F IDA M. TARE ELL BOY SCOUTS LIFE OF LINCOLN Other Books By THE SAME AUTHOR FATHER ABRAHAM HE KNEW LINCOLN IN LINCOLN S CHAIR LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN LINCOLN BEGINS His CAREER AS A PUBLIC SERVANT BOY SCOUTS LIFE OF LINCOLN BY IDA M. TARBELL Jfteto THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All right* reserved Mdli TED Itf IHfi UWira) 3J ATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 19*1, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Stt up and electrotyped. Published October, 19*1. Press of J. J. Little & IVCB Company New York. U. S. A. w c TO F. S. T. 48348 A PIONEER BOY CONTENTS CHAPTER I CHAPTER II HE FINDS His KINGDOM ........ 26 CHAPTER III STARTING OUT FOR HIMSELF ....... 46 CHAPTER IV A GREAT DECISION .......... 76 CHAPTER V THE CALL OF His COUNTRY ....... 97 CHAPTER VI THE FIGHT OF His LIFE ........ 119 CHAPTER VII THE BIG GIANT OF ILLINOIS ..... . . 144 CHAPTER VIII ARMED WITH A SINGLE PURPOSE ...... 172 CHAPTER IX STEADY IN STORMS .......... I99 CHAPTER X VICTORY! ILLUSTRATIONS Lincoln begins his career as a public servant . Frontispiece FACING PAGE They had to cut their road as they went .... 10 Facsimile of lines from Lincoln s copy-book. . . 20 Running a ferry across the great Ohio 21 Map showing Lincoln s supposed line of march in Black Hawk War 61 Facsimile of map of Albany, made by Lincoln . . 69 Facsimile of a report of a road survey by Lincoln . . 73 The earliest known portrait of Lincoln . . . . 115 Lincoln in February, 1860, at the time of the Cooper Institute speech 148 Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac . . . 197 Mr. Lincoln and his son "Tad" 227 Statue of Lincoln, made by George Gray Barnard . 245 BOY SCOUTS LIFE OF LINCOLN BOY SCOUTS LIFE OF LINCOLN CHAPTER I A PIONEER Boy Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth. WALT WHITMAN. "np> OM LINCOLN has bought a farm;" that is what all his Kentucky relatives half- *- brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins, were saying to one another. To be sure, Tom was a carpenter, but in those days in Ken tucky it was in 1803 that the farm was bought people felt rightly that the great business of a man, as in all newly settled countries, was clearing and breaking the land, opening roads, driving out In dians and wild beasts. As Tom was only twenty-three years old and since he was five had been an orphan with no settled home, this buying of a farm was an event in the family. It meant that he was going to settle down ; perhaps that he was getting ready to marry. And, as a matter of fact, that is what it did mean, for on June 12, 1806, 2/ & :-! : B v y: ScifiY/ .//<? o/ L/WCO/H he was married to a girl called Nancy Hanks, like himself an orphan, dependent upon her kinsfolk a sister of the man with whom he had learned his trade, Joseph Hanks of Elizabethtown. A wedding was a great event in those days. Peo ple came from long distances, often remaining over night for the infare or reception. The day after Nancy Hanks and Thomas Lincoln s wedding, an infare was given jointly by her guardian and her uncle, Richard Berry, at the latter s home near Springfield, Kentucky. The supper was long talked of. There was every luxury that pioneer life af forded roast venison, bear steak, barbacued sheep, roasted wild turkeys and ducks; fruit and maple syrups served in big gourds; peaches and honey a dozen dishes unknown to a feast in our day. Tom and Nancy Lincoln did not go to live at once on their farm, but for two years remained in Eliza bethtown, thirteen miles away, Tom getting his land ready for cultivation and plying his trade as he could. When they finally moved into the country, they carried with them a little girl, a year old. And here on this farm, a year later, the I2th of Febru ary, 1809, a boy was born. He was named after his grandfather Abraham Abraham Lincoln. The cabin home where the little boy was born was similar to the first homes of most of the Kentucky settlers in those early days. It was built of oak logs, ten to a side, forming walls about seven feet in height. The openings between the logs were chinked with mortar of clay and stones, making a solid wall, warm in winter and cool in summer. At A Pioneer Boy 3 one end of the cabin was a big outside chimney, its base of logs and clay, its stack of the flat stones of that part of the world. Inside, over the great fire place was a mantel. A crane swung from one side, on which the pots were hung. And there was a wide stone hearth. There was but one window and one door in this cabin, and the window never had other covering than a dressed deerskin or oiled paper, glass being almost unknown in Kentucky at that time. The little boy never knew much of his birth place because, when he was between four and five years old, his father moved to a new farm some fifteen miles to the east a much larger piece of land, over two hundred acres, and much more in teresting as it was surrounded by high hills and was heavily wooded with sycamore, oak, beech, hickory all the trees of that part of the world. The woods were full of wild fowl, and big and little animals. The land was cut by picturesque ra vines and threaded by a brook, so clear that you could see a pebble at the bottom. Knob Creek the stream was called. At the northern boundary of the farm it emptied into the Rolling Fork of the Salt River, a stream which flows into the Ohio west of Louisville. By the time a boy was five years old in those pioneer days he began to help his father and mother, and little Abraham soon was bringing in wood and carrying water to the field where his father worked, picking berries in the summer and nuts in the fall and, when planting was going on, dropping seeds. 4 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln One of the few things about this farm he remem bered when he grew up was a disaster that came to seeds he had dropped. His father was planting corn in what they called the big field seven acres lying in the valley along the creek. Little Abraham followed him and into every other hill of every other row he dropped two pumpkin seeds. The field must have seemed pretty big to a seven-year-old boy, and he must have felt almost as discouraged as his father probably did when, just after the planting was fin ished, a big rain sent the water rushing down all the gorges on the farm, flooding the entire valley and of course washing out the pumpkin seeds as well as the corn. But life on the farm was not all work, nor was it lonely. Abraham had not only his sister Sarah as a companion, but he had a schoolmate, Austin Golla- her ; and when school was not in session which was much of the time, the term rarely being over three months of the year they visited back and forth whenever their mothers would consent, and on these visits had many adventures. The most exciting was one Sunday when they were looking for partridges which Abraham had seen a few days before. Knob Creek was high that day, and they wanted to cross it. In the effort to walk a log, Abraham Lincoln fell in. Neither of the boys could swim, and it was only the courage and quick wit of Austin Gollaher that saved his playmate. Seizing a long pole, he succeeded in getting his drowning companion ashore. He thought he was dead when he had landed him, and was badly scared; but he was a good Scout, A Pioneer Boy 5 though he had none of the fine training that a Scout gets in our days. "I rolled and pounded him in dead earnest," he used to say in telling the story, u then I got him by the arms and shook him, the water meanwhile pouring out of his mouth. By this means I succeeded in bringing him to, and he soon was all right." It was not only partridges that drew the boys to the woods. Part of the education of the pioneer was to know the tracks of animals, the call and flight of birds and fowls, the spots where the biggest berries grew, the pools fish loved. Every sound of earth and air, every change of color in the tree or the ground, every print of hoof or claw, every trail of snake, must be recognized. Abraham and Aus tin learned to know where a fox had passed, a deer had drunk, an eagle nested. They knew the honk of the wild goose, the song of the cardinal bird, and no doubt they ran from many a real or imaginary bear, and killed snakes that were their friends as well as those that were their enemies. There was not much schooling, though both boys, as long as they lived, remembered the names of two of their teachers Zachariah Riney and Caleb Hazel. Abraham learned much more at home than he did at school, for his mother was am bitious that her children should have opportunities that she and her husband had never had. It was in the long evenings that most of her teaching was done. Sitting on the doorstep, looking over the lovely land in the summer, or before the great roar ing fire in the stone fireplace in the winter, Nancy 6 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln and Tom Lincoln told their children all the stories they knew stories of the Bible, of their own lives and of the lives of all their forebears. In these long evenings the children learned of the tragedy of the Garden of Eden, how the boy Moses was rescued from the bullrushes and grew up to be one of the great men of the land. They became acquainted with Isaac and Jacob and Samuel and David and Goliath the good men and the bad men of the Old Testament. They heard the beautiful story of the Christ and His Disciples, and were taught to repeat chapter after chapter of the wise and beautiful songs and proverbs and teachings of the great Book. It was in these evenings, on the doorstep or by the fire that Sarah and Abraham Lincoln learned all they knew of the families of their father and mother. There were many tales of hardship and of thrilling adventure, for both Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks had been carried from Virginia into Ken tucky when very little children. Their families had traveled in great oxcarts, on horseback and on foot, in company with other pioneers, along a famous highway called the Old Wilderness Road. There were still Indians and dangerous beasts in the woods so that every mile of the journey had to be made in watchfulness. The story which they remembered longest was that of the death of their own grandfather Lincoln, for whom Abraham was named. Grandfather Lin coln had come to Kentucky with his family when Thomas was only about two years old. There were four older children half brothers and half sisters A Pioneer Boy 7 of Thomas. Like all the pioneers of those days, they went for safety to live in what was called a stockade, made by arranging the log cabins of a group of settlers around a small court. The cabins were connected by high stout fences. There was but one entrance to a stockade, and no openings in the outside wall of these cabins excepting for rifle. Abraham Lincoln was a rich man for those days, and he had taken up in Kentucky over 3,000 acres of land, in scattered tracts. One of these tracts he had set about clearing, with the help of his sons. Little Thomas was of course too young to handle an ax, but he usually went with his father and brothers into the clearing. One day when they were at work, an Indian from ambush killed Abraham Lincoln. The two older boys ran for help, leaving Thomas by his dead father. Just as the savage was seizing the child, the oldest boy, who had reached the cabin and found a rifle, shot him dead, thus saving his little brother from scalping or captivity. Thomas Lincoln told many stories of his wan derings after his father s death, and of all he had seen and heard in Tennessee and Kentucky and of the trips he had made down the Ohio to the Mis sissippi and so on down to New Orleans. He had many thrilling stories of hunting to tell them, for he was a splendid shot, and of mighty fights with quar relsome bullies, in all of which he was victorious. He talked to the children, no doubt, of their coun try, the United States, which had declared its inde pendence only thirty-three years before Abraham Lincoln was born. He told them what he knew of 8 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln their Virginia relatives who had fought in the Rev olution, what he knew of George Washington and what he had seen and heard of the attempt of Aaron Burr and his friends to seize Texas and set up a kingdom, in which he hoped some day to include even the very State of Kentucky. There were great tales to tell around the fire in those days of the things the pioneer and his friends had seen and of which they had been a part. When young Abraham Lincoln was seven years old, his first venture in pioneer traveling came. His father was disappointed with his life on Knob Creek, and thought that he might improve his chances by moving north into the territory of Indiana, which was expected soon to become a State. One of his half brothers, Josiah Lincoln, had already settled in Indiana, and a visit to him had convinced Thomas Lincoln that he would do well to try his fortune there. So, in 1816, he began his preparations to move by building a flatboat and by selling his title to the land on Knob Creek, taking in exchange a little money and a large amount of produce that he hoped to be able to sell as he traveled. Late in the summer, Abraham and Austin had the excitement of seeing this boat loaded and launched on the Rolling Fork, and of watching Thomas Lin coln float out of sight on his journey. When he returned, several weeks later, he had a fine story of adventure to tell. His journey had been safe until he reached the Ohio River, where, almost at once, he was caught in the tides and swamped. With a great deal of hard work, he A Pioneer Boy 9 righted his boat, rescued his hogsheads and his tools and made his way across the river, finally landing near the town of Troy, Indiana. Here he stored the freight he had saved, sold his boat, and started northwest afoot into what is now known as Spencer County. He told them that after traveling about sixteen miles he had come upon a beautiful piece of rolling land, heavily wooded with hickory, oak, walnut, and sugar maples trees so old and large that they had in many places crowded out underbrush, making an open forest, fit for graz ing. He told them how this land lay between the forks of a big creek, known as Pigeon Creek, along the banks of which were many openings or prairies. He described how he had marked off a quarter sec tion by cutting brush at the corners and burning them, to indicate that the land had been taken, and then how, to legalize this preemption, he had walked still farther west to Vincennes, where the land of fice of Indiana was then located, and had entered his claim. Now he was back and they were to start at once for their new home. There was a great bustle of packing, in which the children, of course, took their part. They helped load all the family possessions feather beds, coverlets, furniture, the Dutch oven, pots and skillets and the plow, into a wagon. Finally, when all was ready, the sad part came, the saying of good- bys Abraham to his friend Austin, and, saddest of all, a visit with their mother to the grave of a baby brother who had died only a few months before. The journey northward was full of joy and in- lo Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln terest for the children. They camped at night in strange and beautiful places. They crossed the great river, team and all, on a ferry. The river must have seemed like a sea to the children. Land ing on the other side, they took up their route through an almost unbroken wilderness. Only a bridle path ran through this part of the country. They had to cut their road as they went. It was in October when they reached their new land and went about making a shelter which would do them until they could build a home. Of course the most important matter was to choose a proper site, one with good drainage and abundant water. The place where the Lincolns settled, while it would be called flat by those accustomed to high hills and mountains, was a rolling land, and they chose a beautiful, well-drained knoll for their home. Unfortunately, they discovered after their clearing was made that there was no permanent supply of water near. One of the tragedies of this new home was the fact that they never succeeded in getting a good well, although Thomas Lincoln exhausted him self in the search, digging in all directions. There were seasons in the year when young Abraham and his sister were obliged to carry water for at least a mile. On the southwest slope of this knoll they made their camp. It was what the woodsman knows as a half-faced camp. Two strong, straight trees about fourteen feet apart, standing to the east and west, were chosen and trimmed and hewn to serve as corner posts. The east, west, and north sides A Pioneer Boy n were then inclosed in log-cabin fashion, a lighter timber being cut than for a permanent building. These sides were made tight with clay, the roof with sod and branches of trees. There was no chimney in the half-faced camp, but in front on the open south side a big fireplace was made, and here a fire was kept burning night and day, whatever the weather, as a guard against prowling wolves, bears, and wild cats. Most of the cooking was done in what was known as a Dutch oven, a large iron pot, standing on three long legs and furnished with an iron cover and a handle. A big bed of coals was raked in front of the high pile of logs which were always burning in the fireplace, and on these the pot was placed. No better cooking utensil was ever devised for stew or roast than the Dutch oven, but you must have a bed of coals such as only a fireplace will give. A half-faced camp can be made livable, even in winter, except under two conditions when a south wind blows the smoke into the shelter and when a drenching rain soaks everything, inside and out. Then camp life becomes a test of courage and cheer fulness. Before the winter was over the Lincoln family often underwent this test. A shelter provided, the next task was to clear land enough for the next season s crop, cut a boun tiful supply of wood, build a smokehouse and a camp for their few animals, and begin preparing the tim ber for the permanent home, which they hoped to build at once. Of course, while this was going on, they had to keep themselves in food. This was not 12 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln difficult. The forest around them was full of wild fruits and nuts and of all kinds of game ducks, geese, turkeys, grouse, quail, pheasants. Not far away was a "deer lick," long famous in the coun try. Tom Lincoln was so good a shot that the smokehouse was always hung with hams and shoul ders of bear and venison. In all the work Abraham took his part. The ax was put into his hands as soon as they arrived in Indiana, and he was so strong and so willing that he was soon able to swing it with skill. It was only from hunting that he held back. He had no taste for killing things. Just before he was eight years old he shot his first turkey and it was his last. He never shot deer or bear, though he always took his part in guarding family and neighbor when there was danger from prowling wolves. But if he did not kill, he did know how to skin and butcher ani mals. Curing and tanning the hides of the bear and deer and wolf they took was almost as important to the family as the meat, for it was from these skins that a large part of their clothing, as well as bed and floor coverings, were made. Abraham Lincoln was a grown boy before he had other trousers than those made from buckskin most of which he had no doubt prepared himself. His cap was fashioned from a coonskin, the tail hang ing down behind; and as for his shoes, they were like the Indians mocassins, made of hides. By the end of the first year their permanent home was ready a generous log cabin with loft, big fire place, windows, and doors. Into this went the fur- A Pioneer Boy 13 nishings which at odd times Thomas Lincoln had been making. He was not only a fairly good car penter, but a cabinetmaker as well, and out of the timber which he had hewn he made stools, tables, beds the kind of furnishings which men, thrown Robinson Crusoe-like into the woods, provide for their needs. Hardly had they moved out of their half-faced camp into the new home when an aunt and uncle of the children from Kentucky moved into it Betsy and Thomas Sparrow. They brought with them a grandson, a boy some ten years older than Abra ham, Dennis Hanks. The coming of the Sparrows was a great comfort to the Lincolns, for it means company close at hand. Betsy was a sister of Nancy Lincoln, and the two women were glad to be together. Uncle Thomas and Dennis were two more pairs of strong arms to help Thomas Lincoln in settling, and Dennis was a lively and congenial companion for the children. The second winter in Indiana was much more cheerful and comfortable than the first had been, and life for the Lincolns would have continued to improve if a few months later, in the spring of 1818, Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow had not fallen ill and died of a malignant malarial fever, which was ravaging Spencer County. People called this disease the "milk sick," because it was popularly supposed to be caused by the milch cows eating poisonous herbs. As medicines and doctors were almost unknown, the illness which, properly cared for, might have been cured, was usually fatal 14 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln Hardly were Uncle Thomas and Aunt Betsy in their graves when Mrs. Lincoln was taken away by the same disease. Poor Nancy and Abraham ! It was a sorry day for them when they walked behind the green pine box which their father had made for their mother s coffin and saw her buried on a wooded knoll, only a half mile from their home. It was a dismal funeral, for there was no min ister to read the Scriptures or say a prayer. Only a few neighbors were there, and some of them had recently been bereaved in the same way. Among these were two boys, schoolmates of Abraham, whose mother, a friend of Mrs. Lincoln, had died only a few days before. Abraham could not get over the grief of having his mother buried without a funeral service, and months later, a minister being in the vicinity, it was by his request that services were finally held over the little grave of Nancy Hanks Lincoln. The winter following all this grief was a hard one for the children. Sarah Lincoln was only eleven years old, and there was too much hard work for a child of her age. There were only a few neighbors, all at a distance and all heavily burdened by work and by illness. After a year Thomas Lin coln decided that he ought to seek another mother for his children, and, returning to Kentucky, he asked a woman whom he had known as a girl, Sarah Bush Johnston, now a widow with three children, to be his wife. It was a great day for Sarah and Abraham Lin coln when their new mother arrived. She brought A Pioneer Boy i$ with her a big load of better furniture than they had ever seen and many a comfort which they had not known. If they had had any dread of a stepmother, it passed at once. She took the two children as her own and made them a tender and careful mother. Abraham came to love her as he had loved his own mother. From this time not only life at home was happier, but things were much more promising without. There was a little more land cleared every year and put into crops. Their stock increased. Opportu nities for carpenter and cabinet work were multi plying, for Indiana had been admitted into the Union soon after the Lincolns settled in Spencer County, and the valley of Pigeon Creek was filling up with settlers. A town, Gentryville, had sprung up only a mile and a half away. This meant soci ety, and it meant work. In the good way of the pioneer, they helped the newcomers clear their land, dig wells, and build houses. Much of the furniture of the valley was made by Thomas Lincoln chests of drawers, corner cupboards, stools, tables, spin ning wheels. The community had grown so fast that when Abraham was eleven years old, a church was built under the direction of his father. In all of this work Abraham helped; indeed, before he was eighteen years old he was able not only to handle an ax but all kinds of tools, even independently of his father s direction. But it was not only at home, on the farm and in the carpenter shop that he worked. His father hired him out to various neighbors. In one family, 1 6 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln the Crawfords, he spent several months. Every where that he went to live, he became a favorite, for not only was he a strong and willing worker, doing his part cheerfully, but he was most helpful about the house. He might be tired by a hard day in the fields, but his quick eye saw an empty wood- box or water pail, and he quickly filled it. Many a tired woman in a family where he worked had him to thank for a "lift." Much he might easily have shirked if his spirit had not been so kindly, his desire to lend a hand where it was needed so constant and natural. It was not a kind deed a day with him; it was a kind deed whenever there was a chance for one and he had an eye for the chance. He was not kind to his friends alone. Any one in trouble, anything suffering, was sure of his help and championship. Many of his companions were cruel to animals; he would not allow it. He would lecture them, even fight them, to stop it. Anything that was helpless he would champion. There was a good deal of drunkenness in the country , and people were often hard-hearted toward men who had drunk themselves helpless and insensible. One night, when young Lincoln and some of his friends were going home after spending the evening in their nearest town, Gentryville, they passed a man, drunk to insensibility in the road. They could not arouse him and Abraham s companions decided to let him lie where he was good enough for him, was their idea. The night was cold, and the man, if he had not frozen to death, would certainly have suffered from his exposure. Lincoln refused to go on, and, A Pioneer Boy 17 taking the man in his big arms, carried him a long distance to a cabin, where he helped build a fire and restore the half-frozen wretch. Such acts of kind ness gave him a great reputation in the neighbor hood. People not only admired his strength, but they admired still more his kindness. He was "clever," they said. People liked him, too, because he was "good com pany." He loved to talk, to tell stories, to discuss, to play games. Wherever he went he brightened things, made them more interesting. His father had always been a famous story-teller and Abraham was like him. He remembered all the stories he heard and told them with pantomime and mimicry that set everybody into shouts of laughter. He took his part in all the games they played particularly did he like the spelling match, the debate, and the exhibitions in school. He loved to run races, to wrestle, to swim, to jump, play slap jack, town ball, I spy, to pitch horseshoes, to hurl a hammer or a maul. Whatever the game spelling or wrestling, debating or lifting weights, he excelled. In all these contests, he played square. There is only one story told of him in which his fairness can be questioned, and several of his old friends who saw the fight for it was a fight always defended what he did. Lincoln and one of his friends, William Grigsby, fell into a dispute over a pup which both boys claimed and which, as a matter of fact, had been given Lincoln. Grigsby angrily dared Lincoln to fight him. "I can lick, Bill, so what s the use fighting?" Lin- 1 8 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln coin said, but Grigsby insisted and finally Lincoln proposed to put his stepbrother, John Johnston, in his place, it being understood that the pup went to the winner. Grigsby and Johnston went to it, but when Lincoln saw that his substitute was getting the worst of it, he suddenly seized Grigsby by the collar and the seat of his trousers and threw him over the heads of the crowd that had collected ! The defense his friends made for his action was that Grigsby knew the dog belonged to Lincoln when he claimed it. His love of fun and of talk often interfered with work. "When Abe started fooling," one of his old friends said, "the boys would throw down their tools and join him, and so they would when he started talking." The only real trouble that Thomas Lin coln had with his son was keeping him steadily at his tasks. And this was the only complaint of those for whom he worked. He had one task with which this propensity never interfered, and that was going to the mill. Flour and meal were not bought at the store in those days as now. The pioneer raised his own corn and wheat and sent it at intervals to be ground. It was generally an all-day task, for the mills were at some distance and you must await your turn when you arrived, and the process was slow. The grain was put between two heavy round millstones and to these were attached a long pole or sweep which was turned by the horse which had brought the grain. Of course the waiting for his turn gave young A Pioneer Boy 19 Lincoln a fine time for talk and fun. One of the most curious experiences of his boyhood and one of which he often talked when he grew up came to him while grinding corn. He was urging the horse to a quicker pace, and started to say, "Get up, you old hussy," when the horse kicked him, knocking him unconscious in the middle of his sentence. His com panion could not bring him to, and, frightened, ran for help. It was some hours before he regained consciousness, and when he came to himself he called out the end of the sentence which which had been broken by the kick of the horse "you old hussy." Mr. Lincoln used often to wonder how it could be that his mind, after hours of what was called com plete unconsciousness, could take up its work at the very point where it had dropped it. People not only liked but they trusted him. He never lied, never tried to shirk the blame for a mis take. Over the door of the little log school on Pigeon Creek a fine pair of antlers were fastened. One day Lincoln carelessly seized one of the prongs and attempted to swing back and forth from it. His weight was too much and it broke with him. When the teacher came in he was very angry and demanded to know who had broken the antlers. Lincoln did not hesitate. "I did," he confessed. "I did not mean to do it, but I hung on it and it broke. I wouldn t have done it if I d thought it d a broke." As time went on and Abraham grew older and stronger, work outside of Pigeon Creek Valley was offered him. The winter he was seventeen he passed in the settlement at the mouth of Anderson Creek 2O Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln where it flows into the Ohio a place near where he and his father had landed in 1816 running a ferry across the great river. Keeping the ferry meant that Abraham saw all the new settlers coming into Indiana by this route, and heard their stories and their discussions. He talked with men and women going to the north and south on visits and business, with traveling preachers, A/ FACSIMILE OT LINES FROM LINCOLN S COPT BOOK. teachers and politicians; and of course he learned all about the river traffic of the Ohio. The Ohio was the highway of Indiana and all the neighboring States. It was by it the settlers received their news and their goods, and it was by it they sent out the produce they raised. Every description of boat known at that time could be seen on the river. Great flatboats loaded with produce, floating down to New Orleans, passed. Trading boats, car rying furniture, groceries, clothes, harness, wagons, plows, kitchen utensils everything that the general- store keepers of the settlements dealt in tied up A Pioneer Boy 21 for business. "Arks" and "Sleds" a primitive kind of houseboat made by building a small cabin on a flatboat, with families on their decks, the women cooking or washing or sewing, the children playing beside them floated by. And now and then came a steamboat. The first was seen on the Ohio River when Abraham was only three years old, but by this time, 1826, there were many of them. The river life fascinated young Lincoln. Why should he not go to New Orleans, too? Other boys did. Boys no older than he went with produce they had raised themselves. In his leisure time he put in a piece of tobacco not far from the ferry. He went back home with the idea buzzing in his mind, -and began working with all his might to raise enough potatoes, corn, and bacon to justify an expedition. His father and mother were doubtful about the un dertaking. They naturally feared some harm might come to him, but he was so eager and worked so hard that they finally consented. When his produce was ready, Abraham went to Anderson s ferry and built a flatboat not very large, but sufficient for what he had to carry. While he was working on this boat one day, and wondering if it were stanch enough for the trip, two strangers rode down to the river bank and hired him to take them out with their luggage to a passing steamer there were no wharves at the small river towns in those days, so that passengers rowed out, the steamer stopping when hailed. He sculled them out, and they jumped on board without paying him. "You have forgotten to pay me," he called after 22 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln them. They had forgotten, and each man threw him a silver half dollar. He could scarcely believe his eyes. Never before had he earned half that much in a day, and even then it went to his father. But this was his. It put hope into him and it made him thoughtful. If money was to be earned by being on hand when and where people needed help, he proposed to earn more. Whether Abraham took this flatboat that he had built to New Orleans or not, we do not know. It is quite possible that he gave up this trip because he had an opportunity to go about this time as a hand with one of his acquaintances, an older man, who was making the trip on a much larger boat than he could have possibly built. A little later, too, he went down the river to New Orleans on a journey of which he often talked when he grew to be a man. This trip was made as a "bow hand" on a trading boat that Mr. Gentry, the leading citizen of Gentryville, was sending down, in care of his own son, and he hired Abraham to go along for eight dollars a month and his passage back. To take a flatboat as large as that the Gentrys built down the Ohio and the Mississippi was a task that called for both brains and muscle. The boat was fully forty feet in length, with a double bottom of stout oak planks. It had a rough shelter on the deck. It was provided with two pairs of stout long oars at bow and stern, a check post and coil of rope, and what was called a setting pole for steering. The current of the river would carry such a .boat as this from four to six miles an hour. The crew s work A Pioneer Boy 23 was largely piloting. There were many bends in the river, the winds were capricious and the currents tricky, and in many places the traffic crowded. It called for skillful steering. They traded as they traveled, tying up wherever they thought there was a chance for a market, exchanging their boat s load of bacon, potatoes, and cloth for cotton, tobacco, and sugar. The boys spent a little time sight-seeing in New Orleans, disposed of their boat, and came back by steamer. Going to Europe nowadays would not have meant more to a boy than these trips to New Orleans did to Abraham Lincoln. When he came back to take up his tasks on the farm and at the car penter s bench he had more to think and talk about than ever before in his life. The river was the great world to him and he was eager to follow it. The greatest man on the river, as he had seen him, was the pilot. Why should he not be a pilot? He talked it over with an older friend in whom he had confidence, and it was only at his insistence that he gave up the dream. His friend believed that it was Abraham s duty to stay with his father until he was twenty-one, so reluctantly he gave up his ambition to be a river pilot and re mained at home until he was of age. For twenty-one years his life was almost en tirely that of a laborer. What did he learn from this hard pioneer work? He knew how to swing an ax as well as any man in the West, to select and prepare trees for cabins and rails and timber. He could use tools, and plan and build. He could 24 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln handle a horse, a plow, a scythe, a flail could build and steer a flatboat. His eye was keen for every moving thing. He could see a hundred sights that none but the woodsman ever sees. He knew the ways of bears and deer, partridges and pheasants, the songs of scores of birds. He was weather-wise and weather-hardened, he had known cold and hun ger and weariness. It had seasoned and trained him until he could lift a weight, run a race, and wrestle with any man in all the country. He knew men by constant association with them, laboring by their side in clearing land, in building, planting, harvesting, and trading. He had learned to get on with people people of all sorts stupid, quarrelsome, cowardly. He had learned to make himself first among people by kindness, courage, helpfulness, cheerfulness, hon esty, loyalty. He had learned the meaning of labor. He saw that it was by labor that new lands are opened; men and women fed, clothed, and sheltered, homes made possible, cities built, a country made great. He saw that all progress and happiness come from man s power to labor, and he learned to despise the man that did not do his part in carrying out this law of God and man. He was a man, every inch of him, by the time he was twenty-one, the kind of man that the pioneer understands and admires. But there was another side to Abraham Lincoln at twenty-one that few of those about him understood. It was something that made them say sometimes that he was "different" A Pioneer Boy 25 from the rest of them. For in these years, while he was learning the life of the laborer and practic ing it, shoulder to shoulder, with his elders as well as with those of his own age, he had been carrying on another life, a life in his mind. The activities of this mind life of his had been as constant as the activities of his physical life. It had had as many handicaps and as many hardships, and just as the life of the pioneer which he had known had had a definite goal the settling and the development of the coun try, so Abraham Lincoln had had in the life of his mind a goal. He wanted to understand things to know what was in books. He wanted to be able to explain what he had learned to others, to persuade and move them. Quite as early as the day when the ax had been put into his hand, he had had this ambi tion. He had never given it up any more than he had been allowed to give up the ax. How far had he gone by this time in this mind life? How had he been able, laboring by day as he did, to carry it on? How far was he on his way toward being an educated man, a man of influence with other men? CHAPTER II HE FINDS HIS KINGDOM My mind to me a kingdom is. EDWARD DYBR. DID you ever hear of a "blab" school? That is what the settlers of southwestern Indiana called the school that Abraham Lincoln at tended when he was a boy. If you had lived there you could not have passed the log schoolhouse with out knowing that the name fitted, for as you ap proached you would have heard a steady hum of voices, growing louder as you passed by, which you would have known could only have come from every body talking together. And so it was. The pupils were studying out loud. There were so few books that the teacher was obliged to read each lesson aloud and the boys and girls repeated it after him. It is probable that Abraham Lincoln never owned a schoolbook in those days. The habit he learned in the u blab" school stayed with him, for all his life he loved to read aloud, and when he was preparing a speech he would repeat over and over the argument and struggle with sentences until he had them in a form where they sounded right. The schools were as poor in furniture and conve niences as in books. Everything that the pupils used 26 He Finds His Kingdom 27 was homemade. The benches were made of puncheons, set in rough logs, so were the tables. And as for blackboards, globes, reference books, and pictures there were none. The only branches that the teachers attempted were reading, writing, and arithmetic. But this poverty of books and furniture did not prevent the schools being full of life and variety. If they had little they made much of what they had. There might be but one reader, but it was packed with interesting selections, meant not only to give a good vocabulary but to teach history, natural science, geography, as well as to arouse a love of generous actions and a contempt for meanness and injustice. Many of the selections chosen dealt with the men that had formed the United States and with their hopes that in this new land there would be freedom and a chance for all that were oppressed. The very problems in the arithmetic often aimed to teach facts about the country, as those given Abraham when he was studying subtraction : "General Washington was born in 1732. What is his age in 1787?" "America was discovered by Columbus in 1492 and its independence declared in 1776. How many years elapsed between these events ?" Having no books, and eager to have copies of the examples given out, Abraham made himself copy books by fastening together sheets of paper. Much was made of spelling in the pioneer schools, the pupils choosing sides and spelling down almost every day. One of the excitements of the neighbor- 28 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln hood was the public spelling bee. Lincoln was so much better speller than most of his friends that the side which had him for a leader at these bees nearly always won. Indeed, finally, he was ruled out of the contests entirely because of his superior accuracy. This did not prevent his giving a hint to his friends sometimes when they were puzzled over a word. One of his little girl friends told as long as she lived how once when she was hesitating whether defied was spelled fi, fy or fe, she looked at Lincoln and he put his finger to his eye. She took the hint and spelled the word. In spite of this early reputa tion, Lincoln never was an accurate speller. He knew this himself. Once a boy who had been taken by his father to call on Mr. Lincoln in the White House heard the President tell how his secretaries had trouble with him because he rarely spelt very right; he made it verry. The boy never forgot hear ing a President of the United States confess that there were words that he could not spell. Another important event in the "blab" school, to which all the neighborhood flocked, were the debates. One subject which always brought out a heated argu ment in which the fathers and mothers of the chil dren took a keen interest, was, "Which has the most to complain of, the Indian or the negro?" Besides the spelling bee and the debate, the schools held what they called exhibitions, generally at the end of the term. All the pupils were expected to perform, either speaking pieces or taking parts in dialogues. In these exercises, as in the spelling and debating, Lincoln excelled, He loved to speak, and He Finds His Kingdom 29 as his memory was good and his ideas of the mean ing of the piece clear, he nearly always aroused his audience to enthusiasm by his rendering. But Lincoln did not have many terms at even the "blab" schools. All the days that he passed inside of a school house do not amount to more than a year. There were a few weeks in Kentucky before he was eight years old and short periods after he moved into Indiana; one when he was ten, another when he was fourteen, and the last and shortest when he was seventeen. Abraham realized that he would certainly forget what he learned in these broken terms unless he con stantly put it in practice. Nothing slips away from one like unused knowledge. He was determined not to let anything escape, and he worked out his own system of saving his learning. He would lie on the floor at night before the open fire and on the back of the big wooden shovel, with a piece of charred wood, use the multiplication table on problems which he made up; and when the shovel was covered, he would pare off the surface with a sharp knife and begin again. Nor did he allow himself to forget the pieces which he had learned in school, often de claiming them before his parents and their visitors. Abraham not only saved what he had learned in school; he found ways of adding to it. He discov ered when he was still very young that everybody about him knew something that he did not know, and that by listening and asking questions of others he could learn things that could not always be found in books, certainly not in books that he had. His 30 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln curiosity about what was going on in the world, about what people were doing and how they were doing it, what they thought and why they thought it, was so great that he rarely met a stranger that he did not try to learn from him. He would leave his work to the disgust of his father or employer when a stranger passed on the road, and ask questions. One of the places where he learned most from others was the general store at Gentryville, kept by William Jones. It was the custom on mail day, Sat- urda^ 1 afternoons, rainy days, and almost every even ing, for the men and boys in and around Gentryville, to gather in Mr. Jones store. They talked of the weather, of the crops, and of all the joys and trag edies of the countryside. They listened to everybody who had come back from a trip down the river and to every visitor that had come from the East or the South. Chiefly, they discussed politics. The mail came once a week, by a carrier from Rockport. He brought the one regular paper, a weekly, the Louis ville Journal. Lincoln was so good a reader that he was often asked to read articles to the company. And then came the discussion. There were great questions to discuss, too, and Lincoln always went home with his mind full of new thoughts and new information after an evening spent in Jones store. His habit of watching what went on around him and of asking questions when he was puzzled, served him well when he was a ferryman and on his trips down the Mississippi. What a boy gets out of hikes and travel depends upon how good a use he makes He Finds His Kingdom 31 of his eyes and his tongue, upon his ability to see things as they are and to ask wise, not foolish, ques tions. Lincoln could make a trip on foot to Rock- port, fifteen miles from his home, and come back with more information and new ideas than a boy who had not his trained faculty for seeing and listen ing would bring back from a trip to Europe. He was not only a listener and an observer ; he had discovered when a very little fellow that stories of what men thought and had done could be found in books. It was the Bible which first taught him this. It was difficult to get Bibles in those days. When the colonies first quarreled with England, they put an embargo on all imports. As there was neither paper nor type enough in the country to print Bibles, there was soon such a dearth of them that in 1777 Congress ordered the purchase of 20,000 in Hol land. When the war was over, cheap Bibles came in again from England, and were scattered over the country where they were needed most. It was one of these English Bibles that came into Thomas Lin coln s household. Abraham s education was founded on this book. He knew much of it by heart. He was familiar with the lives of the men that it tells about, he thoroughly absorbed its wonderful teachings, and even as a boy he tried to model his conduct upon them. For a number of years this Bible was the only book he had at home, but he was so eager to read that he always was on the lookout for books in other people s houses. Wherever he heard of a book, any where within twenty miles, he could not rest until he 32 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln had borrowed it; he would keep it in his pocket and read it whenever he had a spare moment. Much as he enjoyed talking and playing games at noontime when he was working with a number of boys, if he had a book he would go off by himself and read; and at night, after he had his supper, he would go to his room and read as long as there was light. Before returning a borrowed book he would often make long extracts of the passages that had interested him most not so simple a thing for a boy to do that in those days. Lincoln had not only to save paper and sew it together for a copybook, but he had to cut his pen from turkey quills and make his ink from brier root. The winter that he spent at the mouth of Ander son s Creek, running the ferry, he lived in a house where there were many books, most of them new to him, and the family were surprised to find that he spent his night, as well as his little leisure in the day time, reading. One of the most serious difficulties that he had as a boy came from being not as careful as he should have been of a book he had borrowed. It was Weems s "Life of Washington." Lincoln was fas cinated with the story of Washington s goodness and greatness and his services to the country, and he read and re-read the volume. One night he left it in a crack between two logs of the cabin. A rainstorm came up while he was asleep and the book was soaked. The owner was Josiah Crawford, a neigh bor near Gentryville, and Lincoln went at once to him and showed him what had happened. Mr. He Finds His Kingdom 33 Crawford perhaps wanted to give the boy a lesson in carefulness, or perhaps he thought it was a chance to get some extra help at his work. At any rate, he told him that as a penalty for the injury he had allowed to come to the book, he must pull fodder for three days. As a man was paid only about thirty cents a day at that time and as the book was rare and valuable, it was not an unjust punishment. His hunger for books, for it can be called nothing else a hunger quite as real as that one feels for food and the time and trouble he gladly took to get them, earned him more than one useful friend. For instance, there was the constable in Gentryville, David Turnham, who owned a copy of the revised statutes of Indiana, which he used himself in his busi ness. Lincoln was so interested in this book, which contained not only the laws of the State but a copy of the Declaration of Independence and the Consti tution of the United States, that he used to go to Mr. Turnham s house and read there. This ac quaintance grew into a friendship which lasted as long as Mr. Turnham lived. He always treasured the book which Abraham had read so often at his home, and years later, after the assassination, he gave the book to Mr. Lincoln s -friend and law part ner, William Herndon. It is now in New York City, one of the treasures of the Library of the New York Law Institute. The more Lincoln read, the more he wanted to read. Often he brooded over his handicaps his few books always borrowed and never his own the difficulty of finding time to read when he must 34 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln work from sunrise to sunset six days in the week the lack of companions interested like himself. It was hard, lonely work educating himself. He seems never to have allowed his discouragement to get the better of him. However hard things were, he stuck to his determination to know and to understand. In his ambition he was fortunate in having the help and sympathy of his stepmother. When his father fretted because the boy "wasted" so much time read ing, she defended him. She loved to talk over with him what he had read and sought in every way she could to make it easier for him to find time and materials for study. The more he read and studied, the more he learned about using his mind. He began to see that it was not the number of books he read that mat tered, that it was the mastery of what was in them. He discovered that when he had laid aside a book for the ax or plow or hammer, he could still use his mind on its contents, make sure that he understood it fully. To be certain that he really understood was one of his great desires. He had no patience with slov enly thinking. When he was a very little boy, if he heard people talking about things which he did not understand, he would sometimes lie awake half the night trying to figure them out. He was never satis fied until he had a thing clear in his mind. He strug gled a long time to understand the relation of the earth to the sun and the moon. Finally, he had it so clearly fixed in his mind that he could make his com panions understand it. A little girl friend used to He Finds His Kingdom 35 tell when she was a grown woman how one day she said to Abraham, "The moon is going down." And he replied, "No, it is not going down, but we the earth, are going down;" and then went on and ex plained the revolution of the earth on its axis, and its course around the sun. He soon discovered that the more clearly he ex plained to others the more fully he understood him self and the more firmly facts and ideas were fixed in his mind. Whenever he could find anybody to listen to him he would go over what he had read. As he grew older he often had an audience of men as well as boys listening to his serious speeches and discussions. This training which he was giving both his wits and his tongue served him in more than one tight place as he was growing to manhood. The winter he kept the ferry at Anderson s Creek, he was even able to make a successful plea in his own defense when brought before a local justice of the peace on a serious enough charge. It happened in this way: Two farmers kept the ferry across the river on the Kentucky side. As there were only occasional travelers, it was the practice, when any one wanted to cross from one side to the other, to ring a bell for the ferryman. The farmers on the Kentucky side were busy men and frequently did not respond promptly. Lincoln fell into the habit, when the de lay was long, of pushing out from his side of the river and picking up the traveler, and, of course, re ceiving the fee for carrying him over. This hap pened so often that the Kentucky ferrymen began 36 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln to suspect that Lincoln was trying to steal their trade and decided to trap him. One day, when they had not answered the bell and he had finally crossed, they waylaid him, took him before the squire, and made their charge. Lincoln saw at once that the case was serious. Unless he could defend himself it meant a jail sen tence. So, when the squire asked him for his de fense, he made it frankly and persuasively. He had had no idea, he claimed, that in crossing the river he was doing anything but a favor to the Kentucky ferrymen. He knew that they were busy and did not like to leave their work. He knew that the travelers ought not to be kept waiting overlong. He thought that he was accommodating every one concerned when he took the men over. There was no mistaking his honesty, at least so the squire seems to have thought. Besides, his argu ment was so clear and sound that the squire finally let him off. Not only that, the squire was so inter ested in the young man that he had a long talk with him and invited him to come whenever he pleased to the trials that were held before him. Abraham was quick to take advantage of this invi tation. Nothing went on in southwestern Indiana that interested him so much as the scenes in the local courts. He again and again walked to Rockport, the county seat of Spencer County, nearly twenty miles from his home, to attend court. There he became acquainted with Judge John Pitcher, whose curiosity about the big, roughly dressed lad that lis tened so intently to the pleadings of the lawyers and He Finds His Kingdom 37 to his own speeches, was so strong that he talked with him whenever he had the opportunity, advised him, and loaned him books. Another court which Lincoln frequently attended was that at Boonville, the county seat of Warwick County. It was a rather long hike, nearly fifteen miles, and Lincoln made it usually on foot. He even once went barefoot to follow a murder trial, so in terested was he. The desire to understand everything so clearly that he could make others understand it, became more and more a passion with Lincoln as he grew older, and led him to something very important in his education, and that was, a great care about how he said things, about the words he used, and the sen tences he constructed. He found that if his listeners were really to understand his arguments he must use words familiar to them, generally simple words ; that he must use phrases that were straightforward and clear. As his great desire was to think clearly himself and have others understand his thoughts, he became very particular, turning his phrases over and over until they were as intelligible as he could make them. He discovered that one way to interest, as well as to make people understand, was by illustrations drawn from things that they were familiar with, so he fell into the habit of explaining by stories drawn from the incidents of daily life. The dog gnawing and pulling at a root all day long in order to get at a woodchuck served him as a lesson in persistency; the sleepy, lazy horse, driven to action by the bite 38 Boy Scouts r Life of Lincoln of a chin fly, served him as an illustration of the way an annoying or disheartening thing may drive one to an effort which, without it, he would not make. Everything in the world about him was full of mean ing. It was not only that he saw things, but that he thought out their meaning and after he had thought it out he explained it whenever chance came. It was natural that his desire to express himself so that he could convince and move others should lead him to writing. He is known to have written an essay on kindness to animals and another on the horrors of war, subjects that not only appealed to his natural kindly instincts but which were often treated in the school readers of that time. When he was about nineteen, he wrote an essay on the Amer ican Government and our duty to preserve the Union, which he submitted to his friend, Judge Pitcher of Rockport. Years afterward Judge Pitcher, talking about this essay, declared that u the world could not beat it." But it was not on serious topics only that he wrote. He had caught the trick of rhyming, and all of these early years used it freely. When his sister Sarah was married to Aaron Grigsby the brother of that William Grigsby with whom he had had the dispute over the ownership of a dog Abraham wrote a song which was sung at the wedding by the Lincoln family. It was the story of the creation of Eve from Adam s side, and ended with lines which, it is to be hoped, Sarah Lincoln s new husband remembered: He Finds His Kingdom 39 "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." Lincoln s facility in rhyming always astonished his friends. There was nobody else in the country so accomplished. They could understand his strong arm but not his faculty of verse making, and the community was more impressed when it was discov ered that Lincoln could use his accomplishment in ridiculing those who had slighted or wronged him. The feeling of the Grigsbys against Abraham was so strong, probably because of the fight over the dog, that they did not invite him to a wedding in the family, although everybody else in the neighborhood was there. Abraham took his revenge in verse, writ ing a long string of jingles ridiculing them. It was a novel kind of revenge in Gentryville and probably cut deeper because of that. Lincoln had discovered a dangerous thing, that he could hurt people by satire and ridicule dangerous, because so easily abused. A blow with the tongue or pen may be more cruel than a blow with the fist. 40 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln If he had not been kind at heart, given to measuring all his actions by his idea of what was right and what was wrong, that newly discovered power might have proved later a cruel weapon in his hands. But he was kind, and felt about his skill in satire very much as he did about his strength of body, that it was something that should not be used wan tonly; and in later life he learned to use it only when he was indignant over meanness or injus tice, but then to such good effect that there was nothing that those who knew him dreaded more. In this case of the Grigsbys, whatever resentment they may have felt over his lampooning was forgotten, for, years later, when he was President of the United States, one of his stanchest supporters in southwest ern Indiana was William Grigsby. Perhaps the greatest thing that he learned in his hard struggles to make the most of his life was to suit his conduct always to what he felt to be right. He did not believe one thing and do another. It could not have been easy for a boy who was so strong and supple that he could throw anybody that he had ever met, to refuse good-naturedly to fight some quarrelsome bully whose chief ambition was to have everybody afraid of him. Lincoln could afford to laugh at such boys. He knew his own strength, but he believed fighting and quarreling to be contempt ible and wrong. He would have no part in them, unless he was literally driven to it. If, as happened occasionally, a gang that loved fighting for its own sake attacked him, they found, to their shame, that they were no match. There seems never to have He Finds His Kingdom 41 been a boy in the community that he could not pick up and throw over his head; or, if forced to hit, he could not straighten out with one blow. But he took no pride in any brutal use of his strength, though he used it freely in helping others. If there was a log or a timber so heavy that no one could lift it, he would shoulder it. He loved to test himself, too, in all sorts of games, for he took pride in the supple ness as well as in the strength of his body. He used his sense of what was right and wrong as one does a compass in the woods, to point his way; and he would no more be false to that sense of right and wrong than the traveler would to his compass. He had thought it all out and he had come to see that it is only by justice, kindness, honesty of mind and heart in dealing with people that a man can become useful and happy, and, as for himself, his mind was made up. He might never have gone to school but a year in his life, never had books or clothes like those that the well-to-do boy even in that part of the world in those times had, he might have to depend upon labor with his hands for his food and shelter; but this he had come to believe, that the greatest things in the world, greater than wealth or honor, were within his reach. And these were, to be loyal in all his relations, obedient to the law, cheerful whatever his hardships, and trustworthy always. Lincoln s steady, determined training of himself made a strong impression on his friends. Many of the older people especially watched and often said to one another, "He will make his mark," "He will be a great man by and by." 42 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln And, indeed, that is what Lincoln intended. He was ambitious to know and see and be more than those about him. Everything that he learned showed him that there were men in the world who did great and noble things. How were they able to do them? He learned that they had to labor and sacrifice in order to be what they were, but that did not frighten him. All his life he had had to labor and sacrifice simply to get food and clothes. He began to see that the difference in the usefulness and in the powers of men comes from the fact that some of them so love knowledge and so desire to be useful that they are willing to make great efforts; while others want everything done for them; and he saw that these men who want everything done for them never be came useful or important. He kept at his work of learning, understanding, and telling others so persistently that by the time he was twenty-one years old, although he had never been in school more than a year, he had an education which no college or university alone can give ; to be sure, the college or university may make it much easier to learn these things, but they cannot do the work for a man, he must do it for himself. If a man is to have the love of knowledge he must culti vate it. If he is to have an eye that sees everything that goes on about him, he must train it. If he is to have the power to think through a hard problem, he must acquire it by continually putting his mind to hard problems, never giving up anything that puzzles him until he has thought it through; if he is to be able to explain that problem to others, he He Finds His Kingdom 43 must constantly exercise himself in explaining clearly by word and by pen. Above all, if he is to be truth ful, courageous, clean* cheerful, reverent, he must watch himself constantly, control and shape his im pulses, training his heart as he does his mind and body. Lincoln had done these things. By the time he was twenty-one years of age, he had learned the things that are most important in education, and it was now time for him to start out for himself. He did not see much chance of going further in Indiana, and it is probable that he would have left home of his own will if his father had not made up his mind to leave Spencer County. He had not prospered there as he had hoped, and that old malarial trouble of which Nancy Hanks Lincoln had died had broken out again. One of Abraham s cousins, John Hanks, had gone to Illinois, and had come back with wonderful tales of a land without forests to be cleared and of a soil that was so rich it only needed scratching to yield a crop. He proposed to go there and settle. The stories stirred all of the pioneer instinct in Tom Lin coln, and he decided to follow John Hanks, so the Lincolns sold their land, their extra stock, and prod uce, and in March of 1830, just a month after Lincoln was twenty-one, they started, a party of thirteen, on a journey into the new land. Everybody was sorry to see them go. It was a hard parting, particularly for Abraham. He had lived fourteen years in this valley, from the time he was seven until he was twenty-one. He knew every- 44 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln body within many miles of his home, and he was on friendly terms with everybody. He was leaving be hind scores of friends, the grave of his mother. He knew that in starting out for himself which, once this moving was over, he must do he must go among strangers ; but it was a new adventure, prom ising him the chance he so eagerly awaited; besides he was too busy with the work of the journey to have time to brood. The goods of the family had been packed into a big wagon and Abraham drove the oxen which pulled the load, a task that required skill and attention. The roads, poor at best, were terrible at this season, half frozen in some places, full of deep holes in others. There were no bridges and often the heavy wagon broke through the soft ice which still cov ered the streams. Abraham had his hands full all day and at evening when they camped he must care for his oxen and help with the horses, for most of the party, including Mrs. Lincoln, were on horse back, each rider carrying strapped behind a great bundle of fodder. The journey led them through two good sized towns Vincennes and Palestine. Lincoln saw on this trip his first printing press and his first juggler. The skill of the latter particularly amazed him. Here, he saw, was somebody who could do some thing with his body that he could not do. He never lost his interest in this sort of skill, and always at fairs, in later life, he would go to watch the strong men throwing balls and performing other feats of jugglery. He Finds His Kingdom 45 Much of the interest of the trip came from a little business venture that he was making on the side. He had foreseen that there was a chance of making a little extra money, so he went to his friend, Mr. Jones, of the general store, and asked him to make up a pack of things that he could peddle along the way. Needles, pins, thread, calico, buttons, knives and forks, went into his pack, and all were sold on the trip. It took two weeks for the Lincolns to reach Macon County, Illinois, where John Hanks had already selected a piece of land for them. This land lay about ten miles west of Decatur, the county seat, on a bluff overlooking the Sangamon River. There were acres of open prairie and much fine timber a really beautiful spot. All hands fell to with energy to build a cabin, and this done, to split rails for a field. Most of these rails were split by Abraham himself, and thirty years later some of them were carried in political parades and shown in political conventions. The field fenced, the ground must be broken and put into crops. In all this work Lincoln helped. It was true he was now of age and had the right, accord ing to law, to start out for himself; but this he was unwilling to do until he sa^w his father established. That done, he set out on a search for work, his ax over his shoulder, for the first time in his life a free and independent man. CHAPTER III STARTING OUT FOR HIMSELF Get work: it is better than what you work to get. ROBERT BROWNING. IF you had seen him in the summer of 1831, when he started out for himself, probably the last thing you would have believed was that Abra ham Lincoln had in him the making of a great man. The chances are that you would have looked at his clothes instead of his eyes, have judged by the kind of work he was doing instead of finding out what was going on in his mind. Certainly, if you had seen only the outside you would not have picked him out as a future leader of a great country. And yet, to the Boy Scout, with his trained appreciation of strength, vigor, and suppleness, he would have been a remarkable figure. Lincoln was twenty-two years old, almost six feet four inches in height, and weighed nearly one hun dred and eighty pounds. There was not an ounce of extra flesh on his body, nothing but hard, sinewy muscle, and if he had gripped your hand you would have known that he could crush it if he wished. Carrying his great frame erect, he walked with long, elastic strides, arms swinging. When sitting he slouched "sat on his shoulder blades," people said; 4 6 Starting Out for Himself 47 when reading he liked to lie at full length on the floor or ground. His face matched his body a thin face, with high cheek bones, broad forehead, and big nose. There was a curious drop at one side of his lower lip and a big wart on his right cheek. His eyes were gray and his hair heavy, coarse, and black. His big body was clad in clothes so poor and ill fitting that they attracted attention even in those pioneer days. Usually they were made of what was called jeans, a cotton mixture, roughly woven at home. His trousers were nearly always too short and his coat hitched up in the back. You see, if you are given to judging people by their clothes, the probability is that you would have passed by this future President of the United States. In spite of appearance, however, from the time that Abraham Lincoln began to work on his own account, it was on the educated people, the big men of the community, that he made the deepest impres sion. He amazed them by his knowledge, his thoughtfulness, his clear and forceful expression of ideas. They were surprised at his interest in the affairs of the countryside and his sensible way of looking at them. Almost at once he interested him self in a local public question. Lincoln had seen, as soon as he arrived in Macon County, that the great need of the settlers was better transportation some way to get easily to the big markets of the world with their produce. Now, close to his new home was a river, the Sangamon, which about one hundred and fifty miles to the west joined the Illinois River, some seventy miles from 48 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln where it flowed into the Mississippi. But it was such a lawless, zigzag stream and so blocked by driftwood and snags that it had never been consid ered navigable. Lincoln worked near this river for several months after he arrived in Illinois and, trained as he was to watch and think about his sur roundings, studied its ways until he made up his mind it could be opened and that to do this was the first business of the settler. One day as he and his cousin John Hanks were at work with others in the fields, a candidate for office stopped to talk to them. He talked on the very subject Lincoln had been thinking about the navigation of the Sangamon. When he had finished, John Hanks declared loudly that Lincoln could make a better speech than that. "Let him do it," the boys shouted. It must have been a surprise to them when, without hesitation, Abraham bounded to his feet and made a speech which the candidate himself admitted to be better than his. He knew enough of speech- making to understand that was not the first time the big rail splitter had talked on his feet. "Where did you learn that?" he asked him. Abra ham told him modestly enough how he had read and tried to make all he read clear to himself and others by speaking when he could find listeners. "Keep on," the man told him, "you ll make your mark some day." It was the Sangamon River that gave him his first chance and soon after it gave him a second when he and his half brother and his cousin were hired to pilot a flatboat with a load of produce from near Starting Out for Himself 49 Springfield to New Orleans. It was a chance to prove that he was right in the things that he had been saying about the navigation of the river. Early in 183 1 the three young men went to Spring field where they were to meet their employer. But they found he had not kept his agreement to have a boat ready and loaded for them, and that if they were to make the trip, they must build the boat themselves. It was work with which all three were familiar, and soon they were busy getting out the timber. There were no lumber yards to draw upon, but there was plenty of government land with timber for the asking. Going into the woods they built a camp and set about their task. The camp was near a set tlement known as Sangamon town, and it was not many days before the inhabitants were telling one another that there was a big fellow down in the new camp who was a wonderful story-teller. It soon became the habit at noontime and in the evening for all the menfolks around to drift into Abraham s camp to listen to him talk. Their favorite seat was a long log, off which the men, convulsed with laughter, rolled so often that they soon had it pol ished. It was long known in Sangamon town as "Abe s log." The boat was finished early in April and safely launched; but it did not get off without an exciting accident in which Lincoln s coolness and courage in danger came out strongly. A log canoe or dugout had been made for use with the flatboat and two men who had been helping the 50 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln party attempted to launch it. The river was high, overflowing its banks, and they were careless. Hardly was the dugout in the water before over it went, throwing them into the cold, rushing stream. They were swept rapidly away by the swift current, but finally succeeded in reaching the branches of a half-submerged tree in midstream. How to rescue the two men, perched up above the roaring river, was a problem. Lincoln took the matter promptly in hand. Seizing the heavy ropes on the flatboat, he called on the whole party to help attach them to a big log, and shove it into the stream. A daring fellow was selected to guide it to the tree in which the men were perched. He did so, but, excited with his success, sprang up too quickly and was thrown into the water, losing the log and only barely reaching the tree, to which now three half- frozen, frightened men were clinging. A second log was secured and the maneuver re peated, but Lincoln himself directed the life boat this time. He was able to bring it so near the tree that he could throw a line about the trunk and hold it secure until the prisoners had climbed down and seated themselves. Then, freeing his craft, he or dered it pulled slowly to shore. By this time the whole countryside was on the banks watching the rescue, and when a short time afterward Lincoln and his friends floated away from Sangamon town, he went with a reputation not only as the best story-teller that had ever been in those parts, but as a fearless and resourceful hero. Thirty miles or so down the river, the flatboat Starting Out for Himself 51 and its crew met with a second mishap in which Lin coln was again the central figure. In an attempt to go over a milldam at the town of New Salem the boat hung, bow in air. The boxes and hogsheads began settling into the stern and water flowing in. It looked like a shipwreck and the whole neighborhood gathered to shout directions and warnings. Lincoln paid little attention to his audience, but quickly began unloading and shifting cargo. Part of it was sent ashore in the dugout, and the rest was carried for ward until gradually the weight began to raise the stern. When the angle was changed he bored a hole in the bottom of the boat, letting out the water which had run in and was soon able to push the craft over. "A mighty smart chap," declared the people in New Salem, who had been watching operations. From the Sangamon they floated into the Illinois River and from the Illinois into the Mississippi and on down to New Orleans. Although Lincoln had made the trip at least twice before he was now much better prepared to benefit by what he saw and heard. The month he spent in New Orleans was one of the richest so far in his life. In 1831 the city was filled with people from all parts of the world, but particu larly from France and Spain. There were many Creoles and Indians. Besides, there was a commu nity of pirates and filibusters, fresh from wild and often wicked adventures and preparing for new ones. Along with these were hundreds of rivermen from the full length of the Mississippi. It was said that one could walk a mile in those days over the tops of the flatboats tied up along the wharves in New Or- 52 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln leans. Lincoln lived among these rough men, heard their tales, and learned their ways. Nothing in the brilliant life of the city interested him so much as the slave market. It was the first time he had seen men and women put upon the auc tion block as he had been accustomed to seeing horses and cows and hogs. The separation of moth ers and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters filled him with angry amazement. From the time that he was seven years old he had lived in free states. Slavery was only a name to him. He had been taught by his father and many of his friends to regard it as wrong, but he had all his life heard men for whom he felt respect uphold it as a neces sary institution. What he saw in the slave market, the most terrible and inhuman part of slavery but a necessary part if men and women were to be con sidered as property which could be bought and sold filled his mind. He could not think or talk about anything else. "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing," he told his cousin, "I ll hit it hard." After the month in New Orleans, the travelers came back by steamer to Illinois. Their employer, a venturesome, boastful trader, who was looking for a chance to establish himself permanently in Illinois, had decided to open a store in New Salem. He had been so pleased with what he had seen of Lin coln that he asked him to take charge of this store; and so, in the summer of 1832, Lincoln returned to the town where more than one citizen recognized him as the resourceful and cool fellow who, a few months Starting Out for Himself 53 before, had saved a flatboat and its cargo from sink ing in the Sangamon. But New Salem quickly discovered that Lincoln was as able in many other ways as he had been in saving his boat. He surprised them both by the variety of things he could do and by the kindliness and zest with which he did them. Just after his arrival an election was held in the town and the clerk in charge the schoolmaster, Mentor Graham, needed an assistant. When anything unusual was going on, particularly anything that brought men together, Lincoln was sure to be on hand. Mentor Graham, seeing him in the crowd, asked him if he could write. "I can make a few rabbit tracks," he answered. It would not have been surprising if Graham had been a little doubtful about his capacity, but he tried him out, and immediately saw that here, in spite of his queer looks,, was a young man who knew his business. He made the entries correctly and promptly and asked such intelligent questions and made such shrewd comments that the school master was greatly taken with him. When things were a little dull he enlivened the crowd by telling stories. Before night, all New Salem was telling about the stranger who had dropped in, made such a good clerk, and illustrated his talk by the most amusing and striking stories that they had heard in many a day. By the time the store was open he had won the good will and respect of the best people in New Salem; soon after he won over the roughest part 54 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln ot the community, a wild and lawless gang known as the Clary s Grove Boys a name given them from their meeting place in a grove near the town. One of the ambitions of this gang was to include in its membership the strongest wrestlers and hardest fighters in the country. Their champion at this time was Jack Armstrong, whom they boldly declared to be as strong as an ox and able to lick anybody alive. Lincoln s employer, hearing these boasts and proud of his clerk s strength and skill, retorted that Lincoln could lift more, run faster, jump higher, wrestle better than any man in Sangamon County. Of course, the Clary s Grove Boys would not let that pass, and they ordered Armstrong u to throw Lin coln." Abraham did not like these wrestling matches. There was too much "wooling and pull ing" about them, he said. But it was an open challenge with the promise of fair play, so he con sented. There was great excitement over the match, the community generally expecting Armstrong to make short work of the new man. But almost at once everybody saw that the champion had met his match. He could not throw Lincoln. Realizing this, after a long struggle, he tried a "foul." Lincoln had wrestled in good humor to this point, but when he realized what Armstrong was doing he was furious. Seizing him by the throat he held him at arm s length, shaking him as a dog might a rat. The gang, seeing their champion in this inglorious predicament, rushed to his assistance. For a few minutes it looked as if Lincoln would be downed by numbers, but he held them off until, amazed at Starting Out for Himself 55 his strength and skill, they fell back in admiration, and Armstrong, ashamed of his trickery, loudly declared that Lincoln was the best man that had ever broken into camp. Lincoln s place was now secure with the young of the countryside. He was their chosen umpire in all sports and they heeded his warning^ and took his advice when nobody else could influence them. When fall came and the regular muster of the militia for the drilling required by law was made, it was the young men that chose Lincoln for captain, just as their elders chose him for clerk of elections and referee in town matters. This popularity with all classes encouraged Lin coln to think that his ambition to take an active part in public affairs might not be hopeless, after all. Dare he offer himself as a candidate for office? By this time he had become so intimate with Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster, that he told him of his ambition. The schoolmaster understood, as Lincoln did not, that, intelligent and thoughtful as he was, his lack of systematic schooling would be a serious handicap to him if he went into public life. "For one thing you must learn not only to speak well and fluently but speak correctly," he told him. "That is, you must know more than you do about the sci ence of grammar." "I can learn it, can t I?" said Lincoln. "Yes," said the schoolmaster, "and I will help you." So far as Abraham could find out, there was at that time but one grammar to be borrowed in the 56 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln whole countryside, and that was some miles away. He did not wait, but started at once for the book; and for weeks after that he could be seen in every spare hour, working over the principles and trying to apply them. He did a good piece of work. There were only two slips which Lincoln in later life was wont to make and these many educated people make. One was to split his infinitives, and the other was to confuse "shall" and "will." He learned something by this mastery of gram mar which he seems not to have fully realized be fore, and that is that men arrange the knowledge they collect of a particular subject and the principles governing this knowledge which they work out into what is called a science, and that in order to get a solid basis for work in the world it is necessary to master at least the outlines of the essential sciences, that these are the foundations of an education and that it is through the schools that men have agreed to teach the elements of the necessary sciences. Lin coln saw that heretofore he had been reading and studying without plan and although he had taught himself to think out and express problems clearly, he had little systematic knowledge. "If that s a science," he said when he had finished with grammar, "I guess I ll try another." While he was working on his grammar he de cided to prepare an address to the people of the district, announcing himself as a candidate for the State legislature. You see, he did not intend to lose any time in letting people know what his ambitions were. He did not intend that lack of money, school- Starting Out for Himself 57 ing, or clothes should stand in his way. He went straight after the thing that he wanted, and in March, 1832, only one year after he came into the State, and when he was only twenty-three years old, he put out his announcement; but hardly was his bid for votes out before his and everybody s mind was turned from politics to war an Indian war. One morning in April, a rider dashed through the streets of New Salem, scattering handbills signed by the governor, calling for volunteers to repel an invasion by the Sac Indians, led by a chief whose name was familiar to every Illinois settler, Black Hawk. The Sacs had once owned the northern por tion of Illinois, but in 1804 had sold it to the United States, and moved west of the Mississippi, with the understanding that they could hunt and plant corn in Illinois until it was settled. The whites had not kept faith with the Indians, squatters in large numbers taking possession of land still unsurveyed. The Indians had resisted and there had been much bitterness and violence from both White and Red. Finally, in the spring of 1832, Black Hawk decided to invade the State. He had been persuaded by agitators that if he would attack, other Indian tribes would join him and that the British would send him powder and rifles; there was no chance of either of these things happening. As soon as Black Hawk and his braves appeared along the Rock River, the governor called for vol unteers from the State to help the soldiers of the regular army stationed at Fort Armstrong (Rock Island in the Mississippi) to drive him back. There 58 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln were few slackers among the younger men when this call came to New Salem, one of the first to enlist being Lincoln. Each company chose its own cap tain, and to Lincoln s surprise and delight, he was elected. He often said, in talking about his life, that nothing that had ever happened to him pleased him more than this honor. Undoubtedly it was because of the liking that the men had for him that they chose him, for probably no man in New Salem knew less about military mat ters than he did. He did not know how to give orders. Nor did he know the regulations necessary for the discipline of a camp. During the march, on which they immediately started, he constantly got into trouble through his ignorance. In later life he used frequently to tell with great enjoyment of his own awkwardness and mistakes. Once when the company was marching twenty abreast, they came up against a fence in which there was a gate. Lin coln, at his wits end as to the proper order, called out: "This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate." Because of his good-humored tolerance with his company and their propensity for mischief and carousing, he had to suffer much military humiliation and once, not at all for his own fault, but for shield ing his men, he wore a wooden sword for two days. Black Hawk was followed north for a month without an encounter. By this time the volunteers were pretty well tired of the long marches, poor Starting Out for Himself 59 food, and poor shelter. Most of them refused to go on and finally the governor mustered them all out and arranged for a new levy. This broke up Lin coln s company. He did not go home, however, but reenlisted as a private in a company of mounted independent rangers, whose duty it was to carry mes sages and spy on the enemy. After a month of this work these rangers were mustered out and Lincoln enlisted a third time in an independent company and here he remained until the end of the war in July. He saw no fighting through the three months saw no hostile Indians except a few dead ones that he helped bury. But if there were no battles, there was much real hardship, for the food was scanty and poor, the marches long and difficult, often through forests and swamps, and the ground offered the only beds. The return to New Salem, after he was finally mustered out at Whitewater in Wisconsin, was espe cially hard, for his horse had been stolen and he was obliged to "foot it" save when a friendly comrade gave him a lift or when he could get a canoe and paddle down a stream flowing in the direction that he was going. If his service in the Black Hawk War brought Lincoln no glory as a soldier it was the finest oppor tunity he had yet had for making the acquaintance of numbers of men and of studying the needs and the conditions of Illinois. He met, in the three months of campaigning and marching, scores of men with whom he was later to work in the law and in politics. His experience taught him, too, how 60 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln right he had been in thinking that the greatest need of Illinois at that time was better transportation. He still believed the way to get this was by improving the rivers and he came back to New Salem more confident than ever that the navigation of the Sanga- mon River was the issue on which to make his cam paign, for the war had by no means killed his polit ical ambition. As a matter of fact, he knew that he was stronger than ever with the men of his county, and when he reached New Salem he picked up his campaigning where he had dropped it, using the very handbills which he had had ready when the call to volunteer came. His campaigning had none of the formality of that of to-day. Candidates traveled from settle ment to settlement, on foot or a-horseback, often in groups, picking up an audience wherever they could find men and spending much time by .the wayside, at the stores, or in taverns discussing the questions of the day. Every man felt that politics was part of his business and that he must understand it if he was to vote right; consequently he took every op portunity to hear and to question. Speakers ex pected to be interrupted by their hearers and a great deal of their success depended upon the good humor, the frankness, and the information they put into their answers. If a speaker resented a question, it was generally concluded he was caught or consid ered himself superior to his hearers. Lincoln liked his audiences too well to treat their interruptions contemptuously; besides he was so interested in what he was talking about and was always so anxious to Starting Out for Himself 61 Data does not exist for determining positively *J. the route Lincoln followed in the Black Hawk War. JT Only thegeneraldtrectionof the marches of his company are indicated here. In poln{r from Ottawa to Galenaand back Captain lies may hare very well marched his company through Dlzon s Ferry. In returning from Whitewater to New Salem, Lincoln may have followed the river to Dizon There were undoubtedly several ald marches such aa that on June 85, from Dizon to Kellogg a Grove and back, which are not shown In this map. Starting Out for Himself 63 get new light that he regarded questions as a help rather than a hindrance. He frequently found other duties at public meet ings than speaking and answering questions. He had to keep the crowd in order. A regular feature of most of the political gatherings seems to have been a fight on the outskirts. Lincoln did not hesi tate to come down from his platform when inter rupted by a scrap and in his own way restore order. Noticing that one of his friends was getting the worst of it in a general fight which broke out at one of his meetings, he jumped from the platform, pushed his way through the crowd, and, seizing the bully who had started the row by the seat of his trousers, "threw him" so those who saw it always insisted "twelve feet away." Returning to the stand he went on with his speech. There was no doubt but that the people liked his speeches. He spent most of his time arguing that the Sangamon should be opened and he showed them how it could be done. They saw that he had studied the river, knew how it acted at different seasons, where its length could be shortened, its channel cleared. Here was a young man who kept his eyes open, they said, and who studied not only what was in printed books but in the greatest of books, the life and country around him. Then they liked the modesty of his speeches. "Upon the sub jects I have treated," he told them, "I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them, but as soon as I discover my opin ions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce 64 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln them." "Knows he can learn," they told one an other, "and means to do it. Isn t afraid to change if he finds he s wrong. He ll make his mark yet." How strong he made himself in Sangamon County was shown when the elections came, for, al though there were eight candidates in the field, he stood third on the list. In New Salem he received 227 of the 300 votes cast. Who would dream, to have seen him starting out from his father s log cabin in Macon County in the spring of 1831, in his jean trousers, his ax over his shoulder, that in two years he would receive over two thirds of the vote cast in the town in which he settled, for a posi tion so important as that of member of the Illinois Assembly. The election, even if called a defeat, was a vic tory. He had made himself a place among men in his community. He knew it well. That was the thing he had been working for. He was far from discouraged. Two years from now there would be another election and he meant to win that time. But now he must have work. Storekeeping, he had learned when he was clerking, just about sat isfied him, and as there was a grocery for sale in New Salem, he and an acquaintance, William Berry a fellow not too fond of work, it must be ac knowledged decided to buy the store, giving their notes in exchange. And so, late in 1832, we find the firm of Lincoln & Berry in business in New Salem. Hardly had they opened their door before two Starting Out for Himself 65 other groceries in New Salem were forced to sell. Lincoln and Berry, in spite of the fact that they had no money, bought the stocks. It was high finance ! Two penniless youths buying up three stores and doing it entirely on credit. Not a cent of money had passed hands in the consolidation. What pleased Lincoln about the undertaking was that he now had ample time to read. Customers usually found him lying on the counter, his feet propped up against a pile of groceries or calico, reading anything he could get his hands on. But even if he was an unbusinesslike storekeeper, there probably never was a more popular one. His store, as that of his friend Jones in Gentyrville, be came the meeting place of the men from the town and the county in their leisure hours, a place to dis cuss politics, neighborhood affairs, listen to stories. Liking for him grew steadily and as people knew him better they began to comment more and more on his scrupulous honesty. A woman told how one evening he weighed her out a half pound of tea, and the next morning when he came in discovered on his scales a four-ounce weight. He realized at once that in the darkness he had made a mistake and without waiting hurried off and delivered the balance of the half pound. Another customer told how he walked three miles once, after the store was closed, to return an overcharge of six and a quarter cents. And as for his kindness, it was not long before in New Salem, as back in Gentryville, he had made a reputation for helping everybody that was in trouble. You could always count on him. He 66 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln boarded in the little country tavern, but more than once when there were too many travelers for the beds, Lincoln cheerfully gave up his and slept on the counter in his store. More than one traveler who had broken down or stuck in the mud in the one poor street of New Salem had a tale to tell of a storekeeper of wonderful strength who lifted the wagon out or mended the broken parts. It was through his willingness to do a good turn to a traveler that this year of storekeeping brought him the most valuable books he had ever owned, books he was fully able to appreciate and use. One, day a man drove up, who was moving his family and household goods westward and had overloaded. He asked Lincoln if he would not buy a barrel of plunder for which he had no room. Lincoln good- naturedly consented, and, paying for the barrel, put it away without knowing what was in it. Some time afterward he dumped the contents on the floor and was amazed to find in the collection a complete set of Blackstone s Commentaries. No possession could have been more precious to him at the mo ment; and he set himself to the reading of these vol umes, which he always considered the basis of legal learning, with a determination to master them. Men seeing him stretched under the tree in front of Lin coln & Berry s store, or lying on his counter, would ask what he was reading. "Reading?" he would say, "I am studying studying law." And more than one who received this answer went away, shak ing his head over Lincoln s way of keeping store. It was not long before the community, seeing his Starting Out for Himself 67 interest in the law, began to ask services of him. The justices of the peace would call on him to dis cuss a point or to examine the papers they had made out. Lincoln was quick to see that here was a chance for him, so he began to study how to make out wills, contracts, deeds all of the various legal instru ments by which men carry on their business. It was not long before he was doing this work for many of his friends, sometimes with fees, oftener with out. If Lincoln s partner, William Berry, had been industrious and honest, he might have made up for what Lincoln lacked as a storekeeper; but he was neither. He was a shiftless fellow, drinking more than was good for him, and in six months time the firm was forced to sell. They sold to men who were no more sensible than they in business, and who not only failed but, worse still, fled without making any arrangement for paying the notes which they had taken over. Soon after this Berry died, and Lincoln found himself responsible for the debts of the three stores consolidated the year before, as well as the debts of the gentlemen who had taken over the venture responsible and not a cent to his name. There was a way out of it. He might have pleaded bankruptcy, but he could not square such a course with the laws that he had laid down for himself. He went to the various creditors, promis ing them that he would pay everything if they would give him time. And he did every cent of it, although he was nearly twenty years in doing it and found it so heavy 68 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln a burden that he used to speak of his obligation as the National Debt. But what was he to do now? A big debt on his hands, a great ambition in his heart, no friends to help him with money or influence only himself to rely on. It was not a bright outlook, you may think, but as a fact Lincoln had made in this part of Illinois a reputation for honesty, hard work, in telligence and kindness which was worth more than a fortune in money would have been. He had proved himself the kind of young man that work seeks, and even before the store was closed, an open ing had come. A very important task in a new and growing country is the surveying. Farms and roads are being laid out, towns are being started, the work of fixing boundaries goes on incessantly, and it re quires not only knowledge and skill but indifference to hardship, particularly the latter, in a country like Sangamon County. The surveyor for that part of the world a well-educated gentleman, John Cal- houn, needed a helper. He had noticed Lincoln, and just before the store failed sent him word that if he would qualify that is, if he could show that he knew enough of the science of surveying he would take him on his staff. Two points troubled Lincoln in this offer. He and Calhoun belonged to opposite political parties and he feared that if he accepted office he might be expected to change his views that he could not do. Then, he knew nothing of the science of sur veying. He went to see Calhoun and frankly stated Starting Out for Himself A J /" or A WAP or ALBAHT. ILL.. MADR nr I.TNCOLH- Starting Out for Himself 71 his doubts. He was told that his position had no political string tied to it and that if he would learn surveying they would wait for him. Now surveying is not an easy science, but to Lin coln this was no objection. It was something new to learn, it meant honest, useful, and well-paid work that gave him a chance to serve people and at the same time to get acquainted with them. He borrowed the necessary books and hurrying back to New Salem, went at them. Night and day he studied, going to Mentor Graham for help when puzzled. His friends saw him grow thin and white under the effort he made. It was tremendous, for in six weeks he reported to Calhoun that he had mastered the books and was ready for duty. He now had a business a business he liked and one for which he soon proved he was thoroughly competent. He was a careful, accurate, conscien tious surveyor. The boundaries he drew were never disputed; but, what is more remarkable, he seems to have always remembered the lines he had drawn and the marks that he had made. His son Robert says that in 1858, when he was a boy of about fifteen, he drove his father once through a region in which he had done much surveying, and that several times, Mr. Lincoln stopped the horse and laughingly asked him to go a little distance into the woods and see if he could not find, at a par ticular spot which he described, a blazed tree. He had marked that tree, he said, as a survey corner. Robert Lincoln says that he did this several times and not once did he make a mistake. 72 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln But surveying was only a way of earning an hon est living. He had no idea of making it a perma nent profession, nor did he let it interfere with his ambition to become a member of the next Assem bly for which the election came in the fall of 1834. As he worked he campaigned, and successfully, for when the time came, Lincoln was elected. Something more important than his election hap pened to him in this campaign, however. This was making up his mind to adopt the law as a profes sion. Deeply interested as he had always been in legal reading* he had never dared before this to hope that there was a chance for him to learn enough to be admitted to the bar, but while he was elec tioneering one of his fellow candidates, John T. Stuart, a lawyer of Springfield with whom he had become acquainted in the Black Hawk War, began to urge him to try for the bar. "I ll lend you books," he told Lincoln. "Study nights and as you travel from place to place just as you have always done. You have already a foundation. You can do it." There was nothing Lincoln wanted so much to be lieve as that he could do it. At least he could try. Springfield was twenty miles from New Salem, but he walked or rode back and forth, to get the books he wanted, and as he traveled he studied them often aloud. You can see him, can you not? A long, lean figure, with a great shock of black hair, surveying instrument under his arm, an open book in his hand, striding or riding across the rough prairie, pre- Starting Out for Himself 73 I AO1MIL OF A BEl OHT OF A BOAD SURVEY BT LINCOLN. Starting Out for Himself 7$ paring for the life he wanted. He was not yet twen ty-six years old, but see what he had done. He had found by sheer hard work an interesting, use ful way of earning his living; he had deter mined that the way was open, with more hard work, to the profession he loved and honored above all others the law; and he was a member of the Assembly of Illinois. But could he go on? Could a young man, handicapped by poverty and lack of social and educational opportunities as he had been, succeed when he left the pioneer country and tried his fortune among people of training and wealth? The next great test for Lincoln was to prove that he was as good or better a man than those who had had every chance put in their way while he had had to make chances for himself out of what seemed to many nothing but handicaps, CHAPTER IV A GREAT DECISION I didn t begin with askings. I took my job and I stuck And I took the chances they wouldn t, an now they re, calling it luck. RUDYARD KIPLING. TWO years after he had made his great deci sion to become a lawyer, Lincoln felt himself ready to apply for admission to the bar. He seems to have been able to satisfy those in author ity that he was fit, for in September of 1836 he was licensed. He did not begin to practice at once, for just before this license was issued, he had been reflected to a second term in the State legislature. This kept him busy for the winter, but as soon as he came back to New Salem, early in the spring of 1837, he packed up his few belongings they could all be put into a saddlebag and said good-by to the town. It could not have been an easy parting, for New Salem had been his home for nearly six years. There was probably not a man, woman, or child in the town or the county around that he did not know, and with almost every one of them he had friendly relations. Twice they had sent him to the legisla ture, and they would have liked to have had him stay by the town, for nearly all of his friends pre- 76 A Great Decision 77 dieted that he had the makings of a great man in him. Not only was the parting hard, but the future looked anything but bright. He was giving up the profession by which he had been earning his living. He had what seemed to him a huge debt on his hands that left over from his venture in the gro cery business and he was entering a profession which already had many followers in Springfield, the town which he had chosen as his future home. Could he succeed? How could he live? Would there be anybody that would be willing to admit him into his office? It was rather a melancholy young man that rode into Springfield in March of 1837 and looked about for a place to live. Fortunately, he came on a friend at the start a prosperous young storekeeper, James Speed by name, who advised Lincoln to rent a room and furnish it himself. "But I haven t the money to buy the furniture," Lincoln told him. "If that is so, come and live with me," Speed said, "I have a big room, plenty of space for two of us, over the store." Lincoln brightened up at once, and, running up stairs, threw his saddlebags on the floor and came back, exclaiming joyfully, "Well, Speed, I m moved." He had as good success in finding a law partner as he had a home. Major John T. Stuart, with whom he had become acquainted in the Black Hawk War and by whose advice he had decided to take 78 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln up the law as a profession, was just severing his connection with his partner. He believed in Lin coln and invited him to join him. It was a fine chance for a young lawyer this as sociation with a man so well established and so gen erally respected as Major Stuart, and at once the training that Lincoln had given himself began to come out in his work. Whatever the case, big or little, his first effort was to find out the root of the thing, what it really hinged on. He knew that it is not the leaves on the tree or the branches that count, it is the root, and it was this in his law prob lems that he looked for. He would give away point after point if he did not feel they were es sential. u Strip off the technicalities," he used to say, "get at the heart of the thing, and then you can win." He never had any patience with people that fussed over things that did not matter. Once, when he was President, a commission he had sent out to make an investigation came back with a huge re port, loaded down with details. Lincoln was thor oughly disgusted. "If I send out a man to look up a horse for me, I want him to come back with his points ; not how many hairs he has on his tail." And so in the law, it was always points he was after. Having the points, he took ample time to explain to a jury just what they were, always in the sim plest kind of language, without Latin phrases or technical terms of any kind, such as many lawyers used. He generally knew the jurors, or at least knew about them, just what their experiences had A Great Decision 79 been, the kind of thing they would understand; and he talked to them as if they were sitting around the stove, arguing. He was very particular, too, that the counsel opposing him should not befuddle the minds of the jury with misrepresentations. When a lawyer tried this with Lincoln, he was sure to meet his match. He would spring to his feet and pro test so effectively that almost invariably the lawyer would be overruled. Sometimes his anger over a misstatement was so great that those who listened said he roared like a lion. This habit of Lincoln s of protesting when he be lieved the jury was being deceived frequently caused funny scenes in the Illinois courts. One stormy day, he had come into court with his feet soaked, and after presenting his case, sat down by the courtroom stove to dry out. He had pulled off his boots and was holding up his big feet, all the time listening intently to the opposing lawyer. Suddenly, the lawyer said something that Lincoln knew not to be true. He didn t stop to put on his boots, but with one in each hand sprang into the middle of the room, complain ing loudly to the judge that the counsel was wil fully deceiving the jury. So honest was he in his law work that he would never, if he could help it, take a case in which he did not thoroughly believe. He wanted nothing but clean cases, he said. This came largely from his reverence for the law it was intended to do justice. Those who were wrong should not win a case, in his judgment, and he was unwilling to help them do so. He had the greatest contempt for 8o Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln the fellow that would look over the register of deeds to hunt up defects in titles or who was on the watch for quarrels out of which he might get a case. He was unwilling to stir up lawsuits. "There could not be a worse man," he used to say, "than one who would do this." His idea was that a law yer s business was to point out to people who were disputing how they could settle their differences. His theory was set down in one of his fine phrases, "As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior oppor tunity of being a good man." He carried out this theory. A man came to him once to ask his help in a claim he was making for six hundred dollars. Lincoln at once saw that the case was tricky. "You have no claim," he thun dered. "I won t take your case, and my advice to you is that you go to work and earn six hundred dollars." When he found young men or boys trying to prac tice sharp tricks on others and appealing to the law to help them he always took it seriously and did his best to point out to them what a dangerous thing it was to begin life in this way. An old farmer once employed him to recover a note from two young men who had bought a team from him and refused to pay on the ground that they were minors. Lincoln took the case, and ad dressing the jury he told them that this was one of the most important cases they had ever had to de cide, that it was not a matter of the payment of the money simply, but it was a matter of the future of the two boys. They were just starting out in A Great Decision 81 life. They had tried a dishonest trick. If the jury should give a verdict for them it would leave a stain of dishonor upon them which they could never live down. They would always be known as tricksters. After a long and serious talk of this kind, he turned to the young men. "Boys," he said, "pay the note. You owe it. Don t begiji life in this dishonest way." The elder of the two boys was so moved by Mr. Lincoln s appeal that he promptly promised to pay the farmer, and the judge dismissed the case. Lin coln as a lawyer often did work for boys not unlike that of a wise judge of a juvenile court. The training that he had given himself in public speaking from the time that he went to school in Indiana came in good stead now. It had made it natural and easy for him to speak what was in his mind. Not only did he do this with great clear ness, emphasizing only the points that seemed to him to matter, but with a candor which won every lis tener. His wonderful skill in illustrating a point by a story helped him greatly with a jury. Often he could make them see things by a story or an illustration drawn from things with which they were familiar more quickly and effectively than by any amount of hard legal argument. And you could depend on him to put all the fun possible into his pleading. He told his stories with so much zest, often acting them out as he went along, that every body in the courtroom was all attention when he began to plead. Take this case as an illustration. A quarrelsome, 82 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln profane chap in the community had attacked a man, but he had chosen the wrong victim this time, for he was soundly thrashed. Instead of taking quietly what he had brought upon himself, like the bully that he was, he brought a charge of assault and bat tery against the man whom he had attacked. Mr. Lincoln took the case of the defendant. He told the jury that his client was in the fix of a man who, walking down the road with a pitchfork on his shoulder, was attacked by a fierce dog. In fighting the animal off he stuck the prongs of his fork into the brute and killed him. "What made you kill my dog?" said the farmer. "What made him try to bite me?" "Well, why didn t you get after him with the other end of the pitchfork?" "Why didn t he come after me with his other end?" Mr. Lincoln, as he made this answer, whirled about, in his long arms an imaginary dog, and pushed its tail toward the jurors. The acting was so good and so comical that the case was won with out further pleading. The court enjoyed Lincoln s fun, but at the same time they had a wholesome respect for his indig nation. When he tried a case against an out-and- out rascal, he was often biting in his satires. You remember how, when he was still a boy in Gentry- ville, he used satirical verse to ridicule an enemy. When he came to the law, he often employed his power of satire against an opponent. "Lincoln s skinning him," the people used to say, and he him- A Great Decision 83 self would sometimes remark, "Just you watch me skin him," when he was prosecuting a sneak, a liar, or a thief. All these qualities would not have amounted to so much in the law if he had not been so thorough and so continuous a student. Much as he had read, he was always conscious of how much he did not know one of the most important things for a man who wants to do real things in the world to realize. He was never willing to let even a small case go without giving it honest study. Lawyers who trav eled with him on the circuit always told, as long as they lived, of how, night after night, when they were sleeping, Lincoln would lie in bed with a lamp on a chair beside him, studying law books. Always to know more was what he was after. Whenever he had a chance, he studied lawyers of large reputation and compared his own knowledge with theirs, trying to learn from them. In 1855, twenty years after he took his first decision to read law, he was called to Cincinnati in a case which was famous in those days, that of the McCormick Reaper. The case hinged on the ownership of certain pat ents, and required much knowledge of harvesting machinery. The company which was being sued by McCormick for infringing his patents had employed the best patent lawyers in the country, among them, Edwin M. Stanton, who, only a few years later, was to be Secretary of War under Lincoln. A younger member of the company who knew Lincoln well and admired him greatly, suggested 84 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln that he be included in the counsel. Mr. Lincoln was greatly pleased, for it would associate him with famous lawyers of the East. He studied the testi mony diligently and went to Cincinnati where the trial was held, hoping, no doubt, to make an im pression. But when he arrived there, he felt that Stanton and his associates, men of the East, who regarded themselves as vastly superior to the coun try lawyer of Illinois, treated him with something like contempt. They did not seek his counsel, and they did not ask him to present his argument. Mr. Lincoln was much hurt by their unwillingness to take him in, and at first wanted to go home, but his friend persuaded him to stay and hear the trial out. No sooner was the argument fairly launched than he became intensely interested. He saw at once that these men whom he believed to have been un fair and unkind to him were at the same time great lawyers, men with a large command of legal learn ing. He listened with the closest attention to every point made; never, he claimed afterward, had he heard pleading which impressed him more. After the trial was over he said to his friend, "I am going home. I am going home to study law." "Why, Mr. Lincoln," his friend said, u you stand at the head of the bar in Illinois now. What are you talking about?" "Oh, I know, I can get along with the way things are done there now," he said; "but these college- trained men, who have devoted their whole lives to study, are coming out West one of these days. They study their cases as we never do. They have A Great Decision 85 got as far as Cincinnati now. They will soon be in Illinois. I am going home to study law, and when they get to Illinois, I ll be ready for them." Hard work always counts. More and more im portant cases came Lincoln s way, many of them connected with the development of the new coun try. An interesting one came to him in 1857. You remember how all through his young manhood he had been associated with rivers the Ohio, the San- gamon, the Mississippi and how interested he had been in the transportation and travel which went on by the rivers? But in the 4o s and 5o s railroads began to multiply in Illinois. Soon they wanted to cross the Mississippi and reach the great plains beyond. It was natural enough that the river boats which up to this time had had a monopoly of the carrying trade should object to the rivers being bridged. Not only did they object but the cities of the South objected. They thought it would di vert business from them. But a bridge was put over the Mississippi finally at Rock Island. It proved a great thing for Chicago, then little more than a village ; the town began to build up rapidly because of this direct connection with the country beyond. In 1856 a steamer, the Effie Afton, struck one of the piers of the Rock Island Bridge and was wrecked and burned, a part of the bridge being at the same time destroyed. The owners of the steamboat at once brought suit against the railroad. The river must not be bridged again. St. Louis, then the largest city along the river, jealous of the growth of Chicago, joined the boat owners in the fight 86 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln The entire Middle West was excited over the issue. Lincoln was engaged to defend the bridge. It was a case which gave him full opportunity for the problems that he liked best. The character of the Mississippi, its currents, velocity, driftwood, depth of water, the customs of navigators and pilots many points involving nice problems both of river navigation and of engineering were involved. He went at the task u like a dog at a root," as he used to express it, and mastered an enormous num ber of facts and figures so thoroughly that as the trial went on, he was able, again and again, to cor rect his opponents, without consulting his notes. He won the case practically on two points one based on common sense, that one man has just as good a right to go across a river as another has to go up or down it; the second based on an imaginative sense of what was good for the country. He drew a wonderful and moving picture of the possibilities of the great West beyond the Mississippi and the duty of men to combine to open it up to the world. This case showed Lincoln at his very best, and it proved, too, how thoroughly he was following his decision, the decision he had taken two years before at Cincinnati to go back to Illinois and study law. Hard as he worked and extensive as was the prac tice he built up, Lincoln never made much money. His first object in practicing law was not money; it was to see that justice is done among men. His fees were always small, and they were fitted to the pocketbook of his client. Again and again he would A Great Decision 87 take a case for a poor or weak client where he would receive little or nothing when he might have ob tained a good-sized fee on the other side. A widow whose cow had been killed by a rail road train once came to him for help. The rail road, knowing Lincoln s power, was anxious about the case. It did not want the widow to win lest a precedent be established and it be obliged to pay damages whenever its trains killed an animal. It accordingly sent an agent to Mr. Lincoln, offering him a retainer of five hundred dollars a very large sum at that time, if he would take the case. "But I have already promised the widow I will take her case." "But the widow cannot pay you anything," the agent argued, "and here is five hundred dollars as a retainer." "No," thundered Lincoln, "I won t go back on her. I will take her case and moreover I will win it." And win it he did. Although Lincoln made so little money as a law yer, there never was a man more generous with what he had. Money seems to have meant nothing to him save to fulfill his obligations and to help others. His father s family was one of the first to profit all their lives by his generosity. Thomas Lincoln kept his little home in Coles County, Illinois, until his death, and his stepmother held it afterward and had her support through Abraham Lincoln s kind ness. He could be very stern, however, with those of his relatives whom he knew were shiftless. No more sensible letters were ever written to a lazy 88 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln and discontented man than those Lincoln wrote to his stepbrother, John D. Johnston, a ne er-do-well whom he had often assisted. Here is one of them : "DEAR JOHNSTON: Your request for eighty dollars I do not think it best to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little you have said to me, We can get along very well now; but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now, this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is, I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether, since I saw you, you have done a good whole day s work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work, and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time is the whole difficulty; it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children, that you should break the habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it, easier than they can get out after they are in. "You are now in need of some money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, tooth and nail, for somebody who will give you money for it. Let father and your boys take charge of your things at home, prepare for a crop, and make the crop, and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get; and, to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of May, get for your own labor, either in money or as your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dollars a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines in California, but I mean for you to go at it for the best wages you can get close to home in Coles County. Now, if you will do this, you will be soon out of debt, and, what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But, if I should now clear you out of debt, next year you would be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in heaven for seventy or eighty dollars. Then you value your place in heaven very cheap, for I am sure you can, with the offer I make, get A Great Decision 89 the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months work. You say if I will furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and if you don t pay the money back, you will deliver possession. Nonsense! If you can t now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been kind to me, and I do not mean to be unkind to you. On the con trary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eighty times eighty dollars to you. "Affectionately your brother, "A. LINCOLN." So modest was Lincoln about his fees that his fellow lawyers were often provoked at him, because he would not keep up prices. They even on one oc casion arrested him and held a mock trial at which he was accused of impoverishing the bar. He was found guilty but let off on condition that he would correct what they claimed to be his evil ways. These mock trials of the Illinois lawyers were one of the ways that they amused themselves on the circuit. In those days in that part of the world, lawyers traveled from county seat to county seat over a big circuit. Lincoln lived in Springfield, but he practiced throughout the Eighth Judicial Dis trict. There were five counties in this district, and every fall and every spring the court traveled from place to place, taking care of the law business. There were no railroads, and they went on horse back or in buggies or wagons, generally in groups. These trips were full of fun and excitement. The country was wild and many of the lawyers carried guns, looking for deer and smaller animals. Not unfrequently the court was delayed a day or more because a part of the company, the judge included, was tracking a deer, Practical jokes were common 9o Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln on these journeys. Lincoln played one once of which lawyers in Illinois still tell. It was in the spring of the year, and a river which the party supposed they must cross in order to get to the town where they were due had overflowed the prairies; it looked as if the whole country was under water. None of the lawyers except Lincoln were familiar with the place, and they were feeling pretty serious. "I know this country," Lincoln told them, "and if you will trust yourselves to me, I will take you to town safely." Of course they consented. "You must strip," he said, "it is pretty wet around here," so judge and lawyers pulled off coats, trou sers, shirts, and boots down to the skin, rolled them all in tight bundles, and, under Lincoln s directions, strapped them to their saddles. "Fall in line," was Lincoln s order; and at the head of this queer-looking procession he started on a long, roundabout journey. For two or three hours the men traveled, the water never much above their horses hoofs, when suddenly Lincoln announced, "Here s our town." Then it dawned on them that their idea that they must cross the main channel of the river in order to get to the place was a mistake ; that they had been on the right side all the time. All that they had been doing in their nakedness was to skirt the edge of a shallow overflow. If the stories of these years that Lincoln traveled the Eighth Circuit are full of practical jokes, they are still fuller of tales of his kindness, not to men A Great Decision 91 alone but even to birds of the air. His companions when they went back to their families nearly al ways had some story to tell their children of the good turns he did. One day as they were going along, he heard birds crying. He at once dismounted, looked them up, found they had fallen from their nest, and carefully put them back. Again they passed a young pig which had been caught in a rail fence, so tight that it could not get out. It was squealing for dear life and in danger of killing itself. Lincoln stopped and with great care removed the fence and let the little fellow loose. Then he put the bars back and went on. In the towns everybody knew him and loved him. There were boys and girls in many of those towns who would run home at night, crying joyfully, "Mr. Lincoln has come ! Mr. Lincoln has come !" When he visited in their homes they gathered about him and listened to his stories. Many a boy, when he knew Mr. Lincoln was going to try a case, would slip in to hear him argue. He would play ball with them on the street, pitch quoits, and wrestle with them. They were not afraid even to play practical jokes on him. He wore a tall, stovepipe hat, as was the custom, and one day in Bloomington, Illinois, some of his young admirers rigged a string across the street, at just the proper height to catch his hat and tip it off. Lincoln took after the young rascals, chasing them so hard and furiously that they were frightened. 92 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln He finally collared them all, and when he saw they were looking scared, said, "Come on, boys, I will stand treat." Not only was he the friend of the children but of the young men just starting out in the law and need ing advice and encouragement. He never was too busy to help a beginner out of a tight place or to give him a hint if he saw he was in danger of mak ing a mistake. To many a young lawyer on the circuit he was like a father. Perhaps the best thing he gave them after his genuine sympathy in their difficulties was his constant advice to "work, work, work." Everywhere he went, up and down the country, he was loved; and never, in all those years when he was not only becoming daily a greater and greater lawyer but was becoming more and more prominent in public affairs, did he neglect an opportunity to do a good turn to an old friend. In 1857, when his mind was absorbed with several important lawsuits, with the arguments that he was working out against the extension of slavery in this country, and with fostering the new Republican party which was opposed to this extension, he learned one day that Duff Armstrong, the son of Jack Armstrong, the bully of the Clary s Grove Gang whom, you will remember, he had thrashed in New Salem back in 1832, had been arrested for murder. Now the thrashing that Lincoln had given Jack Armstrong had done him good and had made him Lincoln s friend. It had made Hannah Armstrong. A Great Decision 93 his wife, Lincoln s friend, too, and she had played almost the part of a mother to him doing his mending, washing his clothes, and looking after him in many ways. When Lincoln heard of the sorrow that had come to Hannah Armstrong, he immediately wrote her the following letter: "Springfield, 111., "Sept., 1857- "DEAR MRS. ARMSTRONG: I have just heard of your deep affliction, and the arrest of your son for murder. I can hardly believe that he can be capable of the crime alleged against him. It does not seem possible. I am anxious that he should be given a fair trial, at any rate; and gratitude for your long-continued kindness to me in adverse circumstances prompts me to offer my humble services gratuitously in his behalf. "It will afford me an opportunity to requite, in a small degree, the favors I received at your hand, and that of your lamented husband, when your roof afforded me a grateful shelter, without money and without price. "Yours truly, "A. LINCOLN." One night in August, 1857, at a camp meeting near Havana, Duff, while drunk, quarreled with a friend and thrashed him. A few hours later, the same night, this boy was killed. The marks of two blows were found upon him one of them proved to be from an ox yoke in the hands of a third mem ber of the gang. Duff Armstrong was accused of dealing the second with a sling shot. He denied having used anything but his fist in the quarrel with the victim, a quarrel which he admitted. The first man was tried, found guilty, and sentenced. Duft 94 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln lay in jail for several months, awaiting his trial. Mrs. Armstrong in the meantime was distracted with anxiety. Jack had died soon after Duff s ar rest, and the last thing he had said to her was, "Sell everything you have and clear Duff." She was not at all sure it could be done. Mr. Lincoln s letter must have come to her like a gift from God. The lawyers whom she had en gaged were glad enough to have his assistance. It was a number of months before the trial came off. Mr. Lincoln took charge of the case from the start. The witnesses, the jury, the spectators were nearly all people, or sons of people, that he had known in his early days in Illinois, and he talked to them in his friendly, intimate fashion, trying to get at the truth of what had happened. It finally came down to this, that the only damaging testimony against Duff was that of a boy who swore that he had seen Duff strike. "What time of night was that?" Mr. Lincoln asked. "Ten or eleven o clock," he said. "How could you see him?" "Why," he said, "it was full moon, and I could see as clear as when the sun was in the sky." Mr. Lincoln came back again and again to this testimony. "You could see him by the light of the moon?" It was thoroughly impressed on the jury that this was where the case hung, and it seemed as if this evidence would convict poor Duff. When Mr. Lincoln rose to speak, he went back to the early days when he had known Duff s father and mother, and told of their kindness to him when A Great Decision 95 he was alone and poor. He painted something of the life of the boy and his waywardness, and showed that the only serious testimony against him was this of the boy who swore that he saw him strike by the light of the moon. At this point, Mr. Lincoln pulled out of his pocket an almanac of 1857, and turning to the phase of the moon on the date of the murder, he pointed out that it was quite impossible that this testimony was true, because the moon that night was in its first quarter and had sunk before the hour of the murder. Judge and jury and lawyers pored over the al manac in amazement. He had completely riddled the damaging testimony, and Duff was freed. This springing of a surprise at the end of a trial was characteristic of Mr. Lincoln. It was like the surprise in a play. In the Trailer case, as it is called, where Lincoln represented the two Trailer brothers who had been arrested on a confession of a third brother for the murder of a man, he created a sensation by producing in the open court the man said to have been murdered. It was in this way that in the years from 1837 to 1860, Lincoln built up his law practice. In those years he tried nearly one hundred and seventy-five cases before the Illinois Supreme Court, many of them of first importance. He became a great law yer, not only because of his knowledge of the law and his skill in pleading, but because he looked on the law as the instrument for seeing that justice is done. He did it by his clearness of mind, his pas- 96 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln sion for the truth, his candor, his wit, his honest in dignation against the thing that was mean and sneaking, and, above all, by his willingness to study and keep studying, always feeling that he did not know enough of his great subject. There can be no doubt that if he had continued in his profession the day would have come when he would have been able to meet on equal terms the great lawyers of the East as they came West, and that he himself would have been going East as their peer. But, great as was his interest in his profession, his reverence for it and his desire to serve men through it, the law had always had a rival in Lin coln s mind; that rival was politics. In all these years in which he had been building himself up in the law to a point where he could meet the best of them, not only at home but abroad, he had never forgotten that he was a citizen before he was a law yer. We left him in 1834 a member of the state legislature to follow his course as a lawyer, now we will go back and see what kind of a public servant he had made. CHAPTER V THE CALL OF HIS COUNTRY And though he promise to his loss He makes his promise good. NAHUM TATE. ABRAHAM LINCOLN was only a little boy when he first began to understand that he lived in a country in whose affairs every man is expected to take a part. Revolutionary soldiers who had fought under George Washington some times sat at his father s fireside and told tales of Valley Forge and Yorktown. He learned from them that the United States was a young country and that it had cost men a terrible struggle to give it life. He discovered that after the war of which they talked there had followed a long, hard polit ical fight to secure what they spoke of as the Union. And they told how, when the plan for running this Union was ready they called it a Constitution it had taken months to persuade the people to agree to it and to promise to carry on their affairs accord ing to its directions. Later a life of Washington fell into his hands which helped him to understand still better what men had done in those early days. He never forgot the stories of the battlefields, of the sufferings of soldiers, of women, and of children of which that 97 98 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln book told. The thing that fixed itself particularly in his mind was that these men had struggled for something more than their own interest, something more even than independence; it was a dream that if they could work out their freedom in the way that they had planned, that it would be a "great promise to all the people of the world, to all time to come." Washington, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence these were the things over which he pondered; and as he did so there came a great de sire in him to do his part toward making the new country a success. He wanted to be a man like Washington, like others of whom he read in the "Kentucky Preceptor" men who had spent all their lives trying to free the oppressed and bring more happiness to the world. You have seen how, in all those years of his early manhood, difficult as things were for him, he worked hard and constantly to fit himself to be the kind of a man he thought a citizen in a free country should be. "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambi tion," he told the people of Sangamon County, when he first asked their votes. "Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being esteemed by my fellow men by rendering myself worthy of their esteem." The more the people knew of him, the more they real ized that he was what he sought to be "worthy of their esteem" ; and it was because of this that they elected him to three successive terms in the As sembly. The Call of His Country 99 Lincoln began his career as a public servant de termined to repay the people of Sangamon County for its confidence they should never be sorry they chose him. He was not going to let them even be ashamed of his appearance. Up to this time in his life he had never worn anything but rough and ill-fitting clothes. Now he proposed to look like a legislator, so, hateful as borrowing was to him, he went to a well-to-do friend and asked him to lend him enough money to buy a complete outfit a broadcloth suit, a satin waistcoat and stock, a high hat. When he arrived in Vandalia there was nothing in his appearance to discredit Sangamon County. Luckily for him, the chief interest of the Assem bly when he entered was transportation a matter on which he had thought much. Up to this time Lin coln had seen no practical method but improving the rivers. Railroads would cost too much. At one time, when there had been talk of building a short line connecting Sangamon County with the Mississippi, he had said in a speech, "However high our imaginations may be heated at thoughts of a railroad, there is a heart-appalling shock accom panying the amount of its cost." The sum which gave Lincoln this shock was $290,000 1 But by the time he reached the Assembly, things had changed in the country. There had been an enormous increase in population. Population meant wealth wealth, if they could have railroads. So, without much consideration of how they were going ioo Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln to pay for them, the legislators began laying out railroads in every direction. Practically every town in Illinois and even some settlements that could scarcely be called towns sent delegations to the capital, asking for a railroad. It was easy enough to put it on paper, so down it went until the State was crossed and crisscrossed in every direction with hopeful plans. Of course there was no way of paying for all this except by credit, and quite as freely as they had made their paper railways, they now voted bonds. Lin coln was carried away as thoroughly as the rest of his colleagues, voting charters and credits with out limit. A confident, hopeful citizen, his new colleagues thought him, one who believed in the State and was willing to agree to anything which promised to help in its development. It was not long, however, before they began to see that he was something more, that he had in him the makings of an unusual political leader. The capital of Illi nois at that time, Vandalia, was in the southern part of the State. The population of the north was in creasing every day, and there began to be loud com plaints about the inconvenience of traveling so far to get to the Assembly. It soon became certain that there must be a change, and of course at once there were many candidates in the field for the prize. Among these was Springfield, in Sangamon County. It was a small, unkempt town, with no communication with the rest of the world except by the poorest of poor roads ; but its geographical po- The Call of Eh Country ^ : vioi sition was ideal particularly in the minds of the Sangamon delegation. This group of men, known as the "Long Nine 7 because their average height was around six feet, and their average weight some thing over two hundred pounds, was as big in energy and brains as in body, and they rushed the capital as if it had been a football. Lincoln from the start of their dash showed a shrewdness, a quickness of wit, and a power of per suasion that delighted the "Long Nine" as much as it dismayed the rival delegations. He had a qual ity of great value in politics, and that was a sense of what the other fellow would probably do ; it made it possible for him to get ahead of him. To secure the prize for Springfield he was willing to do every thing but be dishonest. When it came to securing a vote by promising something that he could not ful fill or by a trade which he felt to be unfair, the "Long Nine" soon learned that they could not count on Lincoln. Urged at one critical point in the cam paign to consent to a bit of logrolling which he con sidered wrong, he broke forth in an indignant re fusal that the legislators never forgot. It was a convincing demonstration that you could not buy Lincoln. Sangamon County carried off the capital, after a lively fight; and it was Lincoln s leadership that did it, so everybody declared. The people saw that he was a leader, but they soon learned that when it came to a matter of con viction he was not the kind of leader that steps softly. ZO$ Soy Scouts Life of Lincoln In a question of right or wrong, he would go out of his way, if necessary, to let people know his opin ion. Illinois was much excited in the late 3o s over the growth of abolition sentiment in the State. The Assembly, to discourage this, passed a resolution saying, among other things, that they heartily dis approved of the formation of abolition societies and of the doctrines taught by them, that they believed the right of property in slaves to be sacred to the slave-holding States, and that the general govern ment had no power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, as the Abolitionists were asking should be done. Lincoln and one of his friends refused to vote for this resolution; and, not content with that, they put in a protest declaring that while they believed the institution of slavery to be founded on both in justice and bad policy, they considered that abolition agitation tended rather to increase than to abate its evils. They added that Congress, in their judg ment, did have the right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, although it had not power to interfere with it in the States where it then existed. It took a brave man to take this stand publicly at that moment. Lincoln might easily have said nothing and quieted his conscience simply by a vote, but he preferred to make it clear to every one just where he stood on every point in the dispute. That is, before his service in the legislature was over, he had definitely stamped on the minds of The Call of His Country 103 people of his State the kind of politician he was clever, ingenious, interested, long-sighted, rigidly honest, and courageous in matters of right and wrong. He showed these same qualities in his cam paigning outside of the Assembly. No man was harder to trap. He was quick to see the weakness or the falsity of an opponent s argument or action, and was equally quick in his attack. He never al lowed an insinuation against his own political honor to go unchallenged. One of his opponents once hinted publicly that he knew things about Lincoln which, if told, would ruin his chance of reelection; but he liked the young man and would do him the favor of not telling. Lincoln lost no time in replying to this sneaking attack. "No one has needed favors more than I," he wrote the gentleman, "and generally few have been less unwilling to accept them, but in this case favor to me would be injustice to the public, and therefore I beg your pardon for declining it. If I have done anything, by design or by misadventure, which, if known, would subject me to forfeiture of the con fidence of the people of Sangamon County, he that knows that thing and conceals it is a traitor to his country s interests. I find myself wholly unable to form any conjecture of what fact or facts, real or supposed, you speak. I am flattered with the re gard you manifest for me, but I do hope that on mature reflection you will view the public interest as of paramount consideration and therefore let the worst come. IO4 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln "I wish an answer to this, and you are at liberty to publish both if you choose." He never got an answer, and the gentleman stopped his hinting. On another occasion, after Lincoln had made a very able speech, sustaining the Whigs against their great rival of those days, the Democrats, a promi nent Democrat who had once been a Whig and had gone over to the other side angered by Lincoln s arguments, proceeded to answer him in a conde scending manner. "The young man would have to be taken down," he said, u he was assuming too much. He was sorry, but he would have to do it." He was a much older man than Lincoln. He was able and prosperous, owning the best house in Springfield and the only one which carried a light ning rod. Lincoln, indignant at the patronizing tone of his opponent, answered him. "The gentleman announced that the young man would have to be taken down," he said. "It is for my fellow citizens, not for me, to say whether I am to be up or down. I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that I would change my politics for an office worth three thou sand dollars a year and then feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God." Whig Springfield and Sangamon County went wild over the reply, and the gentleman for the rest of his life never appeared in a political group that somebody did not say "Lightning Rod." The Call of His Country 105 Lincoln s skill in making his political enemies ri diculous sometimes led him a little far. He was frequently merciless when he found he could tease a political opponent. Once he narrowly escaped ruining his political future by indulging this pro pensity. Among the Democratic officials of the State in 1842 was James Shields, a quick-tempered Irish man, courageous but vain and overconfident just the kind of game that Lincoln loved to hunt. The Whigs at that moment were very much disturbed because the Democratic officials had decided that State taxes could not be paid in State bank notes but must be paid in silver. There was a reason for this. The State s money had greatly depreciated largely because of the extravagant schemes for internal im provement that the legislature had voted in its re cent sessions schemes in which Lincoln had taken his full part. The State officers did not propose to be paid in depreciated currency. The Whigs con tended that this was disloyal, and Lincoln attacked the order in a letter to the local Whig paper, signed "Aunt Rebecca." In this letter he ridiculed Shields swagger and vanity. Shields was furious at being selected as the target for Democratic policies. The matter, however, might have passed off without any serious conse quences if two young ladies in the town one of whom, Mary Todd, afterward became Lincoln s wife had not seized this opportunity to poke still further fun at Shields. He was a gallant man too gallant, so the young ladies of Springfield thought 106 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln and under the same signature that Lincoln had used, "Aunt Rebecca," they sent several letters to the paper. When Shields read these, his anger knew no bounds. He was going to challenge the man that was guilty of them, and demanded his name from the editor. The editor, not willing to bring the young ladies into the trouble, appealed to Lincoln. "Give him my name," Lincoln said, "and in no case that of the girls." Without approaching Lincoln as to whether or not he really was the author of the articles, Shields wrote an angry letter, demanding a "full, positive, and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions," as well as an apology for what he declared were insults. Unless this was forthcoming at once, then Lincoln must take the consequences, which, of course, meant a duel. Lincoln was calm enough. He sent back word that since Shields had not taken the trouble to ask him whether or no he was the author of the arti cles, had not pointed out what was offensive in them, and had threatened consequences, he could not answer: that he must either withdraw this note or submit a challenge. Shields was altogether too angry to withdraw, and a challenge was forth coming. According to usage, this left with Lincoln, the challenged party, the choice of weapons, position, time, and place. He promptly laid them down. In reading them, remember that Shields was a little man, with a reach of arm that went with his height; The Call of His Country 107 that Lincoln was six feet four, with an unusually long arm: "First. Weapons: Cavalry broadswords of the largest size, precisely equal in all respects, and such as now used by the cavalry company at Jacksonville. "Second. Position: A plank ten feet long, and from nine to twelve inches broad, to be firmly fixed on edge, on the ground, as the line between us, which neither is to pass his foot over on forfeit of his life. Next a line drawn on the ground on either side of said plank and parallel with it, each at the distance of the whole length of the sword and three feet additional from the plank; and the pass ing of his own such line by either party during the fight shall be deemed a surrender of the contest. "Third. Time: On Thursday evening at five o clock, if you can get it so ; but in no case to be at a greater distance of time than Friday evening at five o clock. "Fourth. Place : Within three miles of Alton, on the opposite side of the river (the Mississippi), the particular spot to be agreed on by you." There was nothing to do but for Shields to ac cept; and indeed, in his temper, he asked nothing better. On the day set, the duelists with their seconds drove their old-fashioned buggies into Alton, broad swords rattling on the bottom. They promptly crossed the river to a sand bar belonging to the Missouri mainland. Things looked very serious. The rumor that a duel was to be fought spread around Alton, and numbers of people came down io8 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln to the banks and a few who could get skiffs started to row to the scene. Lincoln was very grave. He made no jokes now. Indeed, some of his friends believed that he was beginning to be frightened, so quiet was he; but presently one of them saw him reach over and pick up one of the swords, draw it from its scabbard, and feel along the weapon with his finger as a barber feels the edge of his razor. Then rising, he stretched out his long arm and clipped off a twig from a branch high above his head. There was not a man in the party who could reach anywhere near that twig, and the absurdity of that long-reaching fel low fighting with Shields, who could walk under his arm, almost drove his seconds into hysterics. The plank had been set, the lines drawn, when suddenly from across the Mississippi there appeared a group of influential friends and acquaintances of both men. They had heard rumors of what was going on, and realizing what a tragedy might re sult, had hastened to Alton, arriving just in the nick of time. Taking Shields aside, by dint of per suasion and argument they induced him to withdraw his first note. After that it was easy to adjust the trouble "with honor to all concerned" ; and it was not long before the duelists were on their way home, chatting pleasantly. The party did not come back to the Illinois shore, however, without playing a practical joke on the crowd that had gathered on the banks. As they approached, the watchers saw lying in the bottom of one of the boats what seemed to be a bloody The Call of His Country 109 figure. Beside him sat friends, one of them with a big fan which he was diligently plying. There was great excitement on the shore as to whether it was Lincoln or Shields that was wounded. But as the boat drew up they saw the supposed man was a big log covered with a red flannel shirt; and that Lin coln and Shields, both of them sound, were heartily enjoying the joke played on the crowd. It was a lucky escape for Lincoln. "I didn t in tend to hurt Shields," he told one of his friends, "unless I did so clearly in self-defense. If it had been necessary, I could have split him from the crown of his head to the end of his backbone." It was a good lesson for him one that he needed. He never got over being ashamed of the affair and when it was mentioned his friends noted that he was very quick to divert attention by telling a story that led in some other direction. And never in his later history do we find him provoking an antagonist by ridicule in his early merciless way. The episode had a bearing, he soon found, on his political fortunes. He had refused reelection to the legislature in 1 840, thinking that the time had come when he might take the next step upward in his political career; that is, seek an election to Con gress. There was every reason for him to believe that he would be successful. His popularity, par ticularly in his own county, was great, he was be coming throughout the State more and more a fa vorite for serious political discussions. His friends were warm and sympathetic with his ambition, and so in 1842 he tried for the nomination. no Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln But he was not the only man in the Whig party that wanted the nomination to Congress. There were two other candidates, intimate friends of his Edward D. Baker and John J. Hardin, Both of them were men of honor, popular in the community, excellent lawyers. Here was a new test for Lin coln. What would he do now that he had friends as rivals? Would he sacrifice them to his ambi tion? Could he keep his ambition and keep his friends? How was a man to act in such a situa tion? Lincoln soon discovered how serious a trial he had before him a trial which was going to prove just how stanch his loyalty was, just how genuine his honor. In the first move in the campaign in 1842, he lost; that is, he was defeated by his own Sangamon delegation, Baker being selected in his place. One reason for his defeat was that he was a duelist. Public opinion was severe against the practice, which still prevailed in some parts of the country and which right-thinking people were doing their utmost en tirely to destroy. Lincoln was not at all embit tered by his friend s success, but threw himself heart ily into the campaign to elect him. When they came to the convention where the matter was decided, it was not Baker but the third in the trio, Hardin, who was nominated. Lincoln took quick action. There were three of them, all wanting to go to Congress. Why should they not take turns? And he asked that the convention put itself on record as favoring Baker not himself, notice, but Baker for the next session that of 1844. This was quickly done, The Call of His Country ill although Hardin s friends resented the maneuver. It made a second term for their candidate out of the question. In 1844 Lincoln did not present himself but worked as persistently for Baker as he would have done for himself. Baker was elected, and almost at once Lincoln began to lay the foundation for his own nomination in 1846. He was convinced that the principle of "turn about is fair play" applied to this case. Baker s friends had accepted it. He had rather taken it for granted that Hardin and his friends accepted it, but he had not been long work ing on his campaign before he discovered that here he was wrong, that Hardin really wanted a renomU nation. Lincoln was hurt, and a little indignant. "If neither of us had been to Congress," he told his friends, "or if we both had, it would only ac cord with what I have always done, for the sake of peace, to give way to him; and I expect I should do it. But to yield to Hardin under present circum stances seems to me as nothing less than yielding to one who would gladly sacrifice me altogether. This I would rather not submit to." Sore as he felt, he was determined that there should be no quarrel, and he constantly warned his friends not to criticize Hardin "Nothing can be said against him," he kept declaring. "He is talented, energetic, unusu ally generous, and magnanimous. Make no argu ment but that turn about is fair play. Fortu nately, Hardin was magnanimous, and when he realized how much his rival was taking the matter to heart, he withdrew. 112 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln At the next election, 1846, Lincoln s ambition was realized: he was a congressman. It was in November of 1847 tnat he started for Washington. It was an exciting trip for him, for never before had he been farther east than Indiana. The only cities that he had seen up to that time were New Orleans and St. Louis : Chicago was still too small, too much of a home product to be counted as a city. Washington itself was not much more than a big rambling village. The wings of the Capitol had not been built. The dome and the great terraces were unfinished. Washington s monument was only halfway up. Most of the pop ulation lived on Capitol Hill and the near-by streets. The great development out toward the northwest had not yet begun. The streets were unpaved. It was a barren, slovenly town; but nothing of this Lincoln realized. It was the capital of the country he loved to which he was going, and it was among the men who were running that country that he was now to sit. He was not long in making friends. His kindli ness, his gift for story-telling, his sound sense, and .thorough familiarity with both the history and the affairs of the land, as well as his skill in argument, men quickly noted, and because of them sought his acquaintance. Daniel Webster, whose Sunday- morning breakfasts were among the most popular social affairs in Washington, soon was asking Lin coln as a regular guest. He was asked to join the "Young Indian Club" a group of congressmen in terested in the discussion of national questions. It The Call of His Country 113 was in this club that he first debated with older and abler men the idea of State sovereignty, one of his chief antagonists being Alexander Stephens, a man who, later, was to be a leader in the effort to prove by force the soundness of this idea. The newspaper correspondents, too, discovered Lincoln, and reported him as the best story-teller in Congress. One of his favorite haunts, and one where he made many friends among public men, was a bowling alley. Lincoln never was long in a place that he did not look for some active sport. Bowl ing gave him just what he wanted, and as often as it was possible for him to find time he joined the matched games in an alley on Capitol Hill, near the boarding house where he lived with many other mem bers of Congress. He was an awkward bowler but played with great zest, and solely for exercise and amusement. He always took success or defeat with equal good nature. His playing was punctuated by amusing comments and illustrations. The fame of him as a bowler soon spread, and when it was known that he was in the alley people were sure to gather to listen to his jokes and stories. He was not slow in winning respect in Congress, for he set himself at once to hard work, mastering the congressional procedure, acquainting himself with the men and their methods, and thoroughly studying the questions on which he must give a vote. The question which took most of his time was the very serious one of the war with Mexico over Texas. He had opposed the war, which had begun in the spring of 1846, and had done so from the 114 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln start of the quarrel. He went to Washington, in tending to support the war in every particular ex cept that of declaring it right; but the administra tion wanted not only support, it wanted approval. Lincoln would not give this. He not only refused to vote that he believed the war justified, but he boldly declared that the United States had been the aggressor, and he challenged the administration to prove the contrary. It was unpopular talk, and even in Springfield, where they knew his record best, his Whig friends even his friend and law partner, Mr. Herndon cautioned him. Lincoln answered hotly* "Would you have voted what you felt and knew to be a lie? I know you would not. Would you have gone out of the House skulked the vote? You are compelled to speak and your only alternative is to tell the truth or a lie. This vote has nothing to do in determining my votes on the question of supplies. I have al ways intended and still intend to vote supplies." Unpopular as his position was he persisted in it. The Mexican War was wrong, the United States had been the aggressor ; and, since this was so, he would not pretend otherwise. When the war was won and the great Western territory, including not only what we now know as Texas but New Mexico and California, was ad mitted to the Union there came to the front the question that all thoughtful men had dreaded: Was the territory to be free or slave ? It was con stantly coming up in Congress. Lincoln voted prob ably forty times, in the course of his term, for mak- THE EARLIEST KNOWN PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN. ABOUT 1848. AGE 39 From the original daguerreotype owned by Mr. Lincoln s son, the Hon. Robert T. Lincoln. The Call of His Country 115 ing the territory free ; and he boldly stated his posi tion whenever the opportunity allowed. Not only that, but, as many of his friends thought, he went out of his way to declare for the exclusion of slavery from the District of Columbia. In the campaign of 1848 he kept this up; and more and more certain did it become as his term drew to a close that he would not get a chance for renomination even if he should ask it. His bold ness was not all that hurt him. It had turned out that he was not a good wirepuller, could not get of fices for his friends in the way they had expected. As a matter of fact, Lincoln was poor at this kind of business. If a man did not seem to him fit for a position he was very liable to tell him so; or, if he did put in his application, to do it with such a candid statement of his client s merits as to ruin his chances. He had a strong feeling that fitness was the chief reason for giving a man an office. He could not be an enthusiastic supporter of anybody simply because he owed him a vote. It was under something of a cloud, then at least in political circles that he ended his term in Congress in the spring of 1849 and came back to Illinois. To be sure, he had had a wonderful time. He had seen not only Washington, but in the campaign of 1848, between the two sessions, he had been asked to go to New England to make speeches for the Whig presidential candidate, General Taylor, and there he had met a number of prominent men. On his way home he had done a little sight-seeing, had been to Niagara Falls and felt all of its over- Ii6 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln whelming grandeur. He planned some day to tell in a lecture what he had seen and felt in face of the great waters, and made notes which are to be found among his published papers. After leaving Niagara he had a little adventure that set his wits working in an entirely different direction. The boat on which he was traveling was stranded on a sand bar. The captain had ordered all the empty barrels and boxes on board to be forced un der the side of the boat. These empty receptacles acted as a buoy, and in a little time the vessel swung clear. Lincoln was greatly interested in the opera tion and hardly was he back in Springfield before he began tinkering on a device for taking care of just such an accident. He spent hours in a little car penter shop near his office, working on a model; and finally, when he went back to Washington for the remainder of his term, he took it along and se cured a patent. This model sits on the shelves of the Patent Office to-day. When Lincoln returned to Springfield in the spring of 1849, it looked as if his political fortunes were at an end. He did not whine or sulk. He did not announce that he was suffering for doing what he thought was right. He took what had happened quietly and good-naturedly. Lincoln never had any sympathy with people who nourished a grudge against the public for their defeats and failures. He had a law partner, younger than himself, who was inclined to feel that he was being kept down in the world by older men. Mr. Lincoln chided him for his complaining. The Call of His Country 117 "The way for a young man to rise," he told him, "is to improve himself every way he can, never sus pecting that any one wishes to hinder him. Sus picion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous at tempts 60 keep a young man down and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel, to brood over the attempted injury." Lincoln did not brood now; he worked harder than he ever had before to make a good lawyer of himself. For the next five years his attention was occupied almost entirely with legal matters. If you will examine his published letters and speeches for this particular five years, and compare them with the periods of equal length just before and just after, you will realize how completely politics had dropped out of his life. The probability is that he would have gone on with the law, giving no more attention to public affairs than any good citizen should give, in his judgment, refusing public office if it came his way, devoted to his profession, if there had not sud denly been presented to Congress a bill seeking to overthrow the solemn engagement known as the Missouri Compromise, into which the people of the United States had entered over thirty years before. This compromise provided that there should be no slaves north of 36 30 north latitude in the vast territory running from the Gulf of Mexico to Can ada and as far west as the Rocky Mountains, bought by the United States in 1803 from France. In Lin coln s judgment, to repeal this arrangement was not r li8 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln only a violation of sacred obligations which the coun try had taken, but was directly opposed to the in tent of the men who had founded the country. What should he do? To attack the bill meant that he must turn his mind from his profession, that he must give time and strength which he could ill afford to give. It was doubtful if there was po litical honor in the struggle, for he saw that to take the stand that he must take would be unpopular with many of the people of Illinois. He did not hesitate. Cost what it might, he did not propose that the Missouri Compromise should be repealed, that ter ritory long ago set aside for freedom by the will of the people of the country should be open to slavery. Possibly he was the more willing to go into the fight because the repeal of the Missouri Compro mise had been fathered by his strongest political enemy in the State of Illinois, the man of whom Lin coln, if he was ever jealous of anybody, was jealous, and that was the senior senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas. If you must fight, it is well to have an opponent that brings out all your strength. Lincoln knew that he had such an opponent, and he made ready for what was to be the fight of his life. CHAPTER VI THE FIGHT OF HIS LIFE Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just. SHAKESPEARE. WHEN Lincoln, in 1854, went into what was to be the fight of his life, he did it because he believed that he was right and that if he could get a chance he could make the people of Illinois agree that he was right. The question which stirred him so mightily was whether or not the United States should allow slavery to be ex tended into territory where it did not then exist, and where it had been agreed thirty years before it should never be allowed to go. Lincoln believed that this could not lawfully be done. He knew that the men who organized the Union, the men that we speak of as the "Fathers," had believed that if they stopped the slave trade, as they did, and shut up slavery in a certain number of states, it would finally die a natural death. That is, they believed that property if it is to live must have room in which to grow, also that it must have the tolerance and friendly recognition of all of the people of the coun try where it exists. Lincoln had always held this view. At the same time, he had never agreed with the 119 I2O Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln Abolitionists who were trying to destroy slavery in the States where it was legal. He insisted that the free States should let the slavery of the other States alone, let it die of itself. Nor did he hate the peo ple of the South as many of the Abolitionists did because of slavery. They found slavery there when they were born, he argued. "They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself." But if he did not hate the South he did hate slav ery thought it a terrible wrong; and it was be cause of this hatred that he was ready to throw aside his law practice in 1854 to go into what he realized would be a long and terrible struggle. The man who had brought on the fight was an old antagonist of his, Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas had walked into Illinois from the East, his coat over his arm, in those years when Lincoln was carrying a log chain and reading law at night. The two first came together in 1836 in the State Assembly. You could hardly find two men more different in looks and in their ways of getting on. Douglas was a stout little man, only 5 feet 4 inches tall Lincoln was 6 feet 4 he had a great mane of black hair and when he spoke he often roared like a lion. Douglas had all the qualities which win men. He was handsome, confident, gay, eloquent; and he was willing to go along with anybody who would help The Fight of His Life 121 him to get what he wanted. He was wonderfully able as a politician, adroit and brilliant as a speaker; but no one would ever have thought of applying to him the term which always followed Lincoln, that of "honest." At the start the two men were rivals. They be longed to the same Springfield debating club, where they were frequently pitted against each other. They differed in politics, Lincoln being a Whig and Douglas a Democrat; and in times of campaigning spoke from the same platform or followed each other over the same territory. They were even rivals for the hand of the same woman, it is said, the woman who became later Mr. Lincoln s wife. But Douglas soon left Lincoln far behind. He was given important State offices, was elected to the Su preme Bench of the State and three times to Con gress. He was a senator of the United States, and one of the most distinguished and popular figures in the country, when, in 1847, Lincoln arrived in Washington, an unknown man. By 1854 Douglas was regarded as a future Presi dent. He knew how good his chances were, and he was intent on doing everything that he could to enlarge them. To win he must have the favor of the South. He understood the desire of a large part of the slaveholders of the South to have new territory for their property. He knew if he could give it to them that he would have their support. At that time he was the head of the Senate commit tee on territorial organization. Two new territo- 122 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln ries, Kansas and Nebraska both of which, you will remember, were inside the line which by the Mis souri Compromise was to be forever free wanted to be organized. It was the business of his com mittee to introduce a bill arranging this. Douglas tacked on to this bill an amendment which left it to the people of the territories, and to the new States which might be formed from them, to decide whether they wanted to be free or slave. "This was right," he said, "it was popular sovereignty." A little later he consented, rather reluctantly, to a second amend ment repealing the Missouri Compromise. When the North learned of Douglas action, it broke out in anger and revolt. Particularly was Illinois amazed and indignant. He was their man, their great man, their "Little Giant," as they popu larly called him. Could it be possible that he had so misunderstood their feeling about slavery that he would wantonly, and apparently for no other rea son than to increase his own popularity in a section of the country which naturally mistrusted him be cause he was a Northern man, break a contract which most of them regarded as sacred as the articles of the Constitution? As we have seen, nobody was more stirred by the news of the repeal than Abraham Lincoln. He could think of nothing else. He went over in his mind the whole experience of the country with slav ery the efforts to confine it, the efforts to spread it, the bitterness that had been born in both North and South because of the struggle. Would it never rest? Was the hope and belief of the "Fathers" The Fight of His Life 123 that if it were confined it would ultimately die of itself a false hope ? Must this dangerous struggle go on forever? As he went about the circuit, he talked of noth ing else. It was the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. He was gradually coming, in his own mind, to a conclusion, terrible to himself and so terrible to others that many of his best friends refused to listen to him when he talked of it and that was, that it was impossible for the Union to exist half slave and half free. Once on the circuit, one of his friends tells of waking up early in the morning and seeing him sitting on the edge of the bed in his long nightshirt. "I tell you," Lincoln broke out when he saw his friend was awake, "this country cannot exist much longer half slave and half free." "Oh, go to sleep, Lincoln," his friend re plied. Douglas came back in the fall, after he had put through his Kansas-Nebraska bill, as it came to be called, to try to explain to the Illinois people what he had done. He started in Chicago, and they howled him down, though he fought half the night with them. It was a new experience for the "Little Giant," accustomed as he had always been to ap plause and congratulations. But he was no coward ; and he started out through the State to defend him- self. In October he came to Springfield. It was the week of the State fair, and he had a great audience, on which he used all his tremendous power of elo quence and persuasion. "Why, why," he pleaded, 124 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln "should any one object to allowing the people of a State to regulate their own affairs, to choose the kind of property they want have slaves or not? Was not that their right?" Lincoln had been asked to answer Douglas. His speech, four hours long, is one of the most impor tant of his life, for in it he marshaled like a general the army of arguments he had been gathering in his months of hard thinking. The result was an amaze ment to everybody, friend or foe, and particularly did it take hold of young men. Among those in his audience was a boy of twenty, Horace White by name. This boy had never in his life heard any thing before that so moved him; and years later, when he had become one of the most influential editors in this country, he drew a picture of the scene, which you can take as a true picture of Lincoln not only at this time, but in other great speeches which he was to make. "It was a warmish day in early October," Hor ace White says, "and Mr. Lincoln was in his shirt sleeves when he stepped on the platform. I ob served that, although awkward, he was not in the least embarrassed. He began in a low and hesitat ing manner, but without any mistakes of language, dates, or facts. It was evident that he had mas tered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and that he knew he was right. He had a thin, high-pitched, falsetto voice of much carrying power, and could be heard a long distance in spite of the bustle and tumult of the crowd. He had the accent and pronunciation peculiar to his native State, The Fight of His Life 125 Kentucky. Gradually he warmed up with his sub ject, his angularity disappeared, and he passed into that attitude of unconscious majesty that is so con spicuous in Saint Gaudens statue at the entrance of Lincoln Park in Chicago. . . . Progressing with his theme, his words began to come faster and his face to light up with the rays of genius and his body to move in unison with his thoughts. His gestures were made with his body and head rather than with his arms. They were the natural expression of the man, and so perfectly adapted to what he was say ing that anything different would have been quite in conceivable. Sometimes his manner was very im passioned, and he seemed transfigured with his sub ject. Perspiration would stream down his face, and each particular hair would stand on end. ... In such transfigured moments as these he was the type of the Hebrew prophet. "I heard the whole speech. It was superior to Webster s reply to Hayne, because its theme is loftier and its scope wider. ... I think also that Lincoln s speech is the superior of the two as an example of English style. It lacks something of the smooth, compulsive flow which takes the intellect captive in the Websterian diction, but it excels in the simplicity, directness, and lucidity which appeal both to the intellect and to the heart. The speech made so profound an impression on me that I feel under its spell to this day." A few days later the two men met again, this time at Peoria; and went over the same arguments. Douglas sat in the front row and heard Lincoln an- 126 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln swer his eloquent plea to let each State decide what kind of property it wanted to govern itself as it pleased. "What Mr. Douglas means," retorted Lincoln, "is that as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska therefore I must not object to your taking your slave. I admit this is perfectly logical if there is no difference between hogs and negroes. . . . The doctrine of self-government is right, but it has no application as here attempted. When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is not self-government, that is despotism. No man is good enough to govern another man with out that man s consent. I say this is the leading principle, the sheet anchor of American Republi canism." Lincoln s terrible seriousness, the closeness of his argument, the intentness of his great audience, filled Douglas, listening there in the front row, with alarm. Lincoln was digging under his foundations. If he kept this up, he saw that his own house might be falling over his head. And so, after the lecture, he said to him, "Lincoln, you are giving me more trouble in debate than all the United States Senate. Let s quit and go home." And Lincoln, always ami able too amiable, his friends said agreed. It was the end of the first round of the fight, and the honors were not with the great champion; they were with his unknown challenger. But if Douglas had any idea that when Lincoln accepted his suggestion that they "quit and go The Fight of His Life 127 home** it was to be the end of the fight, he soon saw his mistake, for Lincoln went to work like a beaver to elect to office every candidate in Illinois, Democrat or Whig, opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He began by offering him self for the State Assembly, and was elected. Think ing he had a chance to be made senator, he resigned and went out campaigning, speaking only on the sub ject which had set his mind and soul aflame. When he found that he could not be nominated, but that an anti-Nebraska Democrat who was running against a Douglas Democrat could be if he gave up his chance, he did it. "Never mind about me," he told his friends. "We will have an anti-Nebraska sena tor in Washington to fight Douglas." Douglas, watching from Washington, saw that, as the months went on, the opposition to him in Illinois was growing more and more serious. It was no longer a matter of scattered groups in the different political parties ; these groups were getting together. In May, 1856, at Bloomington, they pub licly broke from their old moorings and formed a new party the Republican. Douglas realized how much Lincoln had to do with the making of this organization and its plat form ; he knew, too, that it was Lincoln who at this meeting, when the organization was completed, had made a speech that had brought his audience to its feet again and again with wild cheering a speech so eloquent, passionate, and sincere that the very reporters taking notes for their newspapers threw down their pencils, forgot what they were there for 128 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln and at the end found themselves standing on the tables, shouting at the top of their lungs. Because of their excitement, no report was made for the newspapers and all over Illinois the speech was known as "Lincoln s Lost Speech," and men who heard it told, as long as they lived, of its greatness. His law partner, Mr. Herndon, who like the report ers, at the end of ten minutes threw down the pencil with which he was taking notes, declared that "If Mr. Lincoln was 6 feet and 4 inches high usually, at Bloomington that day he was 7 feet and inspired at that." An exciting summer followed the convention. The Republicans had their first full ticket State and national in the field, and the Illinois men of different parties who had united at Bloomington pulled together as if they had been trained from boyhood to the same political harness. Their reso lution and indignation was kept at white heat by the civil war that then raged in Kansas. The ter ritory was soon to seek statehood under Douglas bill, and between the settlers who were determined to make it a slave State and those who were equally determined it should remain free there was open warfare. In Illinois the Republicans proclaimed: "The Missouri Compromise must be restored, Kansas shall be free." With such campaign cries in a State so devoted to Douglas it was wonderful that there was no violence; and that there was none was, in no small measure, due to Lincoln who constantly preached self-control to his associates and in his The Fight of His Life 129 speeches kept to the hard, cold, unanswerable argu ments which two years before had made Douglas cry, "Let us quit and go home." When November came, the unbelievable hap pened in Illinois the new party swept the State, electing its whole ticket. For the first time in his history, Douglas and his followers were defeated all along the line. A few months after the election things were made still worse for him by a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States which declared that the Missouri Compromise and all com promises like it were unconstitutional that Con gress had no power to pass them that it had no power to make territory free as it had tried to do. Slaves were property and a man could take his property where he wished. There was a fresh uproar in Illinois, as loud a one as there had been over Douglas bill. Lincoln used the new move of the slavery party to strengthen the argument he had been building up. What was this last move, he asked, this Supreme Court de cision but another timber for the frame of a house that they were preparing to build? See how ex actly it fitted into the timber that Douglas had pre pared! When we see a lot of frame timbers, dif ferent portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different work men, joined together and see them exactly make the frame of a house, we find it impossible not to be lieve that the workmen are following a common plan. That is, you see that Lincoln was charging that Douglas and his party were in a conspiracy to 130 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln extend slavery all over the country, into the old as well as the new States, the North as well as the South. Many of those who listened to him said to one another, "It does look like it. Maybe Lin coln is right when he says we cannot exist much longer half slave and half free, that we must become all one or all the other." It was a serious thing for Douglas ambition to have Illinois turning against him at this moment. His term as senator was about to end. If he were not reflected he would probably not have a chance at the presidency in 1860 or 1864 as he had planned. He must do something. The chance came just in the nick of time. Kan sas was ready to adopt a constitution according to Douglas plan. The people were to have a free chance to vote whether they should or should not have slavery. By an outrageous fraud that nobody denied, a constitution "with slavery" was fixed on them, and Douglas party the President and all refused to interfere. Douglas made a terrible scene in the Senate, speaking for three hours, defying his party and declaring he would never submit. He had promised Kansas that she should be perfectly free to choose. This had not been a free election. "Are you going to force it on them against their will," he said, "simply because they would vote it down if you had consulted them? Is that the mode in which I am called upon to carry out the principle of self-government? If Kansas wants a Slave con stitution," he shouted, "she has a right to it; if she wants a Free-State constitution she has a right to The Fight of His Life 131 it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided, / care not whether it is voted up or down." All through the North there was great rejoicing over Douglas bold stand. He was for fair play, and many leading Republicans began to suggest tak ing him into the party if the Democrats threw him over. They even hinted to the Republicans in Illi nois that they accept him as their candidate for the Senate that fall. But the Republicans in Illinois knew Douglas too well. They looked on the at tack he had made on his party for its stand in Kan sas as a political trick timed exactly so as to win back his old followers. They knew that his revolt against the fraud did not touch the real question which was whether slavery was to be kept where the law had put it or was to be allowed to spread from new State to new State. And their answer to the suggestion that they join with the Democrats in re turning him was to nominate Abraham Lincoln to run against him for the Senate. Douglas came back to Illinois to make his cam paign in bad humor. He was uneasy. The coun try outside might not know anything about this man he must meet; but he did. He knew that man had a dangerous habit in debate of springing new argu-. ments on you, of insisting you answer them, of pur suing you if you did not or could not. He had the habit of asking questions which if you answered them in one way angered Illinois and if you answered them in another way angered the South. And, worst of all, this man was in dead earnest about the righf 132 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln and wrong of things. Lincoln cared whether slav ery was voted up or down. He did not. If Lin coln drove him too often into a corner and made the people see he did not care, that would be dangerous in Illinois. But of all this he gave no sign. He set out in a special railway coach, gay with flags, a brass can non mounted at the rear to announce his approach for all the world like a conquering hero on a tri umphal march. Lincoln camped on his trail, traveling as he could now in an ordinary day coach, now in the caboose of a freight train, now driving across country, ham mering incessantly at Douglas position. He hoped to force Douglas to a challenge to debate. The "Little Giant" was wary. He did not want to speak from the same platform with his rival and when Lincoln realized this, he became the challenger. There was no escape ; but, instead of accepting Lin coln s proposition that they divide time everywhere for the rest of the campaign, Douglas named places at which he would meet Lincoln. These debates were to occur at intervals of about two weeks. At last the second round of the great fight was called. The great champion dreaded it. "I shall have my hands full," he told his friends privately. They pooh-poohed at the idea and boasted loudly of the great show that was coming: "The Little Giant chawing up Old Abe." Not a few of Lincoln s followers, much as they admired him, dreaded the encounter. Was Lin- The Fight of His Life 133 coin, after all, fit to meet this big man this man who had always won, who had long been a United States senator, who, right or wrong, probably would be President ? Who was Lincoln that he should ac tually challenge such a man? Lincoln felt, rather than heard, this fear in his friends minds. Finally one of them told him in Springfield one day that the Republicans were looking forward to the debate which he had brought upon himself with deep con cern. A shadow went over Mr. Lincoln s face. It quickly gave way to a blaze of eyes and a quiver of lips. "Sit down," he said to his friend, "and let me tell you a story. "You have seen two men about to fight?" "Yes, many times." "Well, one of them brags about what he means to do. He jumps high in the air, cracking his heels together, smites his fist and wastes his breath trying to scare somebody. You see the other fellow, he says not a word." Here Mr. Lincoln s voice and manner changed to great earnestness and repeat ing "You see the other man, he says not a word. His arms are at his side, his fists are closely doubled up, his head is drawn to the shoulder, and his teeth are set firm together. He is saving his wind for the fight, and as sure as it comes off he will win it, or die a-trying." If you will take a map and locate the towns which Douglas had picked out for the great tournament Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charlestown, Gales- boro, Quincy, Alton you will see that by a little 134 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln trouble anybody in the State could hear at least one of the debates. Nothing had ever happened in the lives of the boys of Illinois so exciting. It was like the World Series. Everybody turned out. Whole neighborhoods packed themselves into a prairie schooner or on a hay wagon drawn by four or six horses. They came in buggies, in barouches, on horseback, by rail, by canal; a boy walked bare footed through the dust for miles rather than miss it. Most of them carried their food so that the de bating point was like one grand picnic streets, fields, hillsides crowded with campers. At every corner were fakirs and hucksters selling lemonade and pain killer, flags and badges, telling fortunes or making stump speeches. The debates came off in the afternoon, and long before the hour the great crowds would surge toward the stand the boys pushing their way to the front, climbing to the roofs of any near-by house or near by trees. For four years these boys had been listening to the great discussion. They had heard it at home, at school, in the streets, at political meetings. They knew what it was all about, and many of them could use the arguments for or against the extension of slavery as skillfully as their fathers, such was the constant training in debate that their schools gave. More than one of them, too, had finished his de bate over the great question with his fists. And now they were to see the champions of the two sides. They were like boys who, having for years played baseball at home and with neighboring teams, come The Fight of His Life 135 at last to see a game between national champions. What they were interested in was the men, and how they did it, how they handled themselves when they came to face each other. Each boy had chosen his leader, and was loud in his praise of him. It was natural that any boy should be proud to wear a Douglas badge. He was their "great man" "the next President of the United States" that was enough for many. But boys felt differently about Lincoln they liked him, liked him because he liked them always noticed them, talked to them when he had the chance in deed, sometimes even in the rush of the campaign, joined them for a few minutes at ball told them a story or even treated them at the grocery. Many a boy and girl who heard one or more of the de bates, loved to tell all during life of some little at tention of Mr. Lincoln. Down at Jonesboro, a lit tle girl, all dressed up for the great event, picked her way through the dust to do an errand in a gro cery store. Mr. Lincoln sat inside and as she passed drew her to him. "She s an orphan," said the store keeper. And the great man drew a dime from his pocket and slipped it into her hand. Do you sup pose that she ever forgot that little act of sympathy and kindness? They liked his fun whether they were for Doug las or for him, and many a one always remembered how at one debate when it came his turn to answer, he slipped off his long duster and said to a young girl beside him, "Please hold my coat while I stone Stephen." 136 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln They liked the habit he had of giving them a smile quite their own if they came around with their father or some grown friend at a reception. At the last of the debates at Alton, a very much excited small boy, "effervescing with patriotic enthusiasm," as he de scribed himself later, by the name of J. Henry Lea, went with his father to the hotel to congratulate Mr. Lincoln. A large group of the leading men of Illinois, men whose names are a part of the his tory of the country, surrounded Mr. Lincoln, yet when the small boy was presented he found time to give him not only a cordial handclasp but to say a few special kind words to him. From that hour, so Mr. Lea wrote fifty years afterward, he was to him a "demigod." Mr. Lea became later a genealogist. Realizing that Lincoln was the only great American whose an cestry had not been clearly established, and resent ing that because of ignorance and partisanship so much scandal and misrepresentation had gathered about it, he set out to establish clearly by docu ments the Lincoln pedigree. He worked for nearly thirty years on this task until finally he was able to establish an unbroken line from the farm where Lincoln was born in Kentucky, back through Vir ginia, into Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, across the ocean to England, and back to one Robert Lin coln who was born and died in Hingham, England, in the sixteenth century. When Mr. Lea published this work in 1908, he submitted it to the American people whom Lincoln loved so well "as a slight tribute to the memory of The Fight of His Life 137 their best and wisest statesman, father, and friend." This was the kind of enthusiasm that the debates aroused in many a boy. Then he was always telling stories or giving il lustrations either on the platform or as he talked to the groups gathered about that stuck in a boy s mind. A boy who heard Mr. Lincoln use his fa mous snake illustration could not fail to understand why he objected to taking slaves into new terri tory. "If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the near est stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. Much more if I found it in bed with my neighbor s children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide ! "That is just the case. The new territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be 1" One of the things that Mr. Lincoln was trying hardest in the debates to make Illinois understand 138 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln was that Mr. Douglas had one kind of an argu ment for the North and another for the South. More than one boy was able to see this by a story that he told of a man who had a very lazy pony. The man finally bought a pair of spurs, but they were not long of any use, for the moment the pony felt the prod he would stick out a forefoot and lie down. The owner decided that he would trade him off. He found a man with a fine horse and proceeded to tell him of the wonderful qualities of his pony. At the moment they were passing a clump of bushes where he saw some pheasants. He struck his spur into the pony who immediately put out his forefoot and lay down. "There are pheas ants around here," he cried out. "This pony is a hunter and a setter. This is his way of warning me." And, sure enough, when the men dismounted and went to the bushes they did scare up the birds and were able to shoot them. The man was very much impressed and finally made a trade. They changed their saddles and went on. Soon they reached a stream which they had to ford. The new owner of the pony applied his spur as they went into the stream, when out went the pony s forefoot and down he lay. The former owner cried out, "Don t be discouraged. He is just as good for fish as he is for fowl." "And that s the way with Doug las," he would say, "he is as good for the South as he is for the North." One feature of the fight which Lincoln s boy friends particularly resented was Douglas trickery in debate. He was a poor Scout when it came to The Fight of His Life 139 meeting the hard blows Lincoln gave him. He be gan by trying to belittle Mr. Lincoln. "He s a kind, amiable, intelligent gentleman," he said. He d first known him twenty-five years ago; they d been to gether in the legislature for a term, and then Mr. Lincoln had "subsided," been "submerged." Ten years later, when he was in the United States Sen ate Lincoln had turned up in Congress for a term, but the people had refused to return him and now here he was, disputing an election with him. Of course Douglas did not say, "Isn t that the most impudent and absurd thing you ever heard of?" but that was what his hearers knew he wanted them to feel, and his followers took the cue and set out to make Mr. Lincoln in every way ridiculous. The chief Douglas paper, The Times of Chicago, followed its leader by making a hodgepodge of all that Mr. Lincoln said. They made his sentences ungrammatical, ran them together, left out punc tuation or misplaced it, twisted his meaning, so that the result was often an unreadable conglomeration of nonsense. And when The Press and Tribune, a Lincoln paper, published his speeches properly and charged The Times with mangling its reports, the Douglas paper came back, declaring that they were exact, but that the Republicans, realizing how badly Mr. Lincoln was doing, had sent out some one to "rake after" him. That this was not true, we know from the same Horace White whose description of Mr. Lincoln in 1854 I have already given you. Mr. White was at the time on The Press and Tribune, and it was his business to go over the shorthand re- 140 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln ports made of all the speeches and he declares he never made any change. Mr. Lincoln was always good-natured under these repeated efforts to make him out an insignificant person. "Of course what Mr. Douglas says is true," he replied. "With me, the race of ambition has been a failure a flat failure; with him, it has been a splendid success. Senator Douglas is of world renown. All of the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certain, at no distant date, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his jolly, fruitful face post offices, land offices, marshalships, and Cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting forth in wonderful exuberance, ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. On the con trary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out." Nor did this kind of attack dishearten him. He believed too profoundly in the truth and soundness of his arguments, "I know the judge is a great man, while I am only a small man, but / feel that I have got him" Nor was this effort to make fun of Mr. Lincoln Douglas most serious offense against the code of fair play in debate. When he knew Lincoln did have him was making an argument or a charge that he could not answer or stating facts that he could not disprove he actually roared with rage and called it all a lie. Lincoln took it good-naturedly. The Fight of His Life 141 "It is no use," he said, "for Judge Douglas to swell himself up, take on dignity, call people liars. If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that, by a course of reasoning, Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now if you undertake to disprove that proposition and show that it is erroneous, would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar?" What really irritated Mr. Lincoln was being forced constantly to give time to answering charges that did not bear on the great theme. For instance, Douglas again and again charged that he had re fused to support the Government by voting sup plies for the Mexican War. This was not true. Lin coln had always voted supplies. Finally, at one of the debates where Douglas was taking up time re peating this, Lincoln settled it by seizing by the col lar a friend of Douglas, a man who had been in Congress at the same time that he was, and dragging him to the platform, "Here, you were there, and you know whether I voted supplies or not. Is Judge Douglas telling the truth?" The man so unexpect edly dragged in front of the audience had to admit that Douglas was lying. "Judge Douglas," he complained one day, "is playing cuttlefish a small species of fish that has no mode of defending himself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes." The way the two men fought became more and more interesting, especially to boys and young men. 142 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln A boy wants fair play. He doesn t like to see the man he is backing play tricks, if he is an honest boy. The anger and bitterness and unfairness of Douglas in the struggle lost him much sympathy even among his followers; and the good nature, kindliness, and fairness of Lincoln softened even his enemies. That is, Douglas lost sympathy as Lincoln gained it. His sincerity, his scrupulous care to state things as they were, to correct or explain an error if one was pointed out, his frankness in meeting every point that Douglas made, never evading or skulking, piled up the respect of friend and foe. His deep earnest ness, his appeal to the right and wrong of the mat ter took deepest hold, especially of the young. Many a boy felt his heart burning with a desire to spend his life fighting for the right thing, the honest thing, as he watched Abraham Lincoln making his great fight. It was this that made Illinois, as a whole, feel as the debates came to a close that the honors were fairly Lincoln s. Every one, friend and foe, agreed that he had been what a man should always be honest, brave, and courteous. The debates closed the middle of October, and in November came the elections. Lincoln had nearly four thousand more votes in the State than Douglas, but a senator is elected by the legislature; and the Democrats came out with forty seats to the Republicans thirty-five; that is, Douglas had won the senatorship. Of course Lincoln was disappointed; but his friends wondered that he did not seem downhearted. He laughed and said that even if he had stubbed his The Fight of His Life 143 toe, he was too big to cry. The truth was, however, that he did not think himself defeated. He had set out to do something which he considered more im portant to his party and to the country than being himself elected. He had set out to prove that Doug las was carrying water on both shoulders trying to make Illinois think he meant one thing and the South another. He felt he had done that, for he knew the South would never accept the explanation by which Douglas had won Illinois. This meant that Douglas never would be President. He was satisfied that he had persuaded great numbers of people that unless slavery was stopped, as the Fathers had expected it to be, it would spread all over the country. At the same time, he knew he had made these same thousands of men, women, and boys feel that this never must be, because slavery was wrong. As for himself, "Well," he said, "although I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone." And that had been his great aim not merely to be senator. You see, he really thought he had won. And so he went cheerfully back to his law. And high time, too. For months he had been earning nothing and the time had come when he had not even money for houshould expenses, CHAPTER VII THE BIG GIANT OF ILLINOIS He went about his work such work as few Ever had laid on head and heart and hand As one who knows, where there s a task to do, Man s honest will must Heaven s good grace command. TOM TAYLOR. NEXT to winning a fight is giving the winner a drubbing that sets the knowing who look on to saying, "Watch that man. He has the makings of a champion." That is what happened in the Lincoln-Douglas fight of 1858. Douglas won; that is, he was elected senator; but Lincoln put up a fight that set scores of young men and some older ones in Illinois declaring that he was a "great man; a greater man than Douglas;" "the greatest man who ever lived" one young editor shouted, forthwith rushing to his paper and proposing him for the next President of the United States 1 Their enthusiasm was strengthened by evidence that came to them of the impression Lincoln s work had made outside of the State even on "great men" leaders in the life of the East. What was the joy of one of this young group when he received a let ter from an important Easterner, asking: "Who is 144 The Big Giant of Illinois 145 this man that is replying to Douglas in your State? Do you realize that no greater speeches have been made on public questions in the history of our country?" "There," they all cried as the letter was passed around, "I told you so." One Lincoln man in the East, when the struggle was going on, came back to tell how amazed and delighted he had been to find that whenever it was known he was from Illinois, all sorts of questions about Lincoln were asked him: How old he was, where he had been educated, what he "did." Was he rich? How did he know so much? This friend boasted loudly, u We have two giants in Illinois. Douglas is our little Giant but our Big Giant is Abraham Lincoln." "This interest should be kept alive," he told Mr. Lincoln. "It will make you president," and he sug gested that a sketch or "life" be published. Lincoln only shook his head. "What s the use of talking of me for the presidency, while we have such men as Seward, Chase, and others, who are so much better known to the people, and whose names are so inti mately associated with the principles of the Repub lican party? Everybody knows them; nobody scarcely outside of Illinois knows me. Besides, is it not, as a matter of justice, due to such men, who have car ried this movement forward to its present status, in spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard names? I really think so. "Let s don t talk about it, it won t pay." His hesitation did not discourage his friends. He 146 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln had the makings of a champion. They would back him. One of them the young editor who had lost his head at the convention in 1856 when Lincoln had made the speech which had carried everybody away with enthusiasm went to Washington about a year after the debates and began to talk up Lincoln to members of Congress. He was an available man, he told them; that is, he was a man they could all get together on which was not true in the case of other better-known candi dates. What this young editor was really trying to do was to make people in various parts of the coun try know that Lincoln was in the field and that Illi nois was behind him. In the meantime, Lincoln was building himself up politically better than he realized. If he didn t see much chance for himself he saw a great future for the Republican party if they were "united and resolute." They must keep their pile of votes to gether. They must not waste time dallying with Douglas as some of the Easterners were still in clined to do. They must stand solid for 1860. He found many chances to do his part in keeping the ranks in line. From all sides there came calls for him to help the Republicans. It was such a call that in the fall of 1859 took him to Ohio. He went will ingly, for he was again on Douglas heels. And again he believed he "had" him. The Little Giant had given him a fine opening by declaring that the men who had founded the country, the "Fathers" believed with him that Congress had no power to keep slavery out of the territories that it was purely The Big Giant of Illinois 14? a local matter. Lincoln was terribly indignant over this contention. "There are two ways of establishing a proposi tion/ he said in Ohio. "One is by trying to demon strate it upon reason, and the other is to show that great men in former times have thought so and so, and thus to pass it by the weight of pure authority. Now, if Judge Douglas will demonstrate somehow that this is popular sovereignty the right of one man to make a slave of another, without any right in that other or any one else to object demonstrate it as Euclid demonstrated propositions there is no ob jection. But when he comes forward, seeking to carry a principle by bringing it to the authority of men who themselves utterly repudiate that principle, I ask that he shall not be permitted to do it. He asks the community to believe that the men of the Revolution were in favor of his great principle, when we have the naked history that they themselves dealt with this very subject matter of his principle, and utterly repudiated his principle, acting upon a precisely contrary ground. It is as impudent and absurd as if a prosecuting attorney should stand up before a jury and ask them to convict A as the mur derer of B, while B was walking alive before them." Lincoln realized, however, that he did not neces sarily rout Douglas by insisting that he was wrong. He must prove it, and so when late in the year he received an invitation from the Young Men s Repub lican Club of Brooklyn, New York, to speak in Plymouth Church the next February, he set to work to collect full proofs. It was a heavy task, but he 148 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln did not shirk it. All through the winter he pored over records and documents and histories of the period when the Constitution was being made and amended, refreshing his memory, digging up new facts, examining and strengthening the arguments he had been building up in the last six years and out of it all producing a new speech which he knew was a good one good because it was sound at the heart the truth and the whole truth about the "Fathers." When the time for his engagement came, the speech was finished and carefully written out. Anx ious to look his best as well as to do his best, he bought a brand-new suit of clothes and started East. When he arrived he found that the club had trans ferred the lecture to New York City, such was the interest in his coming. He was to speak in Cooper Union and to have in his audience a big group of distinguished men men like Horace Greeley, George William Curtis, William Cullen Bryant. It was to be a trial of his ability, he saw, a test of what he was worth. He set his teeth hard. He knew he had his proofs if he could only present them so as to show people their real meaning and stir them to action! He had written the speech in full, but he had gone over his arguments so carefully and so often in his mind that he had no need of notes. Nor did he make any attempt to catch his audience at the start by the stories and jokes for which he was famous and which they rather expected from him, but plunged at once into the heart of the question, taking as his text words from Douglas own mouth : LINCOLN IN FEBRUARY, 1860, AT THE TIME OF THE COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH From photograph by Brady. It was a frequent remark of Lincoln that this portrait and the Cooper Institute Speech made him President. The Big Giant of Illinois 149 "Our Fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better than we do now." "I agree," said Mr. Lincoln, "now let us see how they understood it." Who were the "Fathers?" First, there were the thirty-nine men who signed the Constitution. What did they think about letting slavery into the territories? Man by man he had picked them out and hunted up just what they had said and how they had voted on the subject. He showed his audience that twenty-one of the thirty- nine were on record as against slavery in any terri tory the United States then owned only two he found had ever voted for its admission. He in cluded the members of the first Congress in the "Fathers" as they had adopted the first ten amend ments made to the Constitution and he showed that this congress of seventy-six men passed an ordinance forbidding slavery in all the territory we then owned. Of course we should count George Washington as a "Father." What did he think about Congress having the power to keep slavery out of the terri tory? Why, he signed the bill that did the thing. Moreover, he told Lafayette he thought it a wise thing to do and that for his part he hoped the time would come when all the States would be free. That is, Lincoln had taken Douglas at his word and showed by proof, which had cost him long days of research, that the "Fathers" had thought slavery ought to be restricted, that they had made the best laws they could to restrict it ; and had stood by these laws as long as they lived. 150 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln All that the Republicans now asked, Mr. Lincoln said, was that Congress continue to do as the "Fathers" had done. "As those Fathers marked it, so let it be again marked as an evil not to be ex tended but to be tolerated and protected only be cause of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity." Resting on the historical foundation that he had laid, Lincoln went on in his speech to claim that the Republicans, far from being revolutionists as Doug las was declaring them to be, were in fact the real conservatives ; that, they were following the Consti tution, not evading it. If this were true, why should there be men threatening to leave the Union in case a Republican President was elected? What would satisfy people that were making these threats? Nothing in the world, Lincoln said, but that the Republicans should declare that slavery was right and allow it to spread, and he ended his speech with certain sentences, necessary to bear in mind if you are to fully understand just how Lincoln was think ing and feeling at this moment. "If slavery is right," he said, "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 in sist 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 The Big Giant of Illinois 151 thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which de pends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition as being right ; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? "Wrong, as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong; vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of don t care on a question about which all true men do care ; such as Union appeals beseech ing true Union men to yield to Disunionists, revers ing the divine rule and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washing ton said and undo what Washington did. "Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of 152 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it." Mr. Lincoln s highly intelligent audience was so captivated by the careful and solid way in which he built up his arguments and by the force and origi nality of his expressions that again and again the packed house stopped him by long and enthusiastic applause. He won them completely. The next day The New York Evening Post, of which the poet, William Cullen Bryant, was editor, published the whole speech, and a committee of the Young Men s Republican Club, eager to let people see what this Western man, who had so carried away an Eastern audience, looked like, took him out and had his photograph made. A few days later this picture filled the front page of Harper s Weekly. Mr. Lincoln used to say that the Cooper Union speech and this picture made him President. You should study the picture as well as the speech. And if you do, you will see at once that he was not the uncouth, ill-clad man that his enemies were already describing him to be. This picture shows a man of dignity and gentleness, with a face of strong lines and features and eyes deep with feeling. And as for clothes, they were the correct ones of the day, easily and unconsciously worn. A man to look at again and again if you met him in a crowd. You can imagine how all that had happened in New York delighted his friends back home who were working so hard to make him Illinois 1 candidate for President. There were not a few of the most impor- The Big Giant of Illinois 153 tant Republicans in the State who felt as Lincoln had felt himself that with Seward and Chase in the field it would be wasting ammunition to use Lincoln. Seward had the lead, and it was this lead that Lin coln s friends were trying to overcome. They, of course, made the best of what he had done in New York. "Look at this," they shouted, "his whole speech reported in a big New York paper, and a full-page picture in Harper s Weekly. They recog nize what we have always said, that Lincoln is a great man. And if this is so, why should we not stand by our own? Why go outside of the State for a candidate when we have such material?" When Lincoln came back after a month of speak ing and sight-seeing in the East he found his presi dential boom had grown like a gourd in his absence, and it looked every day more and more as if he and not Seward would be the choice of the State when the convention was held. And so it happened. He was nominated at Decatur, the town near which his father had settled in 1831. Whatever opposition there was to him when the convention met was swept away by a simple demon stration, suggested by the very man with whom in those early days he had cut rails and steered flat- boats. This was John Hanks, who, you will remem ber, Thomas Lincoln had decided to follow into Illi nois. Hanks was still living on his farm near Deca tur, and although he was a Democrat, his admiration for Lincoln was so great that when he heard that his name was before the convention, he went into town and looked up a delegate whom he knew. "I have 154 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln known Mr. Lincoln for thirty years," he told this man, "and we are opposed in politics. I have seen him defeated again and again, when he knew that all he had to do to win was to change, but he has never changed. I respect him and I want you to help me to do something for him." Hanks went on to tell this man how, in their boy hood days, he and Lincoln had toiled together, some times flatboating, sometimes lumbering; how they had tramped the prairies and forests with gun and ax, cut and mauled rails along the Sangamon River, to enclose his father s little home. All this time, however hard he was working, there never was a time but what he managed somehow to get books. He settled all the disputes in the neighborhood, and his decisions were always abided by. U I never knew a man so honest, under all circumstances, for his whole life," declared John Hanks. "My wife used to say to me that some day Abe would come out and be something, but I could not exactly see how a day laborer, hopelessly poor, would ever stand much chance to get up high in the world. So when I heard that they were going to run him for President here at Decatur, I thought that it might be a good thing to present some of the rails that we made together thirty years ago. I thought they would speak louder in his praise than any orator could and that the con vention would like to honor true labor." The friend to whom John Hanks said all of this, and probably a good deal more, quite agreed; and as a result of their talk, just before the vote on the candidate was taken, a little procession marched into The Big Giant of Illinois 155 the room, bearing a big banner mounted on fence rails. On this banner was this inscription: ABRAHAM LINCOLN The Rail Candidate FOR PRESIDENT IN 1860 Two rails from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830 by John Hanks and Abe Lincoln whose father was the first pioneer of Macon County. The whole convention broke out in cheers and began to call "Lincoln, Lincoln." "I suppose," said Mr. Lincoln, rising and pointing to the banner, "that I am expected to reply to that. I can t say that I made those rails or not, but I am quite sure that I made a great many just as good." The heart of the convention warmed toward him a great man the "Big Giant" of Illinois; a man who knew nobody better what hard labor meant. A wise man in the crowd, listening to the cheers, turned to a friend and said, "Seward has lost the Illinois delegation." And so he had. Lincoln was Illinois choice, her "favorite son." But how about the country? Could he get even one more State? Why should he get another State, Lin coln still asked himself, when there were men like Seward and Chase? The friends who had engineered his boom to this point did not stop to ask this question. They were too busy. 156 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln The national Republican convention of 1861 was held in Chicago, and this gave them a great advan tage the advantage a home team always has on its own field over a visiting team. There are more banners flying for it, more girls wearing its colors, bigger crowds cheering its moves. The Lincoln dele gation did not neglect a single point. They flung banners across every street in Chicago, draped the face of every friendly building. They brought in crowds from all over the prairies, with every State band they could lay their hands upon, to march and sing and hurrah. Other States might import famous bands and ora tors and banners ; but Illinois saw to it that her man had more of everything. When a political party chooses a candidate for President, the chief thing is to find a man who can be elected. The business of Lincoln s friends in this convention was to persuade a majority of the dele gates that he had a better chance of being elected than any other man, even Seward himself. Seward was the leader of the party, no doubt, but there were great States like Illinois, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and New Jersey in which the prejudices against him were so strong that they could not elect him. Why go down to defeat with Seward, the Illinois men argued, when there was no such prejudice against Lincoln? But the delegates from other States could argue the same about their favorite sons, and did. The Illinois delegates then had the task of persuading each of these different States that in case its candidate could not win, the next best man was Lincoln. The Big Giant of Illinois 157 Still another task that they had was trying to con centrate on Lincoln at once as many as possible of the delegates who had come "uninstructed." Men always work fiercely at national conventions, but probably no delegates ever worked harder than these friends of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. For days before the convention and night and day after it began, they ran from one State group to another, arguing, pleading, threatening, trading. And their work told, for, even before the convention was called on May i6th, Lincoln s chances were looking up. All through the early days of the convention these chances constantly improved ; still, on the morning of the day the nomination was to be made, there seemed to be no great likelihood of his succeeding. The best observers were saying that Seward s nomination was sure. A great convention for nominating a President is always one of the most exciting things that happens in this country, and the crowds it draws together are among the largest that we ever see. In Chicago in 1860 the Republicans had an enormous gathering. They had built a great barn of an auditorium which they called the Wigwam big enough to hold some ten thousand people. This was packed to the very roof the morning the voting began while outside the streets were packed quite as closely with people wait ing for news. If you have ever been at a convention you know how, after the names of all the candidates are in, and the voting begins, you hold your very breath. You know how quickly your pencil flies as you put down the votes for each man, how swiftly 158 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln you add them up, how quickly you compare the re sults ! That morning in Chicago, hundreds of pen cils, held by hands, many of which trembled with ex citement, cast up votes; and the very first addition told a tale. Lincoln had 102 votes 5 1 1 /2 more than the next man below him. It was a big difference. Could these 5 1 1 / 2 votes be secured for him ? They belonged to Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania knew that she had no chance of winning for her man, Simon Cameron. Might she not be impressed by the size of Lincoln s vote and change at once for him? There was a quick consultation; the answer came: "Penn sylvania gives her 52 votes for Lincoln." It was the beginning of a break. Others quickly followed, and when the flying pencils added up the second ballot, Lincoln had 182 votes. The third ballot was taken quickly, and ten thousand people sat breathless as State after State turned over its vote to Lincoln. This last report was scarcely in before a whisper and then a yell ran through the great crowd 231^ votes for Lincoln; 2j4 more would give him the nomination. Ohio was the first to act 4 votes from Chase. He had won. You know, of course, what happened then. You can imagine the roar that rose and fell until there was no breath left in the cheerers. Illinois that morning had packed the Wigwam with men and women pre pared, in case of Lincoln s nomination, to outroar anything that had ever been known in the history of political conventions. One of Lincoln s friends who had worked longest and hardest for him has left ? The Big Giant of Illinois 159 stirring description of what this claque did when the vote was announced. "The scene which followed baffles all human de scription. After an instant s silence, as deep as death, which seemed to be required to enable the assembly to take in the full force of the announce ment, the wildest and mightiest yell (for it can be called by no other name) burst forth from ten thou sand voices which we ever heard from mortal throats. This strange and tremendous demonstra tion, accompanied with leaping up and down, tossing hats, handkerchiefs, and canes recklessly into the air, with the waving of flags, and with every other con ceivable mode of exultant and unbridled joy, con tinued steadily and without pause for perhaps ten minutes. "It then began to rise and fall in slow and billow ing bursts, and for perhaps the next five minutes these stupendous waves of uncontrollable excitement, now rising into the deepest and fiercest shouts and then sinking like the ground swell of the ocean into hoarse and lessening murmurs, rolled through the multitude. Every now and then it would seem as though the physical power of the assembly was ex hausted and that quiet would be restored, when all at once a new hurricane would break out, more pro longed and terrific than anything before. If sheer exhaustion had not prevented, we don t know but the applause would have continued to this hour." While this was going on inside the Wigwam, the town outside went crazy, A boy with a cannon had 160 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln been placed on the roof with instructions to fire if Lincoln was nominated. When this cannon boomed the news, twenty thousand people in the neighbor hood took up the cry. It spread over the city, and from the city to the country; and before morning it was just as Douglas said when he heard the news in Washington, "There won t be a tar barrel left in Illinois to-night." Down in Springfield the town had been hanging around the telegraph office all the morning, waiting for news. Mr. Lincoln himself had dropped in two or three times only to go out when the report came in that the voting had begun. He still did not think it was possible that he could win over Seward. He was standing in the door of a shop across the square, talking to a friend, when he suddenly saw a boy plunging headlong through the crowd toward him. He was shouting at the top of his voice: "Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated ! Mr. Lincoln, you are nominated!" You can imagine what happened in Springfield then the handshaking and the laughing and the crying! How the men gathered about Mr. Lincoln and the woman ran in to talk it over with Mrs. Lincoln! How the boys and the girls gathered around Tad and Willie the two Lincoln boys who were at home ! It was the beginning of an exciting nine months for Springfield a nine months in which almost every day brought some new joyful or tragic sensation. If Mr. Lincoln had had doubts of his nomina tion up to the very hour that the excited small boy The Big Giant of Illinois 161 rushed across the square shouting the news, he had less of his election. If the Republicans held to gether, it looked as if it could be done and this was true chiefly because those who opposed him were badly divided. There was a party that believed slavery could not legally be kept off new soil by either Congress or local government, and it had a ticket in the field. There was a party which declared Con gress could not keep it out but that the local govern ment could; or, as Mr. Lincoln put it: "A thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be;" and it had a ticket and Douglas was at its head. There was a third party which evaded the slavery question and declared for the Union, and it had a ticket. A situation more helpful to Mr. Lincoln s success could not have been ar ranged, if the Republicans only held together. But would they? Would great men like Seward and Chase consent? To Mr. Lincoln s great joy they did soon consent, and, disappointed as they were, wrote him manly letters of congratulation. Seward s fol lowers were all for bolting the nomination at first and putting Mr. Seward in the field. He laughed at them. "The Republican party was not made for William H. Seward," he said, "but Mr. Seward, if he is worth anything, for the Republican party." It was not long before everybody was in line. If they worked they could do it, they kept telling one another. It was a great campaign, that followed; and it was a campaign in which more boys took part than any that the country had ever seen. The feature in 1 62 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln which they were most interested was the "Wide Awakes." There were bands organized for street parades, bodyguards for political speakers, and for all sorts of campaign work, such work as Boy Scouts would do nowadays. They wore black-glazed caps and capes and carried blazing coal-oil torches. The ambition of each club of Wide Awakes was to outdo all neighboring clubs in fantastic marching. They learned all the movements they could hear of and invented their own combinations, drilling until they were perfect in their forming and reforming. Their favorite march was the zigzag an imitation of a rail fence. Each band, of course, had its own partic ular badge, and each was ambitious to have on its badge a picture of Mr. Lincoln splitting rails or steering a flatboat. Many of the Wide Awakes carried their banners mounted on rails in the fashion introduced at the Decatur convention, and proud indeed was the club that had one of the original rails Lincoln had made in 1831. None of the Wide Awakes owned a Lin coln relic quite so precious, however, as the band at Hartford, Connecticut this was the very maul with which he had split the rails which were now in such demand. This maul was treasured by the Hartford Wide Awakes as long as they existed and finally was given to the Connecticut Historical Society, where it is still to be seen. The Wide Awakes marched and everybody sang. The refrain of the favorite song ran : "Oh, ain t you glad you joined the Republicans?" The Big Giant of Illinois 163 But the finest was Whittier s " The Quakers are Out. JI "Give the flags to the winds! Set the hills all aflame! Make way for the man with The Patriarch s name! Away with misgivings away With all doubt, For Lincoln goes in when the Quakers are out!" Marching and singing were only the accompani ments to the speaking. The campaign was distin guished by some of the noblest and most sincere political speeches we ve ever heard in the United States. The theme was so great that of human freedom that it brought out the best in men. Charles Sumner, William H. Seward, Carl Schurz, Horace Greeley, Salmon P. Chase were the most noted of these speakers; but there was scarcely a county in the North that did not have its local ora tor. Through the summer and fall there was a con tinual succession of rallies and celebrations and polit ical picnics bringing together thousands of people. The greatest of these all was in Springfield in August, when a procession of seventy-five thousand people eight miles long passed before Mr. Lincoln s door. Think of what that meant to the boys of the town that knew and loved him so well ! The hard work the Republicans were putting in, the enthusiasm that their feeling that they were right was giving them, the division in their opponents lines, told every day; and long before election time 164 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln Mr. Lincoln felt reasonably sure that he would be the next President .of the United States. But, along with this certainty, came an increasing anxiety. Ever since the Republicans had set out to prevent slavery s spreading to free soil, there had been many groups of important people in the slave States, who had threatened to go out of the Union and fight to stay out, if the Republicans should ever elect a President. They had said this in 1856, and when Mr. Lincoln went over to the new party that year and made his great "lost speech," he had told them that, such questions were to be settled in this country "by bal lots, not bullets." And he had added, "We won t go out of the Union, and you shan t." The more flourishing the Republicans became, the louder the threats of the Disunionists. When Mr. Lincoln spoke in Cincinnati in the fall of 1859, he had a good many of the discontented in his audience, and he took pains to reassure them. "Suppose we do beat you," he said, "what are we going to do with you? We mean to treat you as nearly as we possibly can as Washington and Jefferson and Madison treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and in no way interfere with your institution, to abide by all and every compromise of the Constitution. We mean to remember that you are as good as we, that there is no difference between us other than the dif ference of circumstances. We mean to recognize and bear in mind always that you have as good hearts in your bosoms as other people or as we claim to have, and treat you accordingly. We mean to marry The Big Giant of Illinois 165 your girls when we have a chance the white ones, I mean; and I have the honor to inform you that I once did have a chance in that way." As the election approached and it looked more and more as if the Republicans would succeed, the Dis- unionists became louder and louder in their threats. Mr. Lincoln, however, never really believed that they would carry out what they said. It did not seem possible to him. To him the Union was one and indivisible, something sacred, that must be pro tected and preserved. He felt that it was not only the liberty and happiness of the people of this coun try that was involved in the preservation of the Union, but the hope of the world for all future time. We were trying to work out a government based on the Declaration of Independence a government which promised that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all should have an equal chance. For men deliberately to attempt to break up a Union which had this senti ment behind it was unthinkable to him. He did not believe it of the South, and although the defiance became thicker and thicker through the summer and fall, he held to this opinion. And in this he was backed by Seward and Schurz and Bryant all of whom laughed at the alarms. Not a few people in the South for in every State there were groups of Unionists kept writing him, not to be frightened, that although there might be disorder if he were elected, there certainly would not be secession. But suppose they should try it? He had to ask 1 66 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln himself that. And did. Well, there was no doubt at all in his mind about what his duty would be he must preserve the Union. You see, then, that even before his election, his problem had begun to change, that instead of its being a fight to keep slavery back where it legally belonged, it looked as if it might become a fight to keep the Union together. In November, the hopes of the Republicans were realized Mr. Lincoln was elected. No sooner was this done, however, than he saw how mistaken he had been in his confidence that the Disunionists would not carry out their threats. Seven States, one after the other, quickly left the Union, and as they left they prepared to defend themselves, seizing United States forts and arsenals within their reach and voting large sums for arms. Early in February of 1861, these states united in a new government, the South ern Confederacy adopted a constitution, elected of ficers, and went about creating an army and navy. In doing this they were quite as sure that they were right as Mr. Lincoln was sure that they were wrong. Just as he believed and said that if the South suc ceeded in extending slavery to free territory they would eventually extend it into the free States, so the South believed that if Mr. Lincoln and his party prevented their extending slavery, they would event ually try to abolish it, even where it had been made legal. If we cannot live and do what we think right within the Union, they said, we will leave it and establish a government where we can follow out our own ideas of what is right and what is wrong. This The Big Giant of Illinois 167 meant, of course, that the Disunionists did not share Mr. Lincoln s strong devotion to the Union. While all this was going on, Mr. Lincoln was sitting in Springfield. Not until after his inaugura tion on March 4th would he have the power to lift his voice or take a step to interfere with what the seceding States were doing. The barn door was open, the horse was being stolen before his eyes, and he could do nothing. It was even doubtful if, when he finally did get to Washington, he could find the tracks. Nothing is harder than not to have the power to lift your hand when something you love is being destroyed. The helpless Republicans were dis tracted. There were some in the party who said, "Let them go." There were others who said "Let s compromise give them what they want." And there were still others who said with Mr. Lincoln in 1856, "We won t go out of the Union, and you shan t." That is, the united party that had elected Mr. Lincoln was becoming a divided party; and each faction was besieging Mr. Lincoln to adopt its way of thinking. Thousands of letters and hundreds of visitors poured into Springfield begging him to stand by his guns, to spike his guns, to deliver his guns to the Disunionists. Threats filled his mail threats of hanging, of shooting, of kidnaping. He kept his head through it all, and he held his tongue as well, going about his preparations for Washington, select ing his Cabinet, writing his inaugural address, closing up his law business, though not taking down his "shingle." "Let it hang there undisturbed," he told 1 68 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln his partner. "If I live, I am coming back some time and then we will go right on practicing law as if nothing had happened." He went out of his way to say good-by to all his old friends, and took a day off to visit his father s grave in Coles County, and to pass a few hours with his beloved stepmother, now over seventy years old. The parting with her was the saddest of all for, far away in the country, as she was, the threats against Mr. Lincoln s life had reached her, and she had come to feel that she would never see him alive again. At last everything was done, and on the evening of February n, 1861, Mr. Lincoln and his family and a large party of friends left Springfield for Washington. As he stood at the end of his car look ing over the great gathering, he made a little parting speech, which is counted by lovers of good English one of the most perfect things he ever said. There were boys of fourteen in that crowd who were so deeply moved by it that they were able to repeat it as long as they lived. "My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a cen tury, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assist ance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. The Big Giant of Illinois 169 Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain vith you, and be everywhere for good, let us confi dently hope all will yet be well. To His care com mending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell." Although Mr. Lincoln knew that there were many people who thought he would never reach Washing ton alive, and the probability was that there were a few people who had sworn that he should never live to be inaugurated, he did not allow his danger to in terfere in the least with the program of receptions and speech-making that had been laid out for him. He made every speech and shook every hand. He even remembered at one place to ask from the tail end of his car for a little girl who, a few months be fore, had written him a letter, asking if he had any little girls and telling him that she thought he would look better with whiskers. Mr. Lincoln had an swered her that he regretted the necessity of say ing that he had no daughter, but that he had three sons, one seventeen, one nine, and one seven. As to the whiskers, he wrote her, "As I have never worn any, don t you think that people would call it a piece of silly affectation were I to begin wearing them now?" Regardless, however, of what people might think he had actually begun to grow the whisk ers, and passing through the town where the little girl lived, he asked for her. Of course, she was there. Who would not be, having received a letter from him? And when he called for her she came forward with a great bunch of flowers for him, and received in return a hearty kiss of thanks. 170 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln When the program had been carried out in full, all the speeches made the last was at Harrisburg on February 22d he heeded the warnings of detec tives and friends that a plot to assassinate him as he passed through Baltimore had been discovered, and, slipping away from his party, took an earlier train than that which he had been announced to take, and at daylight on February 23d, was safe in the capital. On March 4th came the inauguration. Never was an inaugural address listened to with such anxiety. What would he say? What would he say about the new government that the seceding States had formed? What would he say about the forts and arsenals that they had seized? Would he say, Go in peace I Or would he hold to his view that the Union could not be broken? What he did say was not harsh, but it was firm. What it amounted to was that, in his judgment, the Union was made to last, that no State could vote itself out, that in spite of what had been happening in the South, he regarded the Union still unbroken, and that he should go ahead, administering the laws everywhere, holding the forts, collecting custom duties, distributing the mails. He should not in vade the seceding States or use force against them. Kindly and affectionately he begged the dissatisfied not to take in hot haste a step which they would never take deliberately, but to "think long and well." "Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time," he counseled them. At the end, he again assured them "the government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourself the aggressor." The Big Giant of Illinois I? 1 But in the next sentence he warned them : "You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern ment, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve and protect and defend it." A moment later he took that oath. CHAPTER VIII ARMED WITH A SINGLE PURPOSE To front a lie in arms and not to yield This shows, methinks, God s plan And measures of a stalwart man. JAMES RUSSELL LOWBLL. IT often happens when a man takes a splendid oath like that of Abraham Lincoln on March 4, 1 86 1, "to preserve, to protect and to defend * the Constitution that he does not see definitely what it means in conduct; that is, he has no clear idea as to how he is going to make good. Mr. Lin coln, when he took his oath, did see. "My course is as plain as a turnpike road," he told one of his friends. He had mentioned several things in his inaugural address that he saw on this "turnpike road." One was to hold the forts that belonged to the United States. Now, as we have seen, the seven States in going out of the Union had taken possession not only of the forts but of the arsenals, dockyards, custom houses everything belonging to the United States within their borders. Nothing was left excepting three forts along the Florida coast, and one in the center of Charleston Harbor Fort Sumter, held by 172 Armed with a Single Purpose 173 a small group of United States soldiers under Major Robert Anderson. According to Mr. Lincoln s oath, he must hold Sumter. Whether he did or not would be a test of the kind of a President he would prove to be one who meant what he said, or one who, when he saw that what he said carried serious consequences with it, would squirm out. One of the earliest letters that came to him on his first full day as President of the United States was from Major Anderson, telling him that he had neither the men nor the guns and ammunition to de fend himself; worse still, that his provisions were almost gone. He might pull through on dry bread, pork, and water for four weeks, but no longer. If they were to be relieved, Major Anderson said, it would take 20,000 men. He was not exaggerating. Fort Sumter was nearly encircled by hostile forts and batteries, and in January, when President Buchanan had attempted to send provisions, the vessel had been fired upon by the determined South Carolinians and had retired. The harbor was stronger now than in January and South Carolina no less determined that the North should not reach Fort Sumter with food supplies or guns. What should be done? There were no 20,000 men on which Mr. Lincoln could put his hands. The regular army at that moment numbered only about 16,000 men, and most of these were in the West where Indian troubles called for constant attention. Moreover, nearly one third of their officers had al- 174 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln ready gone over to the Confederacy. The small navy was also scattered in many different waters. There were many people in the North who wrote Mr. Lincoln that, since he had no force to relieve the fort, he had better surrender it. There were others who, while they did not quite like to use the word "surrender," urged that there be no effort to relieve Major Anderson, since it would surely cause war. A man must carry out his plans with the tools in his hands. Mr. Lincoln saw only one thing as pos sible, and that was to send the garrison provisions. He would not allow brave men as they had shown themselves to go hungry, he said, nor would he give up the fort; that would be to admit the justice of the Southern cause and go back on his word. Instead of weakening he was every day feeling more resolute about the matter of disunion. He worked con stantly on the case in his own mind. What he asked was whether, when an election had gone against a group of citizens in a republic, they had a right to break up the country. If this could be done, then Mr. Lincoln felt that there was no use trying to establish a "government of the people by the same people." He asked himself whether there might not be a fatal weakness in all republics. "Must a gov ernment of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its own people or too weak to maintain its own existence?" It is not only governments that have to ask themselves this question in this life. It is rare indeed when any group of people, young or old, come together, that sooner or later they do not find that if Armed with a Single Purpose 175 they become strong there is danger of their becom ing tyrannical and that if they remain weak there is danger of their going out of existence. And this is just as true of the individual as it is of a group. If you are strong, you must look out or you will be a tyrant. If you are weak, you must look out or you will be a nobody. This was what Mr. Lincoln was going over in his own mind at this time. His conclusion was that it was so important, not only for the United States but for the future of the world, that it be proved that a republic can be strong enough not only to resist at tacks from the outside but to settle troubles inside, that it was worth risking a war to get the proof. No, he would not break his word: he would send provisions to Fort Sumter; but at the same time he would send word to the governor of South Carolina that, in doing this, he would not now put in men, arms, nor ammunition; and that, if later he con cluded to do so, he would notify him unless, of course, there should be an attack upon the fort. The provisions were sent; but before they reached the fort it was bombarded. The bombardment be gan on the morning of April 12, 1861. Major An derson and his men held out all that day and the next. The night of April I3th, Mr. Lincoln had a dream. He was sailing rapidly on a singular and indescribable vessel toward a dark and indefinite shore. The next morning, the I4th, when news came that Sumter had fallen, he connected the fall with his dream. He had reached the dark shore. Mr. Lincoln had told the seceding States in his Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln inaugural address that they could have no conflict without being themselves the aggressors. Clearly they were now the aggressors, and there was no more question in the mind of the North than there was in his mind that since the seceding States were unwilling to trust to "time, discussion, and the ballot box" as he had advised, the government must take back by force the property they had seized and which they had proved they meant to hold by force. And so he at once issued a call for 75,000 men. With that number he and his Cabinet believed that they could suppress the rebellion, as they called it. But the fall of Sumter and this call for men to subdue them was all that was needed in the South to unite both Secessionists and Union men. Still more serious, the Southern Confederacy was quickly en larged now that the tug had come four more States joining fortunes with the seven that were out when the Republicans came in. A third group the Bor der States complicated Mr. Lincoln s situation, for these States Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri could not decide between the contestants. They were pulled both ways. They would not go out of the Union, but they would not fight the South. Mr. Lin coln s problem was not merely putting down a rebel lion. It was a question of overwhelming a hostile country; that is, it was war. The 75,000 men he had called for were not a drop in the bucket. The country itself felt this, and all over the North there was hardly a town in which, with the news of the fall of Sumter, young and old men did not hasten to form companies to offer to the government. Meet- Armed with a Single Purpose 177 ings were called in churches, schools, and courthouses and on the village greens, and before the minister or schoolmaster or judge or politician who urged the de fense of the Union had time to finish his speech, there was a rush of men and boys to put down their names. Before many weeks went by the Washington government was swamped with the men that flowed into the new army. One of our greatest difficulties, Mr. Lincoln told Congress on July 4, 1861, when he called them to gether to report what he had done and to ask for money to carry on the war, has been to avoid receiv ing troops faster than we could take care of them. "The people will save their government," he said, "if the government itself will do its part only indif ferently well." It was not only men that were rushed to Wash ington, but it was offers of funds from States and from individuals. All the inventors of the country set themselves to work to improve weapons and boats. All the people who knew anything about military science rushed in to offer themselves as instructors. The doctors came to build up hospitals, and women came to offer themselves as nurses. In this instant answer to the guns that destroyed Sumter, the action of no one man was more hearten ing to Mr. Lincoln than that of his antagonist in his famous fight against the extension of slavery to free soil Stephen Douglas. Mr. Douglas had been de feated for the presidency when Mr. Lincoln was elected. He was a senator at that time and in a position to know better than Mr. Lincoln did just 178 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln how resolute the South was in its threat to break up the Union. This was something he would not listen to. He was afraid Mr. Lincoln would weaken not carry out his promise to hold the forts, and when finally he did and Sumter was fired on, Mr. Douglas went to him, offering him all his great in fluence to back him. He wired his decision to all his followers and at once went out to speak for the Union beginning in Illinois itself. Never had he been so eloquent not Demosthenes or Mirabeau or Patrick Henry were greater, his hearers declared. His courage and patriotism at this critical moment were remembered the longer because this was his last campaign. He died suddenly only a few weeks after the first call for troops to defend the Union. In the South the same thing was happening. Every man, woman, and child put himself and everything he had at the command of the Confederate Govern ment. There they did not call themselves rebels, of course. They were defending their country a country which they believed they had a right to form. If Mr. Lincoln believed and he seemed at first to have the idea that the North would find it easy to overthrow the South, he soon was disappointed. The great army which gathered around Washington had its first trial in July of 1861 only a few miles south of Washington, at a place called Bull Run. The battle was on a Sunday, and a good many men went in carriages or on horseback down into Vir ginia to see it. But before night they were back in hot haste the Northern army had been defeated, Armed with a Single Purpose 179 and was in retreat. It looked at first as if Washing ton itself might be captured. It was a terrible shock to the confident North, and a horrible disappointment to Mr. Lincoln. Why had it happened? That was what he set himself to decide. What was their weakness? While he was trying to find this out, a great many men were trying to make out that it was not defeat but a panic caused by teamsters and sight-seers. "I see," Mr. Lincoln said one day to one of these people, u we whipped the enemy and then ran away from him." He was not the man to conceal or explain away a reverse or to shirk his responsibility in connection with one. He knew that the Constitution made the President of the United States the commander in chief of the army and navy, and that, though he had a War Department and a Navy Department and many officers and admirals, he must bear the burden for whatever went wrong. The battle of Bull Run was his defeat. How could he prevent another? Mr. Lincoln believed that the defeat was charge able largely to green soldiers and inexperienced of ficers. He knew the battle had been fought before the army was ready because the North had been long urging, at the top of its voice, "On to Richmond." The North must learn patience. He must have a trained and disciplined army that would not be stampeded by a panic of its teamsters if Richmond was to be taken. For this he must have a com mander who knew the business of training and in whom the North would have confidence. There was one man who seemed to be fit for the place, Gen. l8o Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln George B. McClellan, who had been doing work in West Virginia of which the country thought well, and it was General McClellan that Lincoln now made commander of the Department of the Potomac with an order to prepare the army to take Richmond. The camp in which this work was to be done was on the heights across the river from Washington, and in the next month nobody had eyes for any other field. It was the army they all believed would win the war, so why trouble about the smaller armies scattered in Missouri, Kentucky, or Tennessee? No request of McClellan s was denied men and money flowed freely to him. And he did his part, rapidly turning the awkward, untrained squads into splendid, efficient companies. All through the fall of 1861 the country watched the new army drilling and maneuvering, improving its camp, building fortifications around Washing ton, and daily becoming more wonderful to look at. Thousands came to look at it, too, and conducted by members of Congress or the Cabinet, made sight seeing visits through the camp or watched the bril liant reviews. No visitor came oftener to McClellan s camp than Mr. Lincoln himself, and none gave closer at tention to every detail of camp life, spoke to more private soldiers, asked more questions of the officers. His hope, like that of the country, was in this great army which McClellan was bringing into such per fect form. But as the winter approached people became anx- Armed with a Single Purpose 181 ious. Why did not this wonderful army do some thing? Everything had been done for it ; why not on to Richmond? Mr. Lincoln, who had felt strongly that McClellan should not be asked to move until he was ready, finally began to prod him; but always the general had excuses the army lacked this or that; the enemy outnumbered him; he was not ready. He trained and trained and trained, but advance he would not. As the pressure of the government and the de mand of the country became stronger, he became apparently more obstinate in his resolve not to move until he chose, and to Mr. Lincoln he became actu ally insolent, often keeping him waiting when he came to his headquarters, as well as saying con temptuous things about him which were repeated over the country. Mr. Lincoln was very patient under all this. When one day he had been kept waiting half an hour by the general and some indig nant friend resented it, he said, "I will hold McClel lan s horse if he will give us a victory." It was not McClellan s insolence that troubled him, it was a fear that, splendid as the general might be as a maker of armies, he was not the one to use them. McClellan was troubled by what he called the "slows ;" he was not a fighter. And he must have a fighter. Was there one anywhere ? He began to study carefully day by day what the commanding officers in other fields were doing. He was like the leader of a league ball team, who must be keeping his eye on the teams of the country to see 1 82 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln what new and promising talent is developing so that he will be ready, when somebody fails him, to put his hand on material in which there is hope. Almost every day and often at night he went to the telegraph office, which was only across the street from the White House, and, sitting by the desk of the telegraph operator, looked over the big grist of telegrams which were constantly coming in, study ing each man s work. He began to send many let ters and telegrams to these officers, asking them questions, giving them advice, urging them to be more cautious here or to be more daring there. He encouraged them to action, praised them if they suc ceeded, and came quickly to their relief if they failed. Every officer in the long chain which the North was trying to stretch around the Confederacy soon began to see that the President s eye was on him. He be gan to understand, too, that he could not fool the President, that he might be a civilian but that he had a surprising sense of military affairs. This understanding on Mr. Lincoln s part was no accident. He had been working night and day to fit himself to play his part as a commander in chief by learning something of military science. He read the best books on the subject, talked them over with the educated officers of the army, and applied what he learned to his own problem. That is, he did what he had done back in 1832 when he saw a chance to earn his living by surveying instead of by the hard labor of rail-splitting and flatboat steering; when he made up his mind in 1849 to let politics alone and Armed with a Single Purpose 183 become a first class lawyer he studied night and day the science he must practice. His military problem, he saw, was to pen up the Confederates in their own States not only prevent ing them from invading the North but from trading with any part of this or any other country. You can imagine him studying out on the great map which hung in his office in the White House what must be done to shut them in. The western boundary of the Southern Confederacy was made up of Texas, Ar kansas, and Missouri; its northern boundary of Ken tucky, West Virginia, and Maryland. On the east was the Atlantic and on the south the Gulf of Mex ico. Mr. Lincoln saw that, if possible, he must drive the defenders of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi, bringing that river under Union control and giving him New Orleans and its port. He must hold his northern line and blockade the Atlantic and Gulf ports so that the Confederates could neither get in nor out. This was the general plan. The first and far and away the most important part of this plan was to take Rich mond, which had been made the capital of the enemy government when Virginia joined the Confederacy. If this plan of penning up the Confederacy, opening the Mississippi, and capturing Richmond was to be promptly carried out, Mr. Lincoln realized early in the war that it must be by outmatching the enemy in strategy. He had the greater numbers, but the ene my was quicker on his feet. "We must fail," he told one of his generals in January of 1862, while he was 1 84 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln waiting in vain for McClellan to move, "unless we find some way of making our advantage an over match for his ; this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points at the same time, so that we can safely attack one or both if he makes no change; and if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strength ened one, and seize and hold the weakened one, gain ing so much." This idea of threatening at two points so as to tempt the enemy to divide his forces, and of attack ing quickly any point known to be weakened would be good strategy in any game, you will agree. Mr. Lincoln constantly urged it on his generals. Once when Lee had stretched his line in Virginia over a long distance, he telegraphed to General Hooker, then the commander of the Army of the Potomac : "If the head of Lee s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the plank road between Fredericks- burg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him ?" But this kind of strategy, which he saw almost at the start to be essential if the Union armies were to outmatch those of the South, was the very strategy he found his generals were the slowest to under stand and adopt. It was not only military science which interested him, but everything connected with the job of war. He was especially keen on getting better rifles, and inventors found that frequently when they could get no hearing at the War Department, Mr. Lincoln would take time to test their guns himself. He had Armed with a Single Purpose 185 found a clerk in the Navy Department who was as interested as he in firearms, and whenever he got his hands on a new rifle he would ask this man to "go shooting" with him. His target was usually a sheet of white government note paper pinned to a tree. From this he would pace off eighty to one hundred feet, take a quick aim, and often put almost every bullet through the paper. He enjoyed the sport like a boy. The balloon began to be used early in the war for observation purposes, and Mr. Lincoln delighted in watching it sailing over Washington or swaying above the troops. It was he, too, who insisted that John Ericsson, the famous Swedish inventor, should have a chance to try out the plans for an armored monitor which he wanted to build. Ericsson s idea was to mount on a raft a round turret furnished with guns and to encase the whole thing in armor. Up to that time our navy was built entirely of wood, and there was doubt about whether it was possible to use armor. Mr. Lincoln s en couragement of Ericsson proved one of the most fortunate things in the early part of the war. The Confederates, ahead of the Unionists in using the idea, had already covered the "Merrimac" with plate. When she came out of the Norfolk navy yard she destroyed two big wooden Union vessels, with almost no trouble at all. They, of course, had not a shadow of a chance against her iron sides. There was terror throughout the North at this re sult. What could not the "Merrimac" do in their ports if the Confederates sent her out? No gun 1 86 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln could touch her. What would she do to Washington if she came up the Potomac? The answer came quickly. The queer ironclad thing that John Ericsson had built was already on its way south. It came in such a hurry that it was actually finished on the way. When the "Merrimac" steamed out the morning after the "Monitor" ar rived, to sink another wooden ship, she was faced by what looked like u a cheese box on a raft." John Ericsson s "Monitor" might look queer, but it didn t take her long so to batter the "Merrimac" that she was glad to retreat. This contest was the beginning of the ironclad navies of the world. People in Washington who were impatient with the President s willingness to try out new ideas were a little more respectful after this experience. The close study Mr. Lincoln was giving to mili tary matters was far from making him cocksure or domineering. His generals ought to know better than he did. He had put them there to do certain work. He must give them a chance not "meddle ;" but generals who, like McClellan, thought Mr. Lin coln s patience weakness were sure, sooner or later, to learn their mistake. His patience had a limit. As soon as he was convinced that a man was not doing what he had been given a fair chance to do, he be came every inch commander in chief. This was long happening in McClellan s case. It is probable that the general thought Mr. Lincoln would not dare to order him to move until he made the sign. He thought he was too popular with the army there was no general in all the Civil War more beloved Armed with a Single Purpose 187 by his soldiers than General McClellan too popu lar in the North. He was mistaken. In January, 1862, Mr. Lincoln asserted himself and ordered a general advance on the entire front on Washington s birthday, February 22d. The country was jubilant. The war was going on. McClellan disobeyed, making all his old excuses and his disobedience cost him dear, for it turned a great part of the public against him. They began to call him "the Virginia creeper," and even a traitor who did not mean to fight a most unjust charge. It was not until April that finally he was pried from his camp and the march on Richmond began. He moved, but not by the route which Mr. Lincoln thought the common-sense one, directly across Vir ginia to Richmond, fighting as he went. He took his army down the Potomac, landed it on the Peninsula, and from there advanced. Mr. Lincoln, of course, had the power to compel the general to follow the plan he preferred, but he argued that, even suppos ing his was the wiser way, no man does as well on a plan which he has been forced to adopt as on one he has worked out for himself. The President therefore consented to the Peninsular Campaign, making one condition, that a certain fixed number of troops should be left to protect Washington. If you will look at a map you will see why this was necessary. By taking the army down the Potomac the route from Richmond to Washington was left open. The Confederate commander in chief, Gen eral Robert E. Lee, was too able a soldier to miss such a chance that Mr, Lincoln knew. He knew,. 1 88 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln too, that General Lee had officers under him who were masters of quick dashes on weak spots that is, General Lee had none of McClellan s reluctance to taking a chance Washington must not be left ex posed. But McClellan did not leave behind the troops agreed upon, and when Mr. Lincoln found this out he ordered them back. Moreover, when ever in the four months campaign he thought the Washington garrison weak, he held back troops McClellan wanted and expected. It gave the general a grievance a reason for his failure to reach Rich mond, for, though he did advance to within a few miles of the city, did do some brilliant fighting, in July he was obliged to fall back on the James River. The real reason of his failure was probably the reason that he had tarried so long in his training camp; overcaution, exaggeration of the enemies numbers and equipment. As a fact he seems always to have had the larger force, but he had none of the dash, the mobility, the ingenuity of the Confeder ates. At the outset of the campaign, for instance, he delayed a month before Yorktown, making the most scientific and elaborate preparation to reduce it, only to find when he attacked, that the enemy had gone 1 When Mr. Lincoln saw that the campaign on which the North had rested all its hopes for so long was a failure, he was, as he said, as nearly incon solable as he could be and live. His disappointment came as the climax to a series of private as well as public troubles through all this year and a quarter of war. He was a man who could not bear to see Armed with a Single Purpose 189 stranger or friend hurt even disappointed. He had a friendly heart, which needed for its own con tent to see all the world happy. War and the cal culated killing of men was a hideous thing to him. And yet he had to be responsible for a war, and from the start that war had taken from him people that he loved dearly. One of the first of these was an Illinois boy, Elmer E. Ellsworth. Young Ellsworth had been known all over the country as the leader of the Chicago Zou aves a military organization which both by its uni form and its brilliant maneuvering had been the envy of boys and young men everywhere. Mr. Lincoln brought Ellsworth to Washington and made him a colonel in the volunteer service. In May, 1861, he was one of the officers of an expedition sent across the Potomac to drive the enemy from Arlington and Alexandria. Mr. Lincoln had been able to see from his windows in Washington a Confederate flag, fly ing from a staff in this territory; and it had been a great annoyance to him. As the Union force ap proached this flag, young Ellsworth dashed ahead and tore it from its staff, but as he did so a ball struck and killed him. His death hurt Mr. Lincoln cruelly. He immediately wrote to Colonel Ells worth s parents the first of many tender letters of consolation which he was to write before the war was over. "Washington, D. C, May 25, 1861. "To the Father and Mother of Colonel Elmer E. Ellsworth, "Mv DEAR SIR AND MADAME: In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here is scarcely less than your own. 190 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln So much of promised usefulness to one s country, and of bright hopes for one s self and friends, have never been so suddenly dashed as in his fall. In size, in years, and in youthful ap pearance a boy only, his power to command men was surpass ingly great. This power, combined with a fine intellect and indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent in that depart ment I ever knew. "And yet he was singularly modest and deferential in social intercourse. My acquaintance with him began less than two years ago; yet, through the latter half of the intervening period, it was as intense as the disparity of our ages and my engrossing engagements would permit. To me he appeared to have no indulgences or pastimes, and I never heard him utter a profane or an intemperate word. What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. The honors he labored for so laudably, and for which, in the sad end, he so gallantly gave his life, he meant for them no less than for himself. "In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this tribute to the memory of my young friend, and your brave and early fallen son. "May God give you the consolation which is beyond all earthly power. Sincerely your friend in common affliction, "A. LINCOLN." In October the President received a second blow, even heavier. This was at the battle of Ball s Bluff, where one of his dearest and oldest Illinois friends, Colonel E. D. Baker, was killed. The President was at General McClellan s headquarters when the news came in. He did not wait to hear more, but with bowed head, tears rolling down his cheeks, his face pale and wan, passed out of the building. One of the newspaper correspondents, watching him, noted that he almost fell as he stepped into the street and Armed with a Single Purpose 191 that, as he walked to the White House, both hands were pressed upon his heart. In February, sorrow came still closer to him, into his own family, when Willie Lincoln, now eleven years old, the elder of the two boys with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln in the White House, fell ill and died. He was the one of the three sons most like Mr. Lin coln himself gentle, reflective, and studious. "Just such a boy as I was at his age," Mr. Lincoln used to say as he watched Willie puzzling over his prob lems or absorbed in his reading. His father s elec tion, the trip to Washington, the coming of the war, had all been of deepest interest to Willie Lincoln. He kept a journal, a scrapbook, and many souvenirs. After the battle of Ball s Bluff, where his father s friend, Colonel Baker, was killed, he wrote some boyish verses in memory of the soldiers killed, which were published in a Washington paper. All of these interests of Willie endeared him especially to Mr. Lincoln, and his death was a blow from which it was very difficult for him to recover. It came at a moment, too February of 1862 when he was finding it hard to get his plans for prosecuting the war carried out, and when he was receiving from all sides the most bitter criticism. It seemed sometimes as if everybody in Washington and in the country felt that he knew better how to run the war than Mr. Lincoln did. Hundreds of men and women came to tell him what he ought to do, Congress badgered him from morning till night, great commissions visited him. He heard 192 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln them all. He must know what people were think ing, and perhaps there might be in the mob some body who had something of value to offer. It would not do to let a helpful idea slip for lack of a little patience. What he feared in all this tumult of com plaint and advice and angry excitement was that good men doing their best might be forced out of position, that the plans which he was working out painfully and slowly would be upset and all the little headway lost. "Gentlemen," he said one day to some particularly excited and unreasonable visitors, "suppose all the property you are worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin, to carry across the Niagara River on a rope. Would you shake the cable or keep shouting at him, Blondin, stand up a little straighter; Blondin, stoop a little more; go a little faster; lean a little more to the north; lean a little more to the south? No, you would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over. The government is carrying an enormous weight. Untold treasures are in their hands; they are doing the very best they can. Don t badger them. Keep silence, and we will get you safe across." You can imagine how the people shook the cable when they heard of McClellan s failure to take Richmond. Mr. Lincoln had not only to bear their outcries but the anger of McClellan, who took no blame for the way things had turned out. As he fell back he wired to Washington: U A few more thousand men would have changed this battle from a Armed with a Single Purpose 193 defeat to a victory. If I save this army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any person in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army." It was a cruel charge, and not a just one ; but Mr. Lincoln seems to have sensed what McClellan was suffering over the cutting to pieces of his splendid troops, and his replies to the cries of pain and anger that came from the general were kind if firm. "I give you all I can and act on the presumption that you will do the best you can with what you have, while you continue ungenerously, I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would. I feel any misfortune to you and your army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself. If you have had a drawn battle, or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in Washington. We protected Washington and the enemy concentrated on you. Had we stripped Washington he would have been upon us before the troops could have gotten to you." Nor did he fail, stricken as he was by the falling back of the army, to thank McClellan for the "hero ism and skill" which he showed in this withdrawal. It would be "forever appreciated," he told him, and he added, "If you can hold your present position we shall hive the enemy yet." Mr. Lincoln went down to camp to look things over. He was inclined to let McClellan try again, but the country and his advisers would have none of it. They were done with McClellan. Mr. Lincoln himself could not save him, and in August he called him back from the Peninsula to his old position 194 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln across the Potomac from Washington. McClellan was heartbroken over the order; but, as it turned out, it gave him another great chance. While he had been gone, Mr. Lincoln, in order to be sure that there were sufficient forces between Washington and Richmond, had formed the Army of Virginia and called from the West General John Pope to command it. When McClellan left the James, Lee saw his chance and hurried north to at tack Pope. In the second battle of Bull Run at the end of August, Lee thrashed Pope soundly and broke his army to bits. This done, he raced for Maryland. In the panic that seized Washington, Mr. Lincoln kept his head. Pope had failed. McClellan was on the ground. He knew he understood "licking an army into shape" and so, in spite of what anybody might or did say, he ordered him to take full charge, to rally the distracted troops, overtake Lee, defeat him, and destroy his army. For once McClellan acted with promptness. He whipped the army into shape, raced after Lee, over took him at Antietam in Maryland, and defeated him. But he did not pursue him. Though Lee s army was hardly half his in size and far from its base, McClellan let him get away while he stopped to rest. For six weeks he lay there "resting" with Lee scarcely fifty miles away! Mr. Lincoln stood it as long as he could and then put bluntly to McClellan facts about his generalship which were as true in the winter of 1861 and 1862 as true in the Peninsula campaign as they were now. He was "overcautious" overcautious when he Armed with a Single Purpose 195 should be bold. He was assuming that he could not do what Lee was constantly doing; that he could not feed an army where Lee and his generals were feed ing one ; could not move by wagon though Lee was doing it over twice the distance with half the wagons. "One of the standard maxims of war is to operate upon the enemy s communications as much as pos sible," he told McClellan, "without exposing your own. You seem to act as if this applies against you but cannot apply in your favor." Did McClellan admit that Lee was more than his equal on a march? Were not the roads as good for him as for Lee? Was it not unmanly to say that our troops could not march as well as Lee s? Pursue him fight him. "If we cannot beat him where he is now, we never can he again being within the entrenchments of Rich mond." If anything could stiffen a man s pride, shame him to bestir himself, it would seem that such a let ter would; but McClellan did not budge. His horses had sore tongues, were fatigued, he wired. And Mr. Lincoln, breaking out into that sarcasm of which he was a master but which he so controlled, wired McClellan, "Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since An- tietam that fatigues anything?" His patience was reaching the breaking point again. He must have a general who would move as well as train, pursue as well as fight, and on No vember 7th, nearly two months after the battle of Antietam, he removed the general. McClellan had had his last chance in the army, and lost. But as 196 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln we are to see later, he was not through with Mr. Lincoln. The time was to come, when he was to cross swords on another field that of politics. If the general had been overcautious, as Mr. Lin coln charged, surely he had himself been overpatient; but we would not be able to say this of him if he had felt sure at any time for many months that he had in all his armies a better man than McClellan. He was by no means sure that General Ambrose Burnside, whom he now appointed to command the Army of the Potomac, would do better. But he was the best material he saw. It was an unhappy choice. Burnside failed him, failed him in December at the battle of Fredericks- burg, where 10,000 dead and wounded Union sol diers were left on the field and 2,000 were missing. After his defeat Burnside showed no ability to pull his troops together and put new heart into them. He must have another general. There was another man, like Burnside a corps commander under Mc Clellan, "Fightin* Joe" Hooker, whom he had been watching. He had faults which Mr. Lincoln feared, but he had qualities, too. He decided to try him, but in appointing him he bravely laid all his doubts before the general. Read the letter and see how "square" and kind it is. No wonder that Hooker said, "It is just such a letter as a father might write to his son." "GENERAL: I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of course I have done this upon what appears to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which I am not Armed with a Single Purpose 197 quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skillful soldier, which of course I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside s command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The gov ernment will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticizing their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it; and now beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories. "Yours very truly, "A. LINCOLN." What a pity that Hooker no more than Burn- side was the man; for he, like Burnside, gave the overburdened President not only another defeat that of Chancellorsville in May not only a defeat, but he let Lee slip by him, cross the Potomac, and make for Pennsylvania. Hooker took after him in hot haste, but resigned on the way; and into his place went a third corps commander from the Army of the Potomac, General George Meade. 198 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln Now the question was: What could Meade do? Could he overtake Lee and defeat him as McClel- lan had done at Antietam? And if so, what would he then do? Pursue him or let him go? We have learned enough of Mr. Lincoln s determination to find a fighting, pursuing leader, to be sure that un less Meade did both he, too, would be replaced. CHAPTER IX STEADY IN STORMS Beautiful he was with that which none may scorn With love of God and man and things forlorn, And freedom mighty as the soul in him. Large at the helm of state he leans and looms With the grave, kindly look of those who die Doing their duty. MADISON CAWEIN. MR. LINCOLN S anxiety was acute over what General Meade would do, now that he had taken charge of the Army of the Potomac, in the very middle of its chase into Penn sylvania after Lee. When Meade did overtake Lee at Gettysburg and the battle, which was to last three days, began on the morning of July i, 1863, the President sat hour after hour beside the telegraph instrument, or, in his eagerness, rose and leaned over the cipherer as he translated the dispatch. By the end of the third day he was utterly worn out, and the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton, persuaded him to go home to get a little rest, promising that, if any definite news came in the night, to let him know. It was close to midnight when the telegram finally came in, announcing the great victory. Mr. Stan- ton seized the dispatch and ran at the top of his 199 2OO Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln speed to the White House and up the stairs to Mr. Lincoln s sleeping room. "Who s there?" called the President. When he heard the word "Stanton" he did not wait for dressing gown or trousers, but pulled open the door, u in the shortest nightshirt and longest legs," Mr. Stanton used to say in telling the story, "I ever saw on a human being." Stanton was out of breath, but Lincoln read the news in his face, and, seizing him by the shoulders, danced him round and round the room until both of them were ex hausted. They then sat down on a trunk, and the President, still in his nightshirt, read over and over again the telegram which had brought him unspeak able relief and joy. When General Lee retreated from Gettysburg, it was toward the Potomac. A heavy rain fell as he went, making the river almost impassable. It gave Meade a wonderful chance, for, hurt and exhausted as his army was, it was still much larger than Lee s no more exhausted, and behind it was a friendly country. Lee, no doubt, expected an attack on the north side of the Potomac, but it did not come. Even when his army was divided in the crossing, Meade did nothing. Mr. Lincoln s despair over tnis inaction was al most unbearable. Once over the river, the Union forces, he said bitterly, would be quite as likely to capture the man in the moon as any part of Lee s army. His disappointment was embittered by some thing very hard for a man of his frank and open na ture to bear, and that was suspicion of General Meade s sympathy with his policies. It seemed to Steady in Storms 201 him as if Meade and his generals wanted Lee to cross the river, wanted him to get away. He was within Meade s easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would have ended the war. The opportunity was gone. Could it be that Meade was tainted with that sympathy for secession that had crept all through the North, until it was so strong that in recent months it had come boldly into the open and fearlessly raised its ugly head. Mr. Lincoln knew well enough that the growth of this sympathy "copperheadism," as its worst form was called came largely from dislike by many peo ple both in and out of his own party for what he had been doing about slavery. He had made it quite clear at the beginning of the war, you remember, that he thought he had no right to touch slavery in the States where the Con stitution had left it. He fought to save the Union. But the war was only a few months old when he realized he must do something. The anti-slavery people wanted him to set the slaves free. They seemed to think that if he would he could abolish slavery by his simple word. It would be like the Pope s bull against the comet, he told them. The South could laugh at such an order as long as they were victorious; tell him to come and take the slaves, He couldn t do that; but there was one thing that he was willing to do and that was to ask Congress to buy the slaves of any State that would emanci pate them buy them and colonize them in some unsettled part of the country where they could be- 202 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln come self-supporting and self-directing. Through all the months he was occupied with building up an army and trying to get it to do something, he was working on this scheme of buying and freeing, which he called "compensated emancipation." He wanted the Border States those States which lay midway between North and South and which both sides were trying to win over to accept this offer. They were losing their slaves by the hundreds. If they would free them, the United States would pay for them. If they did not do it, they would lose them all sooner or later, anyway, through the wear and tear of war. But, though Mr. Lincoln begged and argued with the Border States to accept his plan, they would not touch it. Nor did the North have any enthusiasm about it. It wanted him either to let the negroes entirely alone or else free them all by a proclama tion the kind of proclamation which would have done no good because it could not have been en forced. He went very slowly in the matter, determined to do nothing that the Constitution, which was the book of rules he was following, did not allow. He knew it allowed him to do anything with property which was necessary to save the Union from being de stroyed. Slaves were property. Anything he did with them to save the Union was constitutional. But even supposing he could and did free all or certain slaves, how was that going to help him save the Union? There were certain things that he would win at once; he would stop the back fire the Aboli tionists had kindled and were feeding and that Steady in Storms 203 would help. He would take laborers from the fields and workshops of the South and would gain sol diers (he meant to arm the negro) for the armies of the North and laborers for her workshops and that would help. He would probably prevent England and trance from recognizing the Confederacy. England and France did not understand or sympathize with Mr. Lincoln s feeling about the Union. They could not see why the South did not have a right to set up for herself if she wanted to ; but Mr. Lincoln knew that if they saw that the success of the North meant the destruction of slavery they would probably refuse to recognize the Confederacy and that would help. But if he might gain, he also stood to lose. If he put out the back fire of the Abolitionist, he might kindle that of the Copperhead. What use would he have for negro soldiers and negro laborers if by the making of them he lost white soldiers and white la borers? What would he gain by silencing England and France if in so doing he turned the Border States against him? In the summer of 1862, when things were going from bad to worse in the army, he made up his mind that he must try new tactics or he would lose the war and that the strongest new weapon, although a dangerous one, would be some form of emancipa tion so he set to work. He was getting ready, but he would not be hurried. Men who knew that Mr. Lincoln hated slavery as few men ever had, who remembered how he had fought against its extension, wondered. Why did 2O4 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln he hesitate? "A man watches his pear tree day after day," he told one of them, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap." When Horace Greeley, the powerful editor of the New York Tribune, tried to drive him by prayers and abuse, he silenced him by a letter which is a model for those of us who really want people to un derstand what we intend to do and why we intend to do it : "As to the policy I seem to be pursuing, as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. "I would save the Union. "I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. "The sooner the national authority can be restored, the nearer the Union will be the Union as it was. "If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. "What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. "I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. Steady in Storms 205 "I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views." It would seem as if nobody could have had any doubts about his intentions after that. It was in September of 1862 that the time finally came when he believed that what he had been get ting ready to do about slavery would help the Union. He had been waiting for a victory, he said, fearing that if he issued the proclamation he had prepared while the armies were retreating it would seem like a last shriek. But he had promised God that if He would give him a victory, he would issue it. The victory came at Antietam, as you know. The night before that battle, Mr. Lincoln had that same dream that he had had before the fall of Fort Sumter. He was on a singular and indescribable vessel, sailing toward a dark and indefinite shore. But this time, when he reached the shore, there was light, not darkness, as after Sumter, for McClellan had driven Lee back. Mr. Lincoln kept his word to his Maker. The proclamation he sent out said that on the first day of January, 1863, all the slaves in States in rebellion should be "then, thenceforward and for ever free." It also said that the United States would "recognize and maintain" this freedom. Of course this did not destroy slavery it simply prom ised to free certain slaves in case the rebellion went on, and it also gave the States in rebellion the chance to save their slaves if they would lay down their arms, 206 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln When the first day of January came, Mr. Lincoln signed the proclamation. The writing is slightly tremulous "Not because of any uncertainty on my part," Mr. Lincoln told some who noticed it, "but because I signed just after three hours handshaking at the New Year s reception." He was sure he had done right. He was sure he had the right to do what he had done, but he knew he was in for a stormy time, that if he had spiked some guns by his proclamation he had brought other guns into action. He looked them all smil ingly in the muzzle, and sized up the situation one day to his Cabinet: "We are like a lot of whalers who have been long on the chase. We have at last got the harpoon in the monster and we must now look out how we steer him or, with one flap of his tail, he will send us all into eternity." It certainly seemed at times as if they might as well give up trying to steer the monster, so terribly did he plunge and leap. The most serious thing was that thousands of people in the North declared that Mr. Lincoln had changed the purpose of the war: he had made it one to abolish slavery. That is, they refused to accept Mr. Lincoln s idea that what he did about slavery was in order to save the Union. The result of the Emancipation Proclamation which hurt and alarmed Mr. Lincoln most was that it turned multitudes of the common soldiers in the army against him. They had not gone into the army to free slaves, they said, and so in droves they ran away. Steady in Storms 207 It hurt him because he loved them felt that he understood them and that they somehow had sensed this love and understanding. Washington lay so close to the big Eastern armies that streams of sol diers were constantly pouring south through the town. As they loitered about sight-seeing or pleas ure-seeking in their hours off they often ran across the President whose habit of early rising, of going out himself for his newspapers, of unexpectedly turning up at the Capitol, the arsenal, or on the street gave them a chance to speak to him often to ask a favor. They found it simple to see him at the White House, too. If the orderlies stopped them with the word that the President was "busy," "not receiv ing," "with the Cabinet," they had a powerful friend in Tad Lincoln. Tad had a great love for all sol diers and a great contempt for orders and rules. If he was within hearing the chances are that he would seize the disappointed soldier by the hand and pushing aside guards drag him straight to his father with a demand that his story be heard. The frequent visits Mr. Lincoln made to the camps endeared him to the men. They were at once at home with him as he walked about, chaffing them over their tent housekeeping even now and then swapping stories with them or measuring with the unusually tall ones. He seemed much more one of them than their officers. One thing that delighted them and of which they often talked was his horse manship. At the first grand review of McClelland army there had been among the officers a good deal 208 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln of contemptuous fun over the idea of the President s riding beside General McClellan, who was known for his splendid horsemanship, and who they sus pected to be not unwilling to "show off" at the ex pense of the President. A man who saw the review and knew how the officers were talking, says that when the day came a spirited black horse was se lected for the President to ride. Mr. Lincoln calmly walked up to the animal, and the instant he seized the bridle to mount it was evident to horse men that he "knew his business." He had the ani mal in hand at once. No sooner was he in the sad dle than his mount began to prance and whirl, but the President sat as unconcerned as if he and the horse were one. The test of endurance soon came. McClellan, with his magnificent staff, approached the President, who joined them and they dashed to a distant part of the field. The artillery began to thunder, the drums beat, and the bands struck up "Hail to the Chief." While the troops cheered, Mr. Lincoln lifted his tall hat from his head and, holding the bridle rein in one hand, dashed calmly and easily down the long line. He could ride, and the soldiers were proud of him. It was in the hospitals in and around Washington that they learned to know him best. The city was so close to the Virginia battlefields that all through the war it was the headquarters of the wounded. After the battles they were brought back by thou sands and laid in long rows on the wharves and sta tions along the Potomac until the ambulances could carry them to the hospitals. They came in such Steady in Storms 209 numbers after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, and later after Grant s battles in the Wilderness, that public buildings and private houses were used. In the summer Mr. Lincoln lived at the Soldiers Home at the head of 7th Street, and all along his way, as he went back and forth to the White House, he passed between barracks and tents filled with the wounded. With the soldiers in these hospitals, as well as those scattered about the town, he quickly established friendly relations. He knew many of the patients by name and when they were hopelessly wounded would send them flowers and special mes sages. It was the youth of them that wrung his heart. He loved boys. You have seen how, in those days back in Springfield, on the circuit, while he was car rying on his great fight against Douglas, he always had a word for any boy that crossed his path. When he began to see the army he was gathering, it was the youth of it that amazed him, as indeed it must amaze all who see armies in the making. He knew that hundreds of these soldiers were lads un der eighteen who had boldly lied, and frequently had their lies ignored, in order to try out the great adventure; and he realized, particularly after Bull Run, how unfitted these half-grown lads were to stand for long the intolerable hardships of war, to rally quickly from wounds and exposure. No day in all the war was harder for him than that day after the defeat at Bull Run, when, through a dripping rain, men and boys trailed across the Long Bridge over the Potomac in disorderedi 2io Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln ashamed, horrified squads. Their faces were coated with the red dust of Maryland, and the smoke and dirt of powder. Their clothes were thick with mud. Starved for food and drink, they took from the hands of the pitying, weeping Unionist women of Washington the bread and coffee which they of fered them from the doors of their houses or from the rough counters set up along the street. And, fed, they dropped into doorways, into open spaces, anywhere there was a vacant spot, and slept and slept boys of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. No trial, among all the many that overwhelmed Mr. Lincoln during the war, quite equaled that of allowing a soldier to be shot. It was the one thing about which he was ever heard to say, "I can t bear it." When the news of terrible defeats, like those of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville came, he might walk the floor and groan, and groan. Men saw his eyes sink deeper and deeper, his color change to a gray like that of death, his shoulders become more and more bent; but never did he say, "I can t bear it." It was only on Friday, toward the sunset hour, that he would walk the floor of the White House, saying, "They are shooting a boy out at such a place to-day. I can t bear it! I can t bear it!" Mr. Lincoln would never allow the death sen tence to be carried out if he could find a shadow of excuse to forbid it. The Secretary of War and many of the generals in the army constantly bom barded him with indignant protests against his clem ency; but if he had found a reason that satisfied him, Steady in Storms 21 1 or even half satisfied him, they could not shake his determination. Fathers and mothers and friends would come to beg him to save a boy. Driven night and day as he was by the demands made upon him, he would personally examine the papers, go himself to the telegraph office, stand over the instru ment until the order had been sent to delay the sen tence, not rest until he had an answer back that the telegram had been received and the order would be carried out. A boy might have run away out of sheer fright. Mr. Lincoln had a drawer full of what he called "leg cases," and he would say some times in explanation of his sympathy for them that if God had given a man a pair of cowardly legs what could you expect but that he would run away ! One of the pardons of sentenced soldiers which touched the country most deeply and which has gone into the wonderful drama of John Drinkwater, "Abraham Lincoln," was of a soldier that had slept on his post. After marching all day he had taken a sick comrade s place for guard duty. It was too much. He had fallen asleep, been discovered, and sentenced. Mr. Lincoln visited the army soon after this and, asking if there were any sentences, was told, yes, there was a boy to be shot on such a day. The President went to see him, talked with him, asked him to tell him about it. He could not help it, the condemned lad said, he was too tired, he didn t know he could be too tired to keep awake. There was no doubting the truth of his explana tion, and the President, putting his arm about him, said, "My boy, you are not going to be shot. I am 212 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln going to send you back to the regiment. But how are you going to pay my bill?" Dazed by the great news, he could scarcely think. He had a little money his parents would mortgage the farm perhaps some of his friends would help they might give five or six hundred dollars. "It is not money I want," Mr. Lincoln told him. "My bill is a very large one, and there is nobody in the world but you can pay it. If you will prom ise from now on to shirk no duty so that when you come to die you can say, I have kept my promise/ then your debt will be paid." The boy gave his word. A few months later he was shot in battle and while dying asked that a mes sage be carried to the President. "Tell him," he said, "that I have tried to be a good soldier and that I died thinking of his kind face." You can understand, then, how bitter it was for Mr. Lincoln to know that the common soldiers whom he so loved were deserting because of the Eman cipation Proclamation, and that they would be shot if caught; but he had no bitterness against them. It was against those back home whom he believed to be influencing them that his anger was directed. "Must I shoot a simple-minded boy who deserts," he said, "while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induced him to desert? I think that to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal a great mercy." If the escape of Lee after Gettysburg and the re volt at home and in the army were giving Mr. Lin coln anxiety and suffering, he had at last a victory Steady in Storms 213 in the West which took much of the sting from his troubles a great, unqualified military success, a suc cess not tainted like Antietam and Gettysburg had been by a failure to seize the advantage gained, but a success followed up. He believed, too, he had at last the thing he had sought from the start, a man that would fight fight as General Lee had been fighting General Ulysses S. Grant, who, on July 4, 1863, had been able to telegraph him that Vicks- burg, the key to the Mississippi, which he had been besieging for many weeks, had fallen, its defenders had marched out, the Union flag was flying; at last the "Father of Waters went unvexed to the sea." The fall of Vicksburg, coming as it did on the very day of the battle of Gettysburg and before it was known that so much of the fruits of Gettysburg was to be lost, put heart into the North. It helped, too, to put an end to talk on the other side of the Atlantic of recognizing the Confederacy talk which per sisted after the Emancipation Proclamation be cause, as the friends of the Confederacy there said, the North never could be victorious. But, above all, it gave Mr. Lincoln the man he sought to save the Union. Grant was a West Pointer. Nobody knew much of him when the war broke out in spite of his hav ing won a captaincy in the Mexican War, for seven years before the fall of Sumter he had left the army and gone into business. The first shot in 1861 brought him quickly back. He took the appoint ment given him without haggling or complaining. He did the thing they asked of him and so well that 214 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln before the end of 1861 he was in command of a big military division, that including the southern part of Illinois and the western part of Kentucky. It was in clearing the Confederates out of this terri tory that in February, 1862, he attacked Fort Don- elson on the Cumberland River and sent a famous message to the commander : "No terms other than unconditional and immediate surrender can be ac cepted." "Unconditional Surrender" (U. S.) Grant now became his name, and major general of volunteers his rank. Mr. Lincoln, watching his work in dispatches and on maps, noted that it was steady, patient, untiring, and when in the summer of 1862, after McClellan s failure to reach Rich mond, he felt the need of a fresh military mind to help him in Washington and decided to call General Halleck, Grant s commander in chief, East, it was Grant that he put at the head of the army in west Tennessee. There was much opposition to Grant s promotion from men within and without the army. They came to Mr. Lincoln with old slanders. Mr. Lincoln had one answer, "I cannot spare this man. He fights." Grant finally, in the spring of 1863, came in his fighting to the siege of Vicksburg. He made some moves that Mr. Lincoln thought unwise, but he kept his hands off. And now this man that fought had given him what was so far in the war the success of successes. After his victory Grant did not wait an hour to follow up his advantage. He pursued, cleaning up as he went, and was ready at the right moment to help in the next great Western military Steady in Storms 215 movement opening eastern Tennessee. There were many loyal people in eastern Tennessee and they had suffered much through the war. Mr. Lin coln had set his heart on relieving them, but his armies there had never succeeded, and largely for the reason McClellan did not succeed : the generals had the "slows." Things were in a very bad way by September of this year, 1863, the Union armies being shut up in Chattanooga and unable even to get proper food. Mr. Lincoln promptly turned the problem of relieving them over to Grant, who lost no time either in getting in food or in bringing up troops. In November his armies attacked the Con federates entrenched on the heights around the town and drove them from their vantage points. Nothing now was too much to do for this general who, while his enemies abused him, plotting his ruin, kept silent and fought. Congress revived for him an old military grade that had lapsed, that of lieutenant general, a rank that had never been given to any one except George Washington; and in March, 1864, Lieutenant General Grant was put in command of all the armies of the United States. Only two large Confederate forces now remained in the field, that which under Grant s generalship had been driven from around Chattanooga but which still threatened the Union forces in that part of the country and General Lee s army which General Meade had been watching but never injuring in all the months since Gettysburg. Grant s job was to see that these two forces were beaten and scattered. The first he turned over to General W. T. Sherman, 2i6 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln who had been under him through all his hardest cam paigns, and the second he took hold of himself. What a relief to Mr. Lincoln, after this long three years hunt for a general, to turn over the com- mandership to a man who always attended strictly to his business of fighting, never mixing politics with it, who attacked whenever he could get the chance, who used the forces he had, whose one idea was Mr. Lincoln s idea to put down the rebellion. Mr. Lincoln put it up to Grant to end the war. He did not ask his plans didn t want to know them ; he told the general, "You are vigilant and self-re liant. I am pleased with this and wish not to ob trude any constraints or restraints upon you. If there is anything that is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now, with a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you." The relief came none too soon, for he had another task on hand and that was fighting the tremendous civilian army that had arisen in the North to prevent his reelection. It was an army made up not only of Democrats who hated him because he was not of their party; of Copperheads who wanted to see the South succeed; of Abolitionists who held him re sponsible for not destroying slavery at once, root and branch, though there was no human, not to say legal, way of doing that; of pacifists who so hated the horrors of war that they were willing to sacrifice the Union and the chance of giving freedom to hun dreds of thousands of human beings but of thou sands of his own party men who thought he should have issued the Emancipation Proclamation earlier Steady in Storms 217 and men who thought he should not have issued it at all; men who believed in the Emancipation Proc lamation but would not consent to an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery forever from the Union; men who thought he should have dis missed General McClellan earlier or not at all; who didn t like this or that member of the Cabinet. Every move he had made or refused to make had turned somebody against him, and these people were now as determined to defeat him for a second term as the Democrats and secessionists themselves. All through the winter and spring of 1864 they looked for somebody that they could put in his place. Mr. Lincoln was exasperatingly indifferent to their efforts. He showed no spite or ill feeling. If the. people wanted somebody else it was their right to have him. He had no business to interfere. But the people did not want somebody else that was clear. General Fremont was a candidate, and it was said that "thousands" would flock to nomi nate him four hundred came. Mr. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, was a candidate, but his own State of Ohio asked for Mr. Lincoln. When the convention met in June the politicians all agreed the people would not take anybody in his place. Mr. Lincoln was no doubt right about the popu lar demand for him: "They probably knew it was never wise to swap horses in crossing a stream and had concluded that he was not so poor a horse but that they might make a botch of it if they tried to swap." But no horse ever had more difficulty in fording 218 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln a stream to keep his feet and the track than Mr. Lincoln now had. Everybody that had opposed him combined to fret, nag, and bewilder him. They came at him from all sides, trying to break his will and confuse his judgment. They did not by any means agree as to what should be done, but they did agree to oppose whatever Mr. Lincoln did. The severest test of a man s courage and fidelity to purpose comes when not only his enemies but his friends turn on him. If he sticks then to the thing he has undertaken, he is a man. Mr. Lincoln did stick. He handled the different forces that threat ened or hectored him bravely, sensibly, and for the most part good-naturedly. It was only now and then that he burst out in contempt or indignation at some particularly outrageous performance which he thought was hurting the cause. There was the draft. Grant needed men many of them. He believed that a great, fresh outpour ing of troops might quickly end the war. Friend and foe warned Mr. Lincoln that he could never be elected if he made another draft. "But what good is it to me to be elected if I have no country? We need the men to save the country/ and he asked for 500,000. Then there were the peace-at-any-price people. They accused him of so hating the South that he was willing to bleed the North to crush her, yet no man in the North was more just and tolerant to the South than he and no man suffered more over the loss and suffering of war. The war had been undertaken Steady in Storms 219 to save something more precious than life and it would continue until that end was secure. Even so powerful an editor as Horace Greeley joined this faction that accused Mr. Lincoln of not doing his part to end the suffering. There were agents from Jefferson Davis now in Canada, Greeley claimed, prepared to make peace and Mr. Lincoln was so obstinate and bloodthirsty he would not send any one to treat with them. Mr. Lincoln finally turned the tables neatly on his critic. He sent him as an agent to see the gentlemen, telling him that any proposition they had which recognized the Union and abolished slavery would be considered, but as Mr. Lincoln believed, they had neither powers nor proposition; they were mischief-makers. But when Mr. Greeley failed "to crack the nut," found Mr. Lincoln was right and he wrong, it only added an other grievance against the President ! There were the selfish those who in these dread ful times thought only of advancement, office, claims, favors. His patience was often badly strained by their insistence. "Go away, my man. Go away," he said one day to a soldier who wanted him to interfere. "I might as well try to bail out the Potomac with a teaspoon as to attend to all the details of the army." To another man who was pestering him to give personal attention to some small claim, he told a story of a steamboat captain he had known on an Illinois river. This captain always took the wheel when the steamer reached the rapids. One day 22O Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln when the boat was plunging and wallowing and it was taking all his skill to keep her in the narrow channel, a boy pulled his coat-tails. "Say, Mister Captain/ he said, "I wish you would stop your boat a minute, I ve lost my apple overboard !" He was the captain of a ship tossed and beaten by winds and waves and hundreds of passengers were calling to him to stop while they picked up their lost apples I These selfish and inconsiderate people were but a small annoyance beside those who, agreeing with him that the Union should be saved, disagreed so violently with him about the way he took to save it that they were almost willing to let it be destroyed rather than let him succeed in his plans. There had come to be by this time several differ ent classes of Unionists. Mr. Lincoln once made a table of them. There were the people who were for the Union: With, but not without, slavery. Without, but not with, slavery. With or without, but preferred it with. With or without, but preferred it without. There was a second division of those who believed in Union without slavery who wanted : 1, Gradual but not immediate emancipation. 2, Immediate but not gradual emancipation. Those in the above group who leaned to slavery were more bitter than ever just now because they saw that by saving the Union in Mr. Lincoln s way they were going to get finally something much more sweeping than the Emancipation Proclamation Steady in Storms 221 and that was an amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery for good and all in the United States. That was in the platform on which Mr. Lincoln was running. You should read this plank carefully in order to understand how much more his election now would mean to human freedom than it would* have meant if he had been satisfied to stop with the Emancipation Proclamation. "Resolved, That as slavery was the cause, and now con stitutes the strength, of this rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and the national safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the republic; and that while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamation by which the government, in its own defense, has aimed a death blow at this gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to the Constitution, to be made by the people in conformity with its provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits of the juris diction of the United States. These divisions among the Republican Unionists, with the suspicion and hate and crime they caused, gave great joy naturally to the Democrats who had nominated General McClellan. He was a good Union man and believed in carrying on the war, but as he was opposed to Mr. Lincoln everybody else opposed flocked about him, among them the peace people. Much to his disgust, even the secessionists claimed him as their friend and exhorted their ar mies to win a victory in order to help his election. By August there seemed little chance of Mr. Lin coln winning. His best and most hopeful friends 222 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln assured him it was impossible. He thought so him self. Now, Mr. Lincoln wanted to be reflected. He wanted to finish the job, he said. As he saw it, the only way that the Union could be saved now was his way. If the people did not take him they would get a divided country one-half of it built on slav ery. "Very well," he said grimly, one day when an alarmed supporter was telling him how black the outlook was, "very well. It s the people s business, the election is in their hands. If they turn their backs to the fire and get scorched in the rear, they ll find they have got to sit on the blister." But whatever happened, he did not propose to turn his back to the fire. You have seen that often in Mr. Lincoln s effort to put down the rebellion he was saved from disaster in the very nick of time at Antietam, at Gettysburg, at Chattanooga. Now at the moment when he was admitting probable defeat, a victory came to aid him a brilliant and important one. When General Grant took charge of all the Union armies he had put General Sherman at the head of the Western forces. His task was to drive out the Confederates still massed south and east of Chat tanooga. Sherman had pushed the enemy with tre mendous energy, beating him at every point until at the moment when Northern discouragement was at its height, he wired Mr. Lincoln: "Atlanta is ours and fairly won." Sherman s message was like a summer thunder shower, clearing the air of suffocation and leaving brisk breezes and fresh life behind. And with it Steady in Storms 223 went other victories of vast importance : one was the capture of the last port through which the Confed erates were able to trade, that of Mobile Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. Through it they had been sending out cotton, receiving back food and arms. Now came news from Admiral Farragut that this last big leak was stopped. And then came swiftly a series of battles fought by General Phil Sheridan which closed the Shenandoah Valley, through which, from the beginning of the war, General Lee had been able to send his daring forces on raids threatening Washington and Pennsylvania. Nothing in all the war had worried Mr. Lincoln more than these dashes at Washington. He could not endure the idea of its capture and any danger of it and there had been danger more than once threw him, cool-headed as he was, almost into panic. In this very summer, when things were so dark and everybody turning against him, one of these raids had taken place, the Confederates coming so near to the town that his summer home was con sidered unsafe. Grant had at once put General Sheridan on the job of clearing out the valley and now it was done done with a fire and dash that recalled "Stone wall Jackson," the famous Confederate general killed at Chancellorsville who, in the early days of the war, had so tormented the Union Army from this very valley which Sheridan now made safe. These victories piling up took many arguments from the mouths of Mr. Lincoln s enemies. He was finishing the war. It might take time more hard 224 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln fighting, more suffering; but victory now seemed sure, victory with the Union, a Union from which human slavery, which had so nearly wrecked it, would be forever wiped. People believed it, and a little later when the elec tion came they proved their faith, for it was Abra ham Lincoln, not General McClellan, to whom the majority gave their votes. CHAPTER X VICTORY 1 He held his place Held the long purpose like a growing tree Held on through blame and faltered not at praise, And when he fell, in whirlwind, he went down As when a kingly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. EDWIN MARKHAM. IF you will turn back to those days in 1861 when Mr. Lincoln made his call for men to put down the rebellion, you will find him saying that the question to be settled by the war was whether or no a government by the people could be broken apart by a group of these same people when they were dissatisfied with the results of an election. If that could happen, then no free government could long endure on the earth. It was not only the fate of the United States but of men everywhere that was at stake. As the war went on he kept this question con stantly in the people s mind. Can you guard this Union you have made? Can you save it from this attack from the inside? Do you care enough for it to hold out whatever it may cost you? He would not let them forget what they were fighting for. He 225 226 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln continually thrust forward the idea in what he wrote or said. It is the theme of one of the greatest of his speeches, made in November of 1863, when the Gettysburg battlefield was dedicated as a national cemetery. Every Scout should know this Gettys burg speech by heart. "Fourscore 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 battlefield 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 thus far 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, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Mr. Lincoln did more than to talk and fight for unionism. He did his best to live it; that is, he did his best to work with all men who wanted to save the Union, however much they differed from him in MR. LINCOLN AND His SON THOMAS, FAMILIARLY KNOWN AS TAD, ABOUT 1864 Photograph by Brady. Victory! 227 their views of how it was to be done, however hard they might be to work with, however unjust, re vengeful, or insolent they might be to him per sonally. No man ever treated another with more contempt than Mr. Stanton had at one time treated Mr. Lin coln. But Lincoln knew that Stanton was able, that he had a passion for the Union that was like his own ; and that the Union might have his services, he made him Secretary of War. Horace Greeley at one time wilfully misrepre sented the President in the Tribune. He had let ters from Greeley in his possession which would have disposed thoroughly of the harmful accusations, but to publish them would have discredited Greeley; and the Union needed the support of the Tribune. Rather than weaken that support he himself suf fered a serious personal wrong. Mr. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, intrigued under his very eyes to prevent his renomination in 1864; but Mr. Lincoln ignored the treachery. He knew that Chase was of great value to the cause, that his one weakness was an uncontrolled desire to be President of the United States. "He would be a good President," was all that Mr. Lincoln would say when his friends pointed out Chase s ac tivities. He would have nothing to do with any contest that would in any way divide those who were supporting the Union. This will to unite with others for a main pur pose, cost what it might to his own pride, reputa tion, ambition, became more and more a part of 228 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln him. That great American poet, Walt Whitman, was much in Washington during the war and saw Mr. Lincoln so often, as he went to and fro about his business, that they fell to nodding and smiling at each other, though, so far as Whitman tells us, they never spoke. The poet had a great under standing of men, and he came to feel finally, as he says, that the hardpan of Mr. Lincoln s character was unionism, that it had become in him a u new virtue" something to be added to the other vir tues that he found in his character, such as "hon esty, goodness, shrewdness, conscience." Whitman was right. Unionism was not only the great passion of his heart, the backbone of all his hopes and dreams for this land and all lands; but it was a part of his character. This being true, you can understand how much his reelection in 1864 meant to him. It answered the great question that had been following him all through the war. It showed, as he said, that he, who was most devoted to the Union and most opposed to treason, would receive most of the people s votes. That is, that when the people had made a government through which they believed they could secure liberty and equal opportunity, they would not allow it to be broken up by attacks from within any more than by attacks from without. The election meant the end of the war. It was an order from the people to go ahead on the lines that Grant had laid down. It would take a miracle now to save the Confederacy. Lee s army in Rich mond and Petersburg was besieged by Grant and Victory! 229 daily growing weaker, while Grant was daily grow ing stronger. Johnston, with the only other large Confederate body, was being driven northward by Sherman, who, after the fall of Atlanta, leaving forces behind to take care of the enemy still remain ing in Tennessee, had started on a march through Georgia. He had captured Savannah and Charles ton, and then, turning northward, had swept the Confederate forces ahead of him. That is, Lee and Johnston with their armies were being gradu ally pressed together by the forces south as well as north of them. This meant that in not many weeks the military end must come. But Mr. Lincoln was leaving all this to Grant. He had other things to do. The first of these was to make sure that the cause of all this trouble slavery, was forever ended in the United States. As we have seen, the Emancipation Proclamation did not do this. It needed an amendment to the Constitution to make it certain; and this amendment had, at Mr. Lincoln s request, been put into the platform on which he had run and been reflected. It was now before Congress. In January it was adopted. Never, in all his troubled life, had he had ?, deeper satisfaction. "This amendment is a king s cure for all the evils ; it winds the whole thing up," he said the night after its passage to the serenaders who surrounded the White House cheering him and clamoring for a speech. To be sure, there was still work to do, for an amendment to the Constitution requires ratification by two thirds of the States. He thought they were 230 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln going to get it. That very day Illinois had ratified. In the next month sixteen States followed her and two of these, Virginia and Louisiana, had been among the seceders. Before the end of the year the amendment was proclaimed a part of the Consti tution of the United States. Mr. Lincoln rejoiced the more over the amend ment because he felt the negroes had shown them selves worthy of it. They had helped themselves from the beginning of the war. When it was pro posed to make soldiers of them, there had been on both sides ridicule and protest they would not fight. But they had fought, and it was not many months after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued before Mr. Lincoln had the satisfaction of answering those who declared they would not fight for negroes, that there were 200,000 negroes fight ing for them that is, fighting for the Union. If they would not fight when the reward of that fight ing was to be their own freedom, he felt that they were not worth freeing, but they had made good soldiers. Mr. Lincoln not only put the negroes into the army, and insisted that they be rewarded according to the services that they gave, but in every way he could he encouraged them to go to work for them selves, go into business, go to school. He sought in every way to show them his friendly interest. There was bitter criticism, particularly in Washing ton, of the attention he gave them, but it did not budge him. There was a truly great negro who arose during the war Frederick Douglass ; and Mr. Fictory! 231 Lincoln, wishing to talk to him, sent his own car riage to bring him to the White House to take tea with him. At the last New Year s reception, held on Janu ary I, 1865, hundreds of colored people gathered at the doors, hesitating to enter yet desiring to shake the President s hand. When the crowd of whites had retired, they began timidly to enter. Wearied as he was by the long hours of handshak ing, when Mr. Lincoln discovered his visitors, he insisted that all should be admitted. They pressed about him, weeping, blessing him, and kissing his hand. To the negro Mr. Lincoln now was friend and savior. Not many of them, perhaps, realized just what had happened. Few of them certainly realized the burden of responsibility and effort that freedom would bring them; but all of them real ized that the hated word "Slave" was wiped out. He was "Massa Linkin," "Uncle Sam" one never to be forgotten when they prayed. Better than many white people, the negroes seem to have real ized the burden that was upon him " Tears like he got everything hitched to him," one faithful negro said, in exhorting his friends to pray for the President. To all of them he came as something more than a man. "He walks the earf like the Lord," they said. The most striking proof of what the negro, backed by the government, had been able to do for himself came on March 4, 1865, when Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated, for in the procession which accompa nied him to the Capitol were not only negro regi- 232 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln ments of such soldierly bearing as to wring admira tion from even the hostile, but there were delegations from colored civic bodies, proofs of the promptness and efficiency with which representatives of the race had seized the opportunity that under his leader ship had been held out to them. It brought him great joy. Indeed those who had begun to feel that he never would be glad again, so heavily had the war weighed down his heart and mind, were already noting a change in his color, his eye, the way he carried himself. He was begin ning to enjoy things again. Particularly was he en joying his boy Tad the only one that had been with him after Willie s death in February of 1862, for his eldest son Robert was still in college. People noted now that Mr. Lincoln rarely went out without Tad at his side. He even rode in the carnage beside him when he went to his inaugura tion. Tad, now ten years old, was a wonderful companion for him, for a boy more full of life and vigor and more bubbling over with mischief never lived. One of Mr. Lincoln s secretaries, John Hay, a very young man himself, only twenty-four, a lover of life in all its forms, lived in the White House, and has left a charming picture of the boy. He had a bad opinion of books, Mr. Hay tells us, and no opinion of discipline. He thought little of a tutor who would not help him in kite flying, in yoking his kids to a chair, or driving his dogs tan dem across the south lawn. Tad was a passionate lover of animals. He filled the White House with cats and kittens, dogs and goats, in much the same Victory! 233 way that Mr. Roosevelt s boys did in his day. If harm came to one of his pets, it was such a grief to him that it was a grief to Mr. Lincoln himself. A pet goat went astray once when he was in New York with his mother, and Mr. Lincoln as well as the housekeeper spent time in trying to hunt Nannie up ; and when they failed, Mr. Lincoln wrote a long letter explaining the case. Tad loved to get up things. Once for days, in collusion with some of his little friends, he held a minstrel show in the attic of the White House, he being a great success as The Black Statue. A penny was charged for admission, and soldiers, orderlies, and strangers in town flocked to this unusual show. One morning, being at a loss for something to do, he bought out the stock of gingerbread from an old lady who kept a stand near the White House, teased a government carpenter to give him a board and sawhorses, and set up shop in front of the im posing entrance through which all distinguished vis itors passed. You can be sure that there was no senator or office seeker who came up that morning that did not buy something from the keen little mer chant. When he was discovered and a sudden end put to his business, his gingerbread was about gone and his hat full of money. Mr. Lincoln backed him up in most of his esca pades. "Let him run," Mr. Hay quotes the Presi dent as saying, "he has time enough to learn his let ters and get pokey. Bob was just such a little ras cal, and now he is a very decent boy." And in truth Tad was a decent boy truthful and generous. 234 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln There was many a poor woman and tattered soldier that some rigorous servant was trying to keep away from Mr. Lincoln whom Tad seized by the hand and dragged to his father, insisting that their cases be immediately attended to. Truly as he loved his father, Tad never had any proper sense of showing him respect. He had picked up many a street song about "Old Abe" and would sing these songs saucily before his father, often following at his heels about the White House grounds, singing a doggerel at the top of his voice, Mr. Lincoln paying no attention. Tad was an enthusiastic lover of the soldiers, and never was prouder than when, at the request of the captain of Company K which guarded the White House grounds, he was allowed to have a uniform and to wear it. Often he rode, in full regalia, with this company as it attended his father ; and he took an active part in its games and pranks. The way Mr. Lincoln "spoiled" Tad came in for much criticism from both friends and enemies in Washington. These were the same people who criticized him for telling amusing stories, for read ing funny books, like Artemus Ward s, for sitting down at the mess table of Company K, for chaffing with the common soldiers when he visited the camps, for giving a long audience to Tom Thumb when Barnum s circus visited Washington, for going out by himself in the morning to buy his own paper, for looking up information that he wanted in different departments instead of sending orderlies to get it for him criticized him for being natural and kind Fictory! 235 and simple in all his ways, for not feeling himself above others, for wanting them to feel that he was their friend as well as their President. Mr. Lincoln s joy that the war was so near an end was the more beautiful because it had no trace of exultation over those who had opposed him in the North or fought him in the South. We talk about being good losers, but the real test of a man and a gentleman is being a good winner. It is poor sportsmanship not to try to make him whom you have defeated forget his defeat. The conquerer in war who will not forgive but will punish and punish and punish, beyond the terms of peace, is a maker of new wars. Mr. Lincoln was too great a gentle man as well as too wise a man to want to humiliate those he had conquered. It was no pleasure for him to triumph over any one, he told the serenaders that crowded under his window the night of his re election. He got no satisfaction from knowing that somebody had been disappointed or pained by his success. He talked the same thing to the group of excited young men who inside were gloating over the re turns as they came in and who were particularly exultant over the defeat of certain violent anti- Lincoln men. "You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I. Perhaps I may have too little of it, but I never thought it paid. A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him." One of his chief anxieties in these days was to 236 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln get the States that had been out or half out of the Union back in, to get them settled into their old relations, their rebellion forgotten, and the whole country backing them in all honest efforts to accept the results of the war. He wanted them to feel at home, to work to have things as if there had been no war. If this was to be done the North must not med dle overmuch with the government the States set up as they came back they must not interfere with their elections. So far as possible he wanted them to come back in their own way. The question was not at all, as he saw it, whether a new State gov ernment was perfect or not. The point was to get something and help to improve it as time went on. One of his last counsels in regard to the government of the States that were returning was not to reject and spurn what they tried to do. "If we do that," he said, "we would do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them." True, the new government might be to what it should be only "as the egg is to the fowl, but we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it." In all his talk and writing about getting things to going again in the old way there was this same sound good sense and this same kindliness. But he had as great difficulty in persuading men to his views of the problem as he had had in holding them to his way of saving the Union. The chief hin drance came from a hateful spirit of revenge that a few men felt toward all who had tried to go out of the Union. They refused to trust their efforts Victory! 237 and their pledges. When Louisiana, in 1863, after the Confederates were swept from power, started a new Union government and wanted to send rep resentatives to Congress, there were people who insisted that Northerners alone should be elected. Mr. Lincoln realized both the injustice and the bad policy of such a procedure. "To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected at the point of the bayonet, would be disgusting and outrageous, and were I a member of Congress I would vote against admitting any such man to a seat." He was for helping the people back in the way they wanted to come, however wrong he thought they might have been in going out. Mr. Lincoln was no more willing to punish the men who had led in the rebellion than he was to hin der and humiliate the people in their efforts to re store their old relation to the Union. Congress had passed an act declaring the leaders in the Confeder acy traitors. They were to be imprisoned, hanged, but he would hear to none of it. Unyielding as he was when any one talked about a peace which would sacrifice either the Union or freedom for the black man, he was all mercy when they came to talk about the men who had led in the rebellion. In every pos sible way he spread the idea that he would have nothing to do with any form of revenge. It shamed him that the great cause should be soiled by so mean a spirit. "I used to know a boy in Springfield," Mr. Lin coln said, when some one asked him what was he going to do with Jefferson Davis, "who saved up 238 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln his money and bought a coon. But the coon was too much for him fought him with tooth and claw, scratched his face, tore his clothes. After a few days he took the animal out on a leash. "Why don t you get rid of that coon, if he is such a trouble to you?" a man who saw him sitting dis consolately on the curb asked. "Hush," the boy said, "don t you see he is gnaw ing his rope off? I will let him do it and then I will go home and tell the folks he got away from me." This spirit of mercy grew in him. When he came to his inauguration on March 4, 1864, he gave it expression in one of the most beautiful paragraphs in all English literature, his idea of the spirit with which men should look upon the mighty problems which always follow a war: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firm ness 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." Not only was it for the North to be merciful ; he felt it should be humble. The North as well as the South had consented at the start to the continuance of slavery in the country. "If we shall suppose," he said in his inaugural, "that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives Victory/ 239 to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speed ily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman s two hun dred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. A few days after his inauguration, Mr. Lincoln took a vacation took it with the army behind Petersburg. With Mrs. Lincoln, Tad, and a few of his friends, he sailed down the Potomac, and up the James to Grant s headquarters, where he re mained for ten days. The time was filled with vis its to the soldiers, in camp and in their trenches, with long talks with officers before roaring camp fires, with reviews of the army, with excursions up and down the river with Admiral Porter who was commanding the naval forces supporting Grant. All of the business of war went on under his eyes. There was much hard fighting, and he saw much of the wounded and dead; but he shirked none of the sorrow. He was supported by the consciousness that it must end now very soon. When he was with Grant and Porter, he fre quently turned the talk to what was to be done with 240 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln the leaders and the rank and file of the Confederacy when the war was over. He wanted Grant to be very liberal with Lee and his men. "We must get them to plowing at once," he said, "to gathering in their crops, to eating popcorn at their own firesides. If you can get them to do that, you cannot get them to shoulder a musket again for half a century." "If Grant is wise," he told Porter, "he will give them their guns to shoot crows with and their horses to plow with it will do no harm." As for the lead ers themselves, his whole idea was, during this visit at City Point, to "let them down easy." Mr. Lincoln was still at Grant s headquarters when, on the morning of April 3d, news was brought to him that Richmond was being abandoned. Petersburg at last had fallen, and General Lee saw that the capitol could no longer be held. Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet had left, and Lee was march ing his army southward, with Grant after him in double quick time. Richmond had suffered cruelly from fire and bom bardment, and was in terrible disorder now that its defenders had been withdrawn. But, regardless of all this, Mr. Lincoln insisted that he should see the city. Two days after the evacuation began, he en tered with little Tad, three or four friends, and a small guard, and walked through the burning, shat tered town. Its streets were filled with drunken whites and blacks, and from doors and windows hostile men and women watched his progress. Never perhaps had Mr. Lincoln done a more reckless thin? than Vktory! 241 in this visit to Richmond; but here, as all through his term as President, he ignored danger. He had that natural, instinctive courage which leads men to go where they think their work calls them, indiffer ent and even impatient of caution. From the day that he had been nominated he had had repeated warnings of danger to his life. It was only the watchfulness of the War Department and of de tective agencies working separately that saved him from assassination on his way to Washington for his inauguration. As the war went on the number of disordered minds that felt that, by putting an end to his life, the cause of the South might be served, multiplied. Mr. Lincoln would hear just as little as he could of the plots that were unearthed, and yet they came to him so thick that he had a drawer in his desk which he called his "Assassination" drawer. u You get used to anything" he would say sometimes to alarmed friends. His burdens were so heavy and so many that he would not cripple himself by in dulging in thoughts of personal danger. The guard that was kept about the White House and the secret service men who attended him everywhere had great difficulty in watching him. He liked to go out alone, to ride alone. He disliked guards. One of his habits that gave them the greatest uneasiness was slipping away from them on summer nights after he had finished his work at the White House, to walk alone to the Soldiers Home, three miles away. Mr. Lincoln was quite as indifferent to danger when visiting the armies as he was in going about 242 Boy Scouts Life of Lincoln Washington. More than once in the war he ven tured into conspicuous places along a battle line, and had to be hurried away by watchful protectors who realized what a wonderful target his tall, lean figure, topped by a high black hat, made for Con federate riflemen. As he had gone about Washington and along bat tle lines, careless of harm to himself, so now he went among the distracted, embittered people of Richmond. No bitterness or enmity toward them Was in his heart. Possibly he was willing to run this great danger to show them that he was their friend, not their conqueror. The wisest among them knew this. When in the winter before he had gone himself to Hampton Roads to tell Alexander Stephens and other agents of the Confederacy that they could have peace as soon as they would give up their idea of separation and consent to emanci pation, and not before, the question of what would be done with the leaders of the rebellion had come up. Would they be hanged? Stephens had said to him then something which pleased him enor mously: "To tell the truth, we have none of us been much afraid of being hanged with you as Presi dent." Directly after the visit to Richmond Mr. Lincoln went back to Washington. All the way home his mind was filled with ideas of mercy. As they approached the city, Mrs. Lincoln said to him, "Washington is filled with our enemies." The President turned on her sharply. "Don t use that word. There are no enemies now." He was not Victory! 243 willing that even in his own household the thought should be uttered. He kept this idea uppermost in his talks with the members of his Cabinet. On April I4th there was a Cabinet meeting. The President was very happy. Lee had surrendered to Grant on the 9th. Only Johnston s army remained in arms, and its speedy surrender to Sherman was certain. He was sure they would soon hear of it, he said, perhaps even before morning, because the night before he had had the dream that all through the war had come to him before great events before the fall of Sumter, Antietam, Gettysburg, the fall of Atlanta a dream of a dim, mysterious ship sailing to a dark and un known shore. Something important always hap pened after it. The only important event likely now to occur was the surrender of Johnston. That would end it all, and their whole thought now must be to bring back the States into their old relation, make everybody happy again; there must be no unnecessary humiliating or tormenting the war was over. Nobody need expect him, he in sisted, to have any part in hanging or killing. Let the leaders get out of the country if they wanted to shoo them off. But no resentment. They are to be our fellow citizens now, and we must treat them so. There had been enough sacrifice of lives. And so the Cabinet meeting ended; the members going home with their minds full of the merciful ness of Abraham Lincoln. That evening Mrs. Lincoln had arranged a thea ter party, and rather late, after dinner, they went 244 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln with some young friends to Ford s Theater where a humorous play called "Our American Cousin" was to be given. Mr. Lincoln loved the theater. It rested him as almost nothing else except his "funny books," and this evening he seemed to get unusual pleasure, perhaps because he carried a lighter heart than he had for so many weary years. The audi ence, too, were happy and friendly, and they cheered and waved their handkerchiefs again and again as he came into his box. The third act of the play had been reached, and he was smiling at some gay sally, when suddenly the audience heard a pistol shot, and saw a man leap from the President s box. He turned toward them as he struck the stage, crying, "Sic semper tyrannis!" and disappeared. The meaning of this strange interruption to the play came to the audience only as they turned their eyes to the box from which the man had leaped. There they saw that the President alone was sitting quietly in his seat, that over him hung Mrs. Lin coln, sobbing; that men and women were crowding in. They heard a call for a doctor for water. Then there ran through the house the whisper, "The President is shot is dying!" They carried him, unconscious, to a bed in a house across the street; and early the next morning the word went out to the country that Abraham Lin coln was dead dead at the very hour that the great cause to which he had given long years of agony and labor was secured. The heart of the country seemed to break at the news. In the South wise men knew that they had Courtesy of George Gray Barnard. STATUE OF LINCOLN MADE BY GEORGE GRAY BARNARD Victory! 245 lost their best friend, and hastened to condemn the deed. On the Union armies, gay as they were with the end of their long struggle, there fell a silence such as comes upon strong men when they see a loved father dead. For days after the news reached Sherman s army which was singing its way north ward, no song was heard, no smile was seen. Father Abraham was dead. They carried him back to his old home in Spring field, and all along the way of the slow march, men and women, boys and girls, passed before the bier as it lay in state in the cities or stood night and day watching the passage of the train. Many a man and woman grew up to tell their children and grand children of the moment when the news of Abraham Lincoln s death reached them. The woman who is writing these lines, a little girl then, remembers see ing her father coming toward the house all the spring out of his step, his shoulders bent, of seeing her mother run out and hearing her alarmed cry, "What is it? What is it?" of seeing, not hearing, a whisper in her ear, of watching her tears, of won dering why the doors should be closed and crape hung on the knobs, of being told something she was far from understanding, but which she could never forget " Abraham Lincoln is dead." And so it was. The whole North wept and no body who lived ever forgot the day or hour when the news came. He was a great, good and wise man. He became what he was by his fidelity to what he regarded to be true, just, honorable and merciful. He early ac- 246 Boy Scouts 9 Life of Lincoln cepted labor as a necessary and dignified part of man s life. To learn to do something well and to do it with all one s might was the only genuine man liness, in Lincoln s judgment. The idler was a nui sance to himself and his fellows. He learned early that a man s real kingdom is his mind and that no man is so placed that he does not have opportunity to feed, train and rule it. He was equally concerned with the training of the heart, with keeping its impulses clean and noble and kind, and though he saw all about him every form of evil and meanness and uncleanness, these things he resolutely resisted. He never allowed himself from his earliest life to despise any man, however poor and mean and wrong that man may have been. His whole effort was to help men, to understand them; and, above all, he desired liberty for all men. The greatest idea that came to him in his boyhood was that of the preciousness of freedom. Nothing ever stirred him as the thought that men in forming this gov ernment meant that all under it should be free. He hated the contradiction that slavery was to this prin ciple, and when the opportunity came, he was willing to sacrifice for this idea of a land in which all men should work together for liberty, justice, and opportunity, his profession, his peace of mind, and his life. Throughout the years of terrific struggle against disunion and for emancipation, his one concern was to be right in mind and heart. It did not matter about him, all that mattered was that the truth should Victory! 247 be kept uppermost. He indulged in no contempt for those who differed with him. They could be honest and think differently, he knew. He took no pleasure in triumphing over any man that he had defeated. He would countenance no revengeful act toward even those who had tried to break down the Union whose preservation he believed to be so necessary to the future progress and happiness of the world. The history of this or no other land offers to the American Boy a more worthy and beautiful model on which to base and rear his own than Abraham Lincoln, THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1.OO ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. FEB 4 vn B *** <*J 4> FtTvJ FfcB w imi MAY o i n j r " iy45 18Mar 50J 6 r- i. : - F?FT*T) l_D IVL<V> C/ L~*l>^ DhU 6 - iyb9 LD 21-100m-7, 33 483482 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY