoln was not satisfied to remain a clerk in a general store, and that the strivings of leadership were in him. He borrowed books. He asked Menton Graham, the schoolmaster, for advice. He read, read, read. He walked many miles at night to speak in debating clubs. He trudged twelve miles to get Kirkham’s Grammar, and often asked his assistant in the store to keep watch with the book while he said the lesson. It was a common thing to find him stretched out on the counter, head on a roll of calicos, grammar in hand. His desire to master language became a passion. The whole village “took notice.” Even the cooper would keep a fire of shavings going at night that Lincoln might read.

The young frontiersman of six-feet-four, who could outlift, outwrestle and outrun any man in Sagamon County, rising from an almost hopeless abyss of ignorance and poverty, was, by his own resolute efforts, acquiring the power that made him the hero of civilization and the savior of a race.

From “Abraham Lincoln.” Copyright, 1892, D. Appleton & Co.

The Globe Tavern, Springfield, where Lincoln lived

How many of the almost seventeen million children who receive free education in the public schools in the United States, and who assemble once a year to repeat the imperishable sayings of Lincoln, realize how he had to strain and struggle for the knowledge which is offered daily to them as a gift?

No wonder that Lincoln became popular in New Salem, and that when the little Black Hawk Indian war broke out he was elected captain of the company which marched forth from the village in April, 1831, in buckskin breeches and coon caps, with rifles, powder horns and blankets.

It was in that picturesque campaign that Lincoln, coming with his company to a fence gate and not remembering the military word of command necessary to get his company in order through such a narrow space, instantly showed his ingenuity by shouting, “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.”

A poor, old half-starved Indian crept into Lincoln’s camp for shelter. The excited soldiers insisted on killing him. But Lincoln stood between them and the frightened fugitive. At the risk of his own life he saved the Indian. The soul of chivalry was in him.

He had no chance to fight, and he was compelled to wear a wooden sword for two weeks because his company got drunk—he who afterwards commanded Grant, Sherman and Sheridan—yet he returned to his village a hero without having shed blood, for the world honors courage and patience even in those who fail to reach the firing line.

V

After the war of 1812, which was fought while Lincoln was in his rude Kentucky cradle, the continental spirit of the American people gradually rose to a high pitch, which was intensified in 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was born and the Holy Alliance—not to say all Europe—was warned against armed interference with even the humblest republic of the Western Hemisphere.

A new sense of power inspired swaggering, bragging American politics. So the Greeks bragged when Alexander overthrew Persia; so Christendom bragged when Charles Martel smashed the Saracens and made possible the Empire of Charlemagne; so the British bragged after Trafalgar and Waterloo; so the Puritans bragged when Cromwell struck off the head of King Charles.

The boastful spirit of America was encouraged by spread-eagle statesmen in blue coats, brass buttons and buff waistcoats, who spoke as though history began at Bunker Hill. Andrew Jackson, whose frontiersmen had thrashed the trained British regiments at New Orleans, had succeeded John Quincy Adams, the polished Harvard professor, in the White House. It was a time of grand talk. The People—with a capital P—puffed out their unterrified bosoms and made faces at the miserable rulers of Europe. It was brave and honest, this strutting, defiant democracy, but it took Charles Dickens some years later to show us the ridiculous side of it, even though he went too far.

“Do you suppose I am such a d—d fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir!” was Jackson’s estimate of himself in 1823. Yet there was the rough old hero in Washington’s chair at last.

Hayne had talked in the United States Senate of nullifying the nation’s laws in South Carolina, and Webster had thundered back his majestic defence of the indivisible Union. Then South Carolina had attempted nullification and threatened secession, to be promptly answered by President Jackson with an effective promise of cold steel and powder, and a gruff hint of the hangman’s noose.

Beyond the Allegheny Mountains were the new Western States, with unpaved towns, frantic land booms, tall talk, and hero-hearted men in coonskin caps pushing out with axes and rifles into the unsettled national territories.

In the midst of this half-organized civilization Abraham Lincoln listened to the slowly swelling voices of conflict that came to him in his Illinois village from the Eastern and Southern States.

The great scattered West longed for means of transportation. Railroads, canals, steamboats! They meant wealth and power to the pioneers and the shrieking speculators. The Whigs under Henry Clay promised to raise such a national revenue through a high protective tariff that a mighty surplus of money could be divided among the States to carry on internal improvements.

Lincoln was a Whig. He was for a high tariff and internal improvements. Had he not personally piloted a steamboat from Cincinnati between the crooked and overgrown banks of the Sangamon River, and had not the imagination of that country taken fire as the vessel reached Springfield? Railroads, canals, steamboats! And no recognition yet of the issue of disunion that was to shake the continent and drench it with blood.

After the return from the Black Hawk war Lincoln offered himself as a candidate for the Legislature. His handbill, addressed to the voters, dealt mainly with river navigation, railroads and usury.

“I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life,” he wrote. “I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.”

Lincoln knew that public. He made his first speech in “a mixed jeans coat, claw-hammer style, short in the sleeves and bob-tail; flax and tow-linen pantaloons, and a straw hat.” First, he jumped from the platform, caught a fighting rowdy by the neck and trousers, hurled him twelve feet away, remounted the platform, threw down his hat, and made his historic entrance into American politics in these words:

“Fellow citizens: I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.”

There is the Lincoln we love—simple, genuine, direct! He seemed to feel to the day of his death that the public was not some distant abstraction, to be approached fearfully and crawlingly; but men like himself, with the same feelings and aspirations. It was because Lincoln hated shams and sneaks, and had the root of kindly honor in his nature, and because he saw, at the very bottom, all men more or less the same, that he reached the average American heart as no one has reached it before or since. He was humble enough—and humility is an inevitable result of moral and spiritual intelligence—to believe that the honesty he felt in himself stirred an equal honesty in others about him.

He was defeated in the election, but that was the only time the people rejected him.

Failure did not sour Lincoln. He took odd jobs about the village—Offutt’s had “petered out”—and for a time he considered the blacksmith’s trade. But presently he became a partner in a general store with an idle fellow named Berry, giving his note in payment of his share. He and his partner bought out still another unsuccessful store, paying for it with their notes. The end of it all was that their business failed and Lincoln had to shoulder a debt that made him stagger for many years.

He was not a good merchant. His fondness for study made him neglect his store. Having secured copies of Blackstone and Chitty he spent his days and nights studying law. He would go to the great oak just outside of the door, lie on his back with his feet against the tree, and lose himself in Blackstone for hours.

The store was a failure, and Lincoln went back to rail splitting and farm work. But his law books were always with him. No hardship, no disappointment, could persuade him to give up his pursuit of knowledge.

In 1833 he became postmaster of New Salem, often carrying the scanty mail about in his hat and reading the newspapers before he delivered them.

Meanwhile John Calhoun, the Surveyor of Sangamon County, wanted an assistant, and he appointed the tall, story-telling, likeable postmaster to the place. Lincoln knew nothing of surveying, but in six weeks he got enough out of books to fit him for the work. His survey maps are still models of accuracy and intelligence.

Once more he was a candidate for the Legislature, in 1834. This time he was elected. He had to borrow money to buy clothes in which to make his legislative appearance.

VI

And now came the first great romance of Lincoln’s life. He fell in love with pretty, auburn-haired Anne Rutledge, daughter of the owner of the tavern in which he lived. His passion seemed hopeless, for the slender maid of seventeen was pledged to a young man from New York. Yet Lincoln loved and waited and hoped. His studies had worn him to emaciation. His ill-fitting clothes hung loose on his ungainly figure. His face was thin and his eyes sunken. He was poor, and a mere clodhopper. Still he loved sweet little Anne Rutledge, even though all the village knew she was another’s, and that love burned in him always.

When her lover went away, promising to return, Lincoln was her watchful knight, serving and hoping. But the New Yorker did not come back. Anne Rutledge grew pale with waiting. It was evident that she was deserted. All New Salem knew it.

Then Lincoln offered her his heart and she consented, asking only time enough to write to her lost lover. No answer to the letter came. Week after week passed. And then Lincoln was accepted. But, alas, the strain had been too great, and the abandoned young beauty grew mortally ill. On her deathbed she called for Lincoln continually, and when he came they left him alone with her for farewell. Afterwards he went to her grave and wept like a child. “My heart lies buried there,” he said.

Lincoln in 1857

Poor, honest, ugly Lincoln! That tragedy saddened his life, and years afterwards he could not refer to Anne Rutledge without tears. So terrible was the effect of her death upon him that for a time his friends feared for his reason. He would wander in the woods a victim to despair. To a companion who urged him to forget his loss he groaned, “I cannot; the thought of the snow and rain on her grave fills me with indescribable grief.” Finally, he was taken to a friend’s house and there watched and comforted through days of deep torment, bordering on madness, till he could bear to go out again among men.

Lincoln went to the Legislature at Vandalia in a coarse suit of jeans, but most of the Illinois lawmakers wore jeans and coonskin caps. It cannot be honestly said that he was a brilliant or important lawmaker, although his great height, immense strength, quaint, sharp wit and never-failing stories made him a popular figure at the State capital.

His mind was too much occupied with the study of the law. He had resumed an acquaintance, formed during the Black Hawk war, with Major John T. Stuart, who encouraged him to become a lawyer, and loaned him books. Curiously enough he seemed to desire no teacher, but followed his course of studies alone. Self-reliance was his strongest trait, self-reliance and endless work.

Those who attempt to account for Lincoln’s remarkable rise in life are apt to overlook the terrific mental grind to which he subjected himself for so many years; and, as we value most that which we get through stress and sacrifice and pain, so the things which Lincoln dug out of his books were never forgotten.

Perhaps, in these easy days, when education is pressed upon all, there is a lesson to be found in the story of this man who laid firm foundations for his after life of greatness by taking upon himself the whole responsibility for searching after sound knowledge and principles.

Lincoln became Major Stuart’s law-partner, and for many years he alternated between petty lawsuits and his more profitable work as a surveyor. His sincerity, shrewd humor, fairness and hearty hand-shaking qualities drew friends to him wherever he went. His long, almost ludicrous figure, with its trousers short of the shoetops by several inches; his stooping shoulders and shriveled, sunken, melancholy face, were not associated with the distinction, romance and tragic dignity which history has given to all that belongs to him. But his very spraddling awkwardness, the picturesque vernacular in which he told his countryside parables, coarse and satirical though they sometimes were; the humble spirit in which the lawyer-surveyor-politician would do odd jobs or chores to help a neighbor or earn a dollar, gave him added political strength with a frontier people who loved plain men.

He does not understand Lincoln who thinks of him as a guileless, innocent frontiersman, raised by accident from a log-cabin to direct a mighty war and shape the policy of a nation. He was a sagacious, observant, natural politician, ambitious but honest. His law-partner, Mr. Herndon, has made that plain. Horace White, who knew Lincoln in his days of political campaigning, has written of him:

“He was as ambitious of earthly honors as any man of his time. Furthermore, he was an adept at log-rolling or any political game that did not involve falsity.... Nobody knew better how to turn things to advantage politically, and nobody was readier to take such advantage, provided it did not involve dishonorable means. He could not cheat the people out of their votes any more than out of their money. The Abraham Lincoln that some people have pictured to themselves, sitting in his dingy law office, working over his cases till the voice of duty roused him, never existed. If this had been his type he never would have been called at all.”

It helps one to realize the man who afterwards roused the soul of the Republic to resist the degradation of slavery and the shock of war to read what he wrote from Washington to Mr. Herndon in 1848:

“Now, as to the young men, you must not wait to be brought forward by the older men. For instance, do you suppose that I should ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men? You young men get together and form a Rough and Ready club, and have regular meetings and speeches. Take in everybody that you can get.... As you go along, gather up the shrewd, wild boys about town, whether just of age or just a little under. Let every one play the part he can play best—some speak, some sing, and all halloo.”

And in 1836 we catch sight of Lincoln, again a candidate for the Legislature, leaping forward, with flashing eyes to answer a taunt of a Mr. Forquer, who had a lightning rod on his new house, and had just left the Whig party for a place in the Land Office: “I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.”

Yes, Lincoln was a politician who could seize your attention by the very witchery of his grotesque personality, twist his opponent into helplessness by the stinging shrewdness of a humorous story, make you laugh or cry alternately, reach down into your humanity by some frank confession of his poverty and rough beginnings, and then suddenly stir the highest instincts of your nature by a sublime moral appeal.

It is true that in his second term in the Legislature he voted for all manner of extravagant and preposterous schemes of “internal improvements.” But that was a day of inflated hope, and Illinois was delirious with land gambling. Lincoln, like the other politicians of the State, was swept along by the current of popular enthusiasm. He swaggered, dreamed, bragged and voted with the rest. The voters wanted railways, canals and river improvements. So the Legislature authorized thirteen hundred miles of railways, a canal between the Illinois River and Lake Michigan, and endless improvements of rivers and streams; and to carry out this staggering programme of improvements in a poor, half-settled frontier State, a loan of twelve million dollars was voted.

Not only did Lincoln in his early life vote for this audacious and spendthrift scheme, in response to a harebrained popular demand, but he advocated woman suffrage; proposed a usury rate, with the naive suggestion that “in cases of extreme necessity there could always be found means to cheat the law”; wrote foolish love letters to blue-eyed Mary Owens, offering to keep his supposed marriage engagement to her, but advising her for her own sake not to hold him to it; and developed into a more or less ranting, downright country politician, ready to make a stump speech, tell a story, shake hands with a crowd or thrash a ruffian on the slightest provocation.

And when the capital of Illinois was changed to Springfield, he rode into that town on a borrowed horse, with “two saddlebags, containing two or three law books and a few pieces of clothing,” and, not having seventeen dollars with which to buy a bed and furnishings, accepted a free room over the store of his friend, Mr. Speed, dropped his saddlebags on the floor and smilingly said, “Well, Speed, I’m moved.” That was his entrance into the town which saw his rise to the Presidency.

Around the fireplace in Speed’s store Lincoln used to sit with Douglas, Baker, Calhoun, Browning, Lamborn and other rising politicians and orators of the West. Here every question under heaven was debated, stories were told, jokes cracked, poems recited; and it would take the pen of a Balzac to describe the scenes of merriment, or serious, sharp contest, that happened before those blazing logs, with an attentive ring of friends listening to the never-ceasing flow of wit and wisdom.

Again and again Lincoln was elected to the Illinois Legislature, always as a Whig. Yet he remained humble in spirit. In answer to the taunt that the Whigs were aristocrats, he made a speech showing that he understood how the political sympathies of the West were to be won:

“I was a poor boy, hired on a flatboat at eight dollars a month, and had only one pair of breeches to my back, and they were buckskin. Now, if you know the nature of buckskin when wet, and dried by the sun, it will shrink; and my breeches kept shrinking until they left several inches of my legs bare between the tops of my socks and the lower part of my breeches; and whilst I was growing taller, they were becoming shorter, and so much tighter that they left a blue streak around my legs that can be seen to this day. If you call this aristocracy I plead guilty to the charge.”

He could outwrestle, outrun and out-talk any man in his section. He was recognized as the most skillful and hard-headed politician in his State. His courage and shrewdness in ordinary affairs were notable, and his honesty and earnestness, sweetened by a sure sense of humor, lent distinction and dignity to a ridiculous figure and sometimes theatrical manner of address.

Yet there was a strange, gloomy self-distrust in Lincoln which showed itself in his love affairs; an imaginative melancholy that wrung his heart and tortured his mind with baseless, shadowy misgivings. He engaged himself to marry Mary Todd and, doubting his own love, broke the engagement. It has been even charged that he deserted her when she was attired for the wedding. Lincoln described his parting to Mr. Speed:

“When I told Mary I did not love her,” he said, “she burst into tears and almost springing from her chair and wringing her hands as if in agony, said something about the deceiver being himself deceived. To tell you the truth, Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.”

So great was Lincoln’s agony and depression after this that he was watched by his friends lest he might commit suicide. “I am now the most miserable man living,” he wrote to Major Stuart. “If what I feel were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not.”

The shadow of threatened insanity passed, and within two years Mary Todd became his wife. It was a singular jest of fate that he should have won her away from Stephen A. Douglas, who was yet to be his rival in the great anti-slavery struggle that was ended only by millions of armed men.

Poor heart-torn, shrewd, foolish, humble, sublime Lincoln!

Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival

Then there was the duel with James Shields. That hot-headed Irishman had challenged Lincoln to fight because the tall politician had written certain anonymous letters for the Springfield Journal. Lincoln accepted and named “cavalry broadswords of the largest size.” The duelists went to the place appointed by the river, and sat on logs on opposite sides of the field. Here is a description of the scene by an onlooker, from Miss Tarbell’s “Life of Abraham Lincoln”:

“I watched Lincoln closely while he set on his log awaiting the signal to fight. His face was grave and serious. I could discern nothing suggestive of ‘old Abe,’ as we knew him. I never knew him to go so long without making a joke, and I began to believe he was getting frightened. But presently he reached over and picked up one of the swords, which he drew from its scabbard. Then he felt along the edge of the weapon with his thumb, like a barber feels of the edge of his razor, raised himself to his full height, stretched out his long arms and clipped a twig from above his head with the sword. There wasn’t another man of us who could have reached anywhere near that twig, and the absurdity of that long-reaching fellow fighting with cavalry sabres with Shields, who could walk under his arm, came pretty near making me howl with laughter. After Lincoln had cut off the twig he returned the sword to the scabbard.”

Before the combat could begin, friends arrived in a canoe, Shields was induced to make a concession, and presently Lincoln and his opponent returned to town fast friends.

VII

We love Lincoln because his life plucks every harp-string in true democracy. Lincoln is the answer to Socialism. He represents individualism, justifying opportunity. Self-government stands vindicated in his name. The thought of him is at once an inspiration and challenge to the poorest and most ignorant boy or man in America.

But we love him most of all because he saved the nation which Washington began, and, in the bloody act of salvation, brought human slavery to an end in the great Republic.

In following Lincoln through his picturesque and gaunt youth and through his service in the Illinois Legislature and in Congress to the point where the inner and outer influences of his life, his soul and its environments, merged into one supreme idea—the preservation of the Union—we must not forget the things that preceded the final test of his life.

Up to Lincoln’s time it had not been determined whether the fathers of the Republic had really produced a nation, or merely a contract or treaty between independent and sovereign States. The system of separated, incoordinate and aloof colonies—a shrewd and stubborn British device for keeping their American subjects weak by disunion—grew into the system of States which formed the Republic.

When the Constitution of the United States was framed, ten of the thirteen States had prohibited the importation of slaves. Georgia and the two Carolinas still permitted the slave trade with Africa. In order not to leave these three States out of the Union, the Constitution permitted the importation of slaves until 1808. But the conscious horror of that concession is to be recognized in the care with which the word slavery is avoided. To satisfy all the slave-owning States, whose consent was necessary to the adoption of the Constitution, slavery itself, within those States, was recognized and sanctioned by a clause providing that five slaves should equal three free persons as a basis of representation in the national House of Representatives.

So that, whether we like the remembrance or not, it is a fact that the founders of the nation actually did sanction slavery, although there was some righteous talk in the Constitutional Convention over the reluctant compromise.

While this convention, in Philadelphia, was legalizing slavery, the Continental Congress, in New York, passed an ordinance for the government of the “territory of the United States northwest of the river Ohio,” providing that slavery should be forever prohibited in that territory.

In 1820 the ocean slave-trade was declared to be piracy, punishable by death.

In that same year Congress, under pressure from the slave owners, adopted the Missouri Compromise, by which Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave State, with the proviso that slavery should be always forbidden in any other part of the territory north of 36° 30´ north latitude.

New England raged against slavery. Her abolitionists cried out against it night and day. To the assertion of the South that slaves were valuable property, legally acquired and legally held, they answered that slavery was a deep damnation in the sight of God, an unspeakably cruel crime, intolerable among civilized men. They helped slaves to escape from their masters, and did everything in their power to make a farce of the laws under which such fugitives might be returned.

A great gulf opened between the free States and the slave States, a gulf flaming with passion and menace. Could the nation hold together?

There were tremendous scenes in the Senate in 1850, when a compromise was reached. California was to be admitted a free State, slavery was to be abolished in the District of Columbia, and there was to be an effective Fugitive Slave Law. These were the principal points.

Henry Clay, in his seventy-third year, spoke for two days in favor of compromise and peace, picturing the frightful war that must result from a failure to agree. John C. Calhoun, pale, haggard and dying, rose from his sick bed, staggered into the Senate on the arms of friends and, being too weak to speak, sat there while his plea for the rights of the South was read. Then he went back to his bed to die a few days later, groaning, “The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her.” Daniel Webster, too, raised his voice for compromise in one of his noblest orations. William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase bitterly opposed any compromise on the basis of the Fugitive Slave Law. So fierce did the debate become that Senator Benton drew a pistol on Senator Foote.

Yet in the end, the compromise was adopted and the Fugitive Slave Law was passed.

Then, in 1854, Stephen A. Douglas, United States Senator from Illinois, introduced a bill providing a government for the immense country now included in Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana and portions of Wyoming and Colorado—a country larger than all the existing free States. All this region was in the area from which slavery was forever prohibited by the Missouri Compromise. Yet Douglas’ bill provided that whenever any part of the territory should be admitted to the Union the question of slavery or free-soil should be decided by its inhabitants. This was the famous “squatter sovereignty” idea, a virtual repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

After a desperate fight in Congress, Douglas carried his bill. It was a startling step and a direct bid for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency. By this act Douglas made himself one of the most conspicuous men in the country.

Hell seemed to break loose after President Pierce signed this bill. It became impossible to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. The anti-slavery agitation in the North broke out with indescribable fury. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published. The abolitionists were almost insane with anger and indignation. Douglas was denounced as a scoundrel who had sold himself to the slaveholders for the sake of his Presidential ambitions.

Lincoln was a well-supported candidate for the United States Senate in 1854, but he gave up his chance and threw his strength to Lyman Trumbull, a weaker candidate, rather than risk the election of a pro-slavery Senator.

Miss Tarbell gives this picture of Lincoln by his friend, Judge Dickey:

“After a while we went upstairs to bed. There were two beds in our room, and I remember that Lincoln sat up in his nightshirt on the edge of the bed arguing the point with me. At last we went to sleep. Early in the morning I woke up, and there was Lincoln half sitting up in bed. ‘Dickey,’ he said, ‘I tell you this nation cannot exist half slave and half free.’ ‘Oh, Lincoln,’ said I, ‘go to sleep.’”

The Territories of Kansas and Nebraska became the center of interest, for whether they would be slave States or free States must depend upon the vote of their inhabitants, and that was a simple question of emigration.

Bands of colonists were sent to Kansas by both the slavery and anti-slavery forces. The work of colonizing the State was organized on a large scale by both sides. The pro-slavery men from Missouri crossed into Kansas in 1854 and elected a pro-slavery delegate to Congress. In 1855 about five thousand Missourians, armed with pistols and bowie knives, invaded Kansas and carried the elections for the Territorial Legislature. This Legislature enacted the Missouri slavery laws and, in addition, provided the death penalty for inciting slaves to leave their masters or revolt. The Free Soil Kansans thereupon elected a Constitutional Convention, and organized a State government, with a constitution prohibiting slavery.

Thus there were two governments in Kansas, one pro-slavery, the other anti-slavery. Blood began to flow as the hostile governments collided.

In 1856 Preston Brooks, a nephew of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, stole up behind Senator Sumner, who had brilliantly defended the Free Soilers of Kansas, and beat him on the head with a heavy cane till he fell unconscious. The pro-slavery Kansans sacked the town of Lawrence. John Brown and his abolitionist fanatics went from cabin to cabin in Kansas, killing and mutilating pro-slavery men. Riots and murders terrorized the State. It was war to the knife between slavery and anti-slavery. And Douglas, in Washington, was pressing his bill declaring that, as soon as Kansas had ninety-three thousand voters, the pro-slavery Territorial Legislature should call a convention and organize the State.

VIII

It was in 1856 that the conscience and courage of the North found a voice in Abraham Lincoln. In his great soul the civilization of America suddenly flowered.

In Congress Lincoln had vainly opposed the war with Mexico as “unnecessary and unconstitutional,” and he had gone back to Springfield to practice law with his new partner, William H. Herndon.

Abraham Lincoln. This photograph was made by Hesler, in Chicago, about 1860

The mighty sweep of events in the country had forced the Whigs and Northern Democrats to form the Free Soil party, not to extinguish slavery, but to prevent its spread from the slave States into the free Territories, and Lincoln’s tongue had pleaded powerfully for freedom. But Fremont, the Free Soil candidate for President, was defeated, and the contending slaveowners and abolitionists continued to press the cup of horror and hatred to the trembling lips of the nation. The South threatened to withdraw from the Union.

Again and again Lincoln had expressed his opinion that slavery was a crime against civilization. In the teeth of Senator Douglas, the eloquent and all-powerful Democratic leader of Illinois, who was arousing the West for slavery, he lashed and trampled upon the attempt to make Kansas a slave State.

While trying to obtain the release of a free-born Illinois negro boy held by the authorities of Louisiana, Lincoln appealed to the Governor of Illinois, to whom he said, “By God, Governor, I’ll make the ground in this country too hot for the foot of a slave, whether you have the legal power to secure the release of this boy or not.”

Even then the man who felt in himself the stirrings of power great enough to utter that threat was a grotesque figure among his fellow-lawyers. Yet there was no shrewder advocate, no more effective jury-pleader and no kindlier heart in Illinois. Mr. Herndon gives this picture of him:

“His hat was brown, faded, and the nap usually worn or rubbed off. He wore a short cloak and sometimes a shawl. His coat and vest hung loosely on his gaunt frame, and his trousers were invariably too short. On the circuit he carried in one hand a faded green umbrella, with ‘A Lincoln’ in large white cotton or muslin letters sewed on the inside. The knob was gone from the handle, and when closed a piece of cord was usually tied around it in the middle to keep it from flying open. In the other hand he carried a literal carpet bag, in which were stored the few papers to be used in court, and underclothing enough to last until his return to Springfield. He slept in a long, coarse yellow flannel shirt, which reached half way between his knees and ankles.”

Lincoln was not a distinguished lawyer. Nor was he a financial success in his profession. His partners complained that he neglected the business side of things and was completely absorbed in the justice or humanity involved in his cases. His heart would melt over the sorrows of a client, and he would either accept a petty fee or altogether neglect to collect anything. Mr. Lamon, his junior partner, has testified that when he charged a fee of $250, Lincoln made him return half the money to their client on the ground that “the service was not worth the sum.” So extreme was his generosity and charity, so averse was he to accepting anything but the most modest fees, that Judge David Davis once rebuked him from the bench for impoverishing his brother lawyers by such an example.

Not only that, but Lincoln many times in court showed his deep and unfailing love of justice and fair play by refusing to take advantage of the mere slips of his opponents. That generous honesty made him a power with judges and juries.

It was when the Republican party was born in the convention at Bloomington, Illinois, on May 29, 1856, that Lincoln displayed the full grandeur of his character. His speech opposing the extension of slavery to Kansas was so stirring, his presence so inspiring, that the reporters forgot to take notes. His hearers were thrilled, swept out of themselves. He seemed to grow taller as he spoke, his eyes flashed, his face shone with passion, he seemed suddenly beautiful, for his soul was in his eyes and on his lips as he declared that slavery was a violation of eternal right.

“We have temporized with it from the necessities of our condition,” he said, “but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black, foul lie can never be consecrated into God’s hallowed truth.”

McClure’s Magazine in 1896 gave a report of this extraordinary speech. Here is an extract:

“Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore, let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till November and fire ballots at them in return.... We will be loyal to the Constitution and to the ‘flag of our Union,’ and no matter what our grievance—even though Kansas shall come in as a slave State; and no matter what theirs—even if we shall restore the Compromise—we will say to the Southern disunionists, ‘We won’t go out of the Union and you shan’t!’”

We love Lincoln because on that day he spoke as one naked in the presence of God. There was no lie in his mouth. Slavery must be kept out of Kansas. Kansas must be free. Slavery was an unspeakable offence in the nostrils of a free people. Yet, since the Constitution and the Missouri Compromise permitted it in the slave States, a law-respecting nation must permit it to remain there. But Kansas must be free. All the soil as yet uncursed by slavery must be kept free.

And slave or free, the nation must be held together—that was the central note of Lincoln’s great speech.

It is a common mistake to suppose that Lincoln was an advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet in 1854, while denouncing slavery as a “monstrous injustice,” he said:

“When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution.”

There was a sincere man, brave enough and humble enough to make such an admission in the teeth of the terrific abolitionist crusade. So, too, he stood in 1856. The nation had given its word, right or wrong, to the slaveholders, and the nation’s word must be kept. But Kansas must be free.

No, tender and merciful as Lincoln was, he did not raise his voice for negro emancipation. That thought came years afterwards, when, in the agony of fratricidal strife, he proclaimed the freedom of the blacks as a war measure.

However, when the Supreme Court of the United States in 1857 decided in the Dred Scott case that a negro could not sue in the national courts, and expressed the opinion that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, there was a fierce outcry in the free States, for five of the Supreme Court justices were from slave States. It is impossible to indicate the pitch of excitement in the country.

Senator Douglas, prompt, bold, masterful, faced his constituents in Illinois and stigmatized opposition to the Supreme Court as simple anarchy. Lincoln answered him at once. The people must not resist the court, but it was well known that the court had often overruled its own decisions and “it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.”

Another strain was placed upon the nerves of the overwrought country. By trickery the pro-slavery men of Kansas had brought about the “Lecompton Constitution,” permitting slavery in the State. President Buchanan pressed for the admission of Kansas into the Union with this constitution.

So, in 1858, when Lincoln was nominated by the Republicans to succeed Douglas in the Senate, and when he challenged Douglas to a joint debate, the nation was in the throes of an agitation that transcended all other passions in its history.

When the long-legged country lawyer, in loose-hung cloak, faded hat and ill-fitting trousers—sunken-eyed, lantern-jawed and stoop-shouldered—went forth to meet the great Senator before the people, the whole country watched the struggle with intense interest. For, ever since Andrew Jackson overthrew the Virginia oligarchy, the West had grown stronger in the national councils, and it was even now suspected that the balance of political power was passing from the South to the North. And Lincoln, risen from the soil itself, was a singularly bitter challenge to the aristocratic and haughty temper of the slaveowners.

Who can describe that unforgetable and decisive debate in Illinois?

On the very day of his nomination Lincoln uttered the thought that was pressed on and on until slavery and secession were trampled into dust under the heels of the Union armies:

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. 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.”

Gaunt, gray-eyed, crooked-mouthed Lincoln! In all history no man ever flayed an opponent as he did Douglas.

“I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just,” he exclaimed in one of his loftiest moments.

He pelted Douglas with logic, exposed the sham of his “squatter sovereignty” doctrine, and pitilessly analyzed the predatory policy of the slavery forces. He forced Douglas to defend and explain his Kansas-Nebraska law, trapped him into confusing admissions and showed that his popular sovereignty principle meant simply “that if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man, nor anybody else, has a right to object.”

Against the awkward country lawyer with shriveled, melancholy countenance and shrill voice, the polished, handsome and resourceful Douglas contended in vain in the seven monster outdoor meetings of the debates. The humanity of Lincoln, the fairness of his statements, the moral height from which he spoke, the homely, cutting anecdotes, the originality and imagination, the obvious simplicity and sincerity of his arguments beat down Douglas’ lawyer-like pleas.

Douglas charged Lincoln with favoring the political and social equality of the white and black races. Lincoln denied that he considered the negro the equal of the white man. “But in the right to eat the bread which his own hands earns,” he added, “he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”

Nothing in the whole story of the American people approaches this struggle between Lincoln and Douglas for dramatic setting and popular enthusiasm; and nothing in Lincoln’s life proved more clearly that with his feet set upon a moral issue he was matchless. He was filled with the majesty of his cause.

“If slavery is right,” he said that winter in Cooper Institute, New York, “all words, acts, laws and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality, its universality. If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension, its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise facts upon which depends the whole controversy.”

In the race for the Senatorship Douglas defeated Lincoln; but in that defeat Lincoln won a great victory in the awakened conscience and courage of the North.

An unpublished photograph of Lincoln in 1860, framed in walnut rails split by him in his woodchopper days. Owned by Charles W. McClellan of New York

We who love him now can hardly understand how deep was the love and how great the confidence that, a year later, raised the cabin-born, uncouth country lawyer and politician to be President of the United States.

We remember his strength and faith in the great war; we remember his gentle patience, his justice and mercy, and his martyrdom; but do we fully realize the effort he made to save his people from the ghastly sacrifice made on the battlefields where the nation was reborn?

IX

How still Lincoln became after his nomination for President in 1860! A note of acceptance, just twenty-three lines long, and then unbroken silence till the end of the campaign.

He had thundered throughout the country against the Christless creed of slavery until men forgot his crude manners, preposterous figure and shrill, piping voice in admiration and reverence of his noble qualities.

Now the crooked mouth was set hard. He retired to his modest home in Springfield, Illinois. Nor could threats or persuasions induce him to address a word to the public during that terrific campaign which was the prelude to the horrors of civil war.

In the upward reachings of Lincoln’s life there was a singular mysticism that sometimes startles one who contemplates the imperishable grandeur of his place in history.

He saw omens in dreams; experimented with the ghostly world of spiritualism; half-surrendered to madness, when his personal affections were attacked; predicted a violent death for himself; dreamed of his own assassination, and discussed the matter seriously; and gave evidence many times of a strange, aberrant emotional exaltation, alternated with brooding sadness or hilarious, uncontrollable merriment.

But behind these mere eccentricities were sanity, conscience, strength and far-seeing penetrativeness.

In the midst of his heroic debate on slavery with Douglas in 1858, while the whole nation watched the exciting struggle, he showed his statesmanlike appreciation of the situation when he said: “I am after larger game; the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.”

And when he was nominated in the roaring Chicago Convention, where the foremost politicians of the East actually shed tears over the defeat of William H. Seward, he let his party do the shouting, promising, denouncing and hurrahing, while he—wiser, cooler, abler than all—stood squarely on his record and his party’s platform, without apology, explanation or mitigation.

To his mind the issue was simple. It could not be misunderstood. Slavery was immoral. It must be confined to the slave States, where it had a constitutional sanction, but uncompromisingly kept out of the free territories.

Yet the country rang with threats that the slave States would break up the Union if Lincoln was elected. He had declared that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. That, they insisted, was a declaration of war against the slave States.

Lincoln drew the short gray shawl about his stooped shoulders, and his face grew more sorrowful. But he said nothing.

Not many months before he had written a letter to a Jefferson birthday festival in Boston, in which he flung the name of Jefferson against the Democrats as Douglas hurled the heart of Bruce into the ranks of the heathen:

“The Democracy of to-day holds the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man’s right of property.

Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.

I remember being once amused much at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men....

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society, and yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’...

This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and the capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.