iverside Literature Series 
 
 lOORi 
 
 . 
 
 . 
 
 
 

 COPYRIGHT 1891, BY M. P. RICE 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN isr,4 
 
ftifcerstoe literature 
 
 A SHORT LIFE OF 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 BY 
 CHARLES W. MOORES 
 
 FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF SCHOOL COMMISSIONERS 
 INDIANAPOLIS 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 HOTJGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 Cambridge 
 
COPYRIGHT, I90Q. BY CHARLES W. MOORES 
 Ai.L RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 EVERY American, over eight years old, ought to 
 know the story of Abraham Lincoln s life. More than 
 this, every American ought to know the best of Lin 
 coln s writings. Above all, every American ought to 
 know the man, Abraham Lincoln. To give to children 
 an understanding of his great life, an appreciation of 
 the simplicity and purity of his literary style, and a love 
 of the man, has been the purpose of this little book. 
 The effort has been to do this without departing from 
 the dignity which maturer minds demand in the pre 
 sentation of a personality that has won the love of us 
 all. At the same time, the picture were incomplete 
 without a portrayal of the humor that saved Lincoln 
 from the madness to which the burden he carried 
 might have driven him. 
 
 The chapters which are not essentially political in 
 their character, and therefore do not call for an elemen 
 tary knowledge of American history, have been found 
 suited to the use of children in the fifth and sixth 
 grades ; while, upon a thorough test, the whole book 
 has proved well adapted for sight-reading in seventh 
 and eighth grades. This test has shown the fulfillment 
 of the author s purpose to give to the children a simple 
 story of Lincoln s life, to stimulate a new interest in 
 his writings, and to lead to a better understanding oi 
 Lincoln, the man. 
 
 "A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears ; 
 A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers ; 
 A homely hero born of star and sod ; 
 A Peasant Prince ; a Masterpiece of God." 
 
 464405 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY . . 1 
 
 II. MOVING TO INDIANA . 7 
 
 III. A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD . 13 
 
 IV. A STRANGE EDUCATION 19 
 
 V. THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN .25 
 
 VI. LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 32 
 
 VII. MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS ..... 38 
 
 VIII. RIDING THE CIRCUIT 45 
 
 IX. THE REPUBLICAN PARTY is BORN . . .52 
 
 X. THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS ... 59 
 
 XI. THE NOMINATION 68 
 
 XII. THE ELECTION 77 
 
 XIII. THE PRESIDENCY 85 
 
 XIV. WAR BEGINS 93 
 
 XV. A PEOPLE S SORROW ...... 100 
 
 XVI. PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME ... 107 
 
 XVII. HIGH TIDE 115 
 
 XVIII. PEACE 123 
 
 f 
 
THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 FOR BOYS AND GIRLS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 
 
 ON the eastern slope of the Allegheny Mountains, 
 not far from the western border of Virginia, was the 
 farm of Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of President 
 Lincoln. This elder Lincoln was one of a family of 
 Pennsylvania Quakers, who about the time George 
 Washington was born had settled in Virginia. He had 
 prospered and had become a man of influence. Doubt 
 less because he was a Quaker he had not joined Wash 
 ington s army, although he had a younger brother who 
 was an officer in the Virginia, troops. 
 
 The Revolutionary War had been going on for five 
 years and was now nearing its close. Of the soldiers 
 who had often felt the thrill that comes to those who 
 hear the sound of fife and drum and bugle, many 
 were beginning to hear the call of the frontier beyond 
 the mountains, which Washington in his boyhood had 
 explored. As their time of service expired, it was but 
 natural that these hardy veterans should see in the 
 unsettled lands to the westward a field rich in adven 
 ture and tempting in its rewards. From Virginia the 
 line of travel to this land of promise lay southwest 
 erly, along the eastern slope of the Alleghenies, up the 
 Shenandoah Valley, directly past the Lincoln farm in 
 
. V : V^BRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 aia Ceunjty, :to the Cumberland Gap, and 
 th eh ce* into tne* blue-grass country of Kentucky. 
 
 As the endless caravan of canvas-covered wagons 
 crept up the long, uneven slope on the Virginia side 
 of the mountain range, hundreds of these venturesome 
 pioneers passed the Lincoln farm, each company, no 
 doubt, shouting to the less adventurous farmer, as they 
 passed, a playful invitation to "sell out and come 
 along." The elder Abraham Lincoln soon caught the 
 spirit and joined the procession of emigrants that for 
 the next fifty years was to take its winding course over 
 the Wilderness Trail to the new West. 
 
 In 1780, Kentucky was a vast solitude, inhabited by 
 wild beasts and a few scattered bands of Indians. Its 
 trees and streams, its wild ravines and sweeping val 
 leys, lay before the wondering eyes of the emigrants as 
 they came down the western slope of the great moun 
 tain barrier, a picture of indescribable beauty, a 
 picture in which there were no signs of human life, no 
 houses, or schools, or churches, or bridges, or roads, or 
 fields of grain. It was a paradise just as God s hand had 
 left it. And yet the struggle that was going on there 
 between Daniel Boone and his comrades in adventure 
 and the few thousand savages who claimed this paradise 
 as their own, gave to Kentucky the romantic name of 
 "the dark and bloody ground," and offered promise 
 of excitement and adventure, as well as a free home, 
 to all who might leave civilization behind them and 
 brave the hardships of the Wilderness Trail. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln the elder was counted a rich man 
 when he took the seventeen thousand dollars that he 
 got for his Virginia farm and bought from the govern 
 ment his three plantations in Kentucky. He became 
 the owner of seventeen hundred acres in three tracts, 
 
THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 3 
 
 located in the Green River Valley, and near where 
 Covington and Louisville are now. To the Louisville 
 region, then a pathless wilderness, he brought his wife 
 and children, the youngest of them two years old. Here 
 he thought to find the fortune that his pluck and enter 
 prise would bring him. He was a friend of Daniel 
 Boone, the Indian fighter, and his wife was a cousin of 
 Boone. The Lincoln s knew this land by its forbidding 
 name, " the dark and bloody ground," but they were 
 not afraid. The boys, no doubt, had their dreams of 
 wild game, and of the scalping-knife and tomahawk, 
 and they went into the unknown country full of faith 
 in the fortune they were to win there. But the father s 
 fortune was to die at the hands of the Indians, leaving 
 his widow and five young children to make their way 
 in the backwoods, with no one to care for them, with 
 no chance for an education, and with property from 
 which they could not make their living. Whatever value 
 their hundreds of acres had, depended on their being 
 cleared and planted. The death of the father was the end 
 of their great hopes, and to the Lincoln boys, who were 
 scattered and put out to work wherever they might 
 find a job, Kentucky was indeed a " dark and bloody 
 ground." The lands, such as they were, went by law 
 to the eldest son, Mordecai. 
 
 The youngest son, Thomas, now six years old, became 
 " a wandering laboring boy," and did the roughest kind 
 of farm-work for such pay as men cared to give him. 
 There were no schools where he could be taught, and 
 he never learned to read or write until his wife taught 
 him to scratch the letters of his name. He was a famous 
 wrestler, and he was strong and brave. He could tell 
 a funny story, and, in his happy-go-lucky way, he 
 won everybody s good will, In his memory he carried 
 
4 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 a picture, that he never lost, of the morning in the 
 Kentucky clearing when the Indian killed his father, 
 and his big brother Mordecai, fourteen years old, ran to 
 the cabin for the rifle and shot his father s murderer. 
 
 Thomas Lincoln learned the carpenter s trade, after 
 a fashion, in the shop of Joseph Hanks. There he fell 
 in love with his cousin, Nancy Hanks, whom he mar 
 ried a tall, frail, but charming girl, with dark hair 
 and dark, sparkling eyes. She was in many ways like 
 her son. She read books when she could get them, par 
 ticularly the Bible, arid she remembered what she read. 
 She saw the funny side of life and she always enjoyed 
 a good story. Yet she was often melancholy. She had 
 not strength enough for the hardships she had to bear, 
 and her short life had little happiness in it. 
 
 The Lincolns began their housekeeping in a shed that 
 afterward was used as a stable in an alley in the village 
 of Elizabethtown. Here their little girl Nancy was 
 born. " Tom " Lincoln was not a very good carpenter. 
 In a community where the neighbors were as able as he 
 to make the simple furniture and rude buildings they 
 needed, it is not strange that he failed. He had followed 
 no steady work since his father s death had thrown him 
 upon the world, and while he was not discontented or 
 idle, he was restless. So he gave up his trade and un 
 dertook farming. Qn Nolin s Creek, a dozen miles from 
 where his friends and neighbors lived, and about sixty 
 miles south of Louisville, he started to cut out the trees 
 and build himself a house of logs. This was a one-room 
 affair, with 110 door to keep out the cold and storm, and 
 with no window to let in the light. There were open 
 spaces between the logs that made its walls. The floor 
 was the bare earth, pounded hard. In its one unfur 
 nished room there was no picture except that of the 
 
THE LINCOLNS SETTLE IN KENTUCKY 5 
 
 barren patches of grass and weeds that the family could 
 see through the open doorway. They slept on a bed of 
 skins on the floor, and in the winter they sat shivering 
 about the fireplace while Tom told stories or Nancy 
 read aloud. Here, on February 12, 1809, their sec 
 ond child, Abraham Lincoln, was born. 
 
 There are pictures of this log house on the Rock 
 Spring Farm, near Nolin s Creek, but the house was 
 torn down and the logs were used in other buildings 
 long before the pictures were made. The American 
 people have bought the farm and rebuilt the cabin out 
 of some of the same logs, and mean to keep it always 
 in memory of the great American who was born there 
 a hundred years ago. 
 
 The Lincolns soon found that they could not make 
 a living on the place. So they moved again and built 
 themselves another log cabin near Knob Creek, where 
 the children and the tired mother were made more 
 comfortable. Little Nancy was now old enough to go to 
 school. They sent her, with her four-year-old brother 
 for company, to be taught for a few months by an Irish 
 wanderer, Zachariah liiney. Of him and their next 
 teacher, Caleb Hazel, nothing is known except thut 
 they had no regular school, that they knew very little 
 beyond the A, B, C s, and that they found in the little 
 Lincoln boy a mind that was eager to learn and a dis 
 position to ask questions that must have interested 
 them and taxed their patience greatly. AVe are told 
 that in the evenings, while other children slept, Abe 
 was bringing spicewood branches to make a blaze in 
 the open fireplace so that his mother could read to him 
 and help him puzzle out the letters by the firelight. 
 
 The boy Lincoln was beginning to get an education. 
 What he did not learn from the two wandering teach- 
 
6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ers and from his mother, he picked up by asking ques 
 tions of every man that passed the house, and by 
 listening to the preachers who rode horseback through 
 the country and preached the gospel wherever they 
 could find an audience by the wayside. The lad remem 
 bered all that he heard, and repeated to his mother 
 and to the boys and girls of his acquaintance the sub 
 stance, and often the very words, of the sermons of 
 these traveling preachers. The preachers knew scarcely 
 more than their hearers, but they rode over hundreds 
 of miles giving comfort and help to those that needed 
 it, and keeping the frontier in touch with the rest of 
 the world. One of them, David Elkin, was a frequent 
 guest at the house, and won the admiration of the 
 little backwoodsman, Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 The Lincoln farm if we may call it a farm, with 
 its trees and heavy underbrush, its stumps and patches 
 >f rock was barren enough, and the little family 
 lived mainly on the wild animals that the father shot 
 and the fish that they could catch in the creeks near 
 by. One day Abraham, now about five years old, had 
 been trying to make himself useful and was coming 
 home proudly swinging a fish from his line. Near the 
 house he met an old soldier and, as he stopped to ask 
 his usual questions of the man, there flashed upon his 
 memory a command his mother had once given him, 
 that he must always be kind to the soldiers. Instantly 
 he gave the man his fish and went home empty-handed, 
 disappointed that he had no fish to show, yet happy 
 that he had done a patriotic act. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MOVING TO INDIANA 
 
 AT the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ken 
 tucky was no longer a wilderness. Through Cumber 
 land Gap and down the Ohio River, thousands of fami 
 lies had been moving in from the East. Already the 
 emigrants from Virginia and Maryland had brought 
 with them a multitude of slaves who were to cut down 
 the forests and plow the virgin soil and furnish for the 
 new State the foundation for a slave civilization and 
 a landed aristocracy. From the beginning the people 
 of Kentucky were set apart in two classes. One of 
 these classes consisted of those who could afford to 
 have slaves to do their hard labor, and who in this 
 way found time for themselves and their children to 
 learn reading and writing. As the country became 
 cleared and settled, these slave-owners were able to 
 keep abreast of the times by means of travel and edu 
 cation. And because they had time and money and 
 book-learning, they became the governing class in the 
 new State. The other class was made up of those who 
 were too poor to own slaves. They spent their days, 
 axe in hand, cutting down the trees and getting the 
 ground ready for the plow, and their nights in the 
 heavy sleep that comes to those who work to the limit 
 of their strength. When they needed food, the rod and 
 gun brought them plenty of fish and game. Their boys 
 and girls had to share in the endless labor as soon as 
 they were old enough to do anything. The time of a 
 boy of seven was too valuable to permit of his spend- 
 
8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ing much of it in school. These two great classes, the 
 owners of slaves and the " poor whites," had little in 
 common. Wherever there were slaves the poor whites 
 had small chance to get ahead in the world. 
 
 Thomas Lincoln was too poor to be a slave-owner, 
 and so long as he had to live in a community where 
 slaves were doing without pay the only kind of work 
 that he knew how to do, he had no reason to expect 
 that he could get ahead. It is certain that slavery had 
 something to do with his failures in Kentucky, and it 
 was partly on account of slavery that he left Kentucky 
 a few years later to settle in the free State of Indiana. 
 
 A hundred miles to the northward was a newer 
 country where there were no slaves, where the want of 
 an education was no disadvantage to a man, and where 
 there were no class distinctions between the rich and 
 the poor. This new State had chosen for its great seal 
 the picture of a pioneer, axe in hand, clearing the 
 forest, with a buffalo in the background making way 
 for the advance of civilization. What made it pecul 
 iarly the poor man s land of promise was that it had 
 just written into its new constitution a law that should 
 make every immigrant sure that he could earn his 
 daily bread without competing with slave labor. In 
 that constitution there was a sentence that in years to 
 come was to exert its influence upon Abraham Lin 
 coln s public career. It read as follows : " As the hold 
 ing any part of the human creation in slavery . . . 
 can only originate in usurpation and tyranny, no alter 
 ation of this constitution shall ever take place so as to 
 introduce slavery ... in this State." 
 
 In the summer of 1816, the year that Indiana came 
 into the Union, Tom Lincoln sold his possessions, 
 and building himself a raft, put his little fortune on 
 
MOVING TO INDIANA 9 
 
 board and floated with it down the Rolling Fork and 
 the Salt River to the Ohio ; and on down the Ohio to 
 the mouth of Anderson s Creek on the Indiana side. 
 Plunging fifteen miles into the forest, lie found at 
 Little Pigeon Creek the spot where he planned to 
 build his new home. He walked back to the Kentucky 
 cabin, and in the late fall brought his family across the 
 country on the backs of two borrowed horses to the 
 banks of the Ohio. Crossing the stream, he and his boy, 
 Abe, began on the north shore to cut a road through 
 the densely wooded forest of walnut and hickory toward 
 their new home. In these woods the children saw many 
 strange wild animals. Here was the home of the deer 
 and the wild cat, the wolf and the bear. In the fallen 
 leaves and undergrowth crept copperheads and rat 
 tlesnakes, while in the shadow of the trees they saw 
 more birds than the little boy and girl could count. 
 Stately, solitary cranes waded in the shallow water of 
 the creek ; overhead were flocks of screaming green 
 and yellow paroquets ; and in the more open places 
 occasional wild turkeys were seen. No doubt the long 
 ride on horseback across northern Kentucky, the first 
 vision of the Ohio River as it swept between its scarlet 
 and golden hillsides, and the first serious efforts witt 
 the pioneer s axe to open a way through which the 
 iiorses could carry their goods to the new home, made 
 impressions upon the memory of the little emigrant 
 that he never wholly forgot. 
 
 Years afterward, in telling about this boyhood home 
 Lincoln described it as " a wild region with many bears 
 and other wild animals still in the woods." Speaking 
 of this seven-year-old boy who had just come into In 
 diana, he said : " He settled in an unbroken forest, and 
 the clearing away of surplus wood was the great task 
 
10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ahead. Abraham, though very young, was large of his 
 age, and had an axe put into his hands at once ; and 
 from that time till within his twenty-third year he was 
 almost constantly handling that most useful instru 
 ment." 
 
 It was indeed the beginning of civilization in that 
 part of Indiana. The nearest neighbors were some 
 miles away, but they lent a helping hand whenever it 
 was needed. The Lincolns were utteTly poor, but no 
 poorer probably than the rest were. And all were rich 
 in the spirit of neighborliness that made each new 
 comer welcome to the frontier community, and joined 
 with him to build his cabin and protect his household 
 from illness and want and danger of all kinds. 
 
 The prospect of beginning life again in the thick 
 woods, in November, without any sort of shelter and 
 with no white settlement near by, must have fright 
 ened the young mother- But she had a husband who 
 never lost his courage and a boy and a girl whom she 
 loved dearly ; and loneliness was not a new experience 
 to her. It was too late to build a real house to live 
 in during their first winter, so they had to make out 
 of saplings what was called a half-faced camp. Three 
 of its four sides were of poles covered as well as possi 
 ble with dead leaves and brush, and the fourth side 
 was open to the weather, except as it was protected 
 by the bonfire that burned day and night before the 
 opening. They had no matches ; so the fire must be 
 watched and kept alive, or the woodsman must start 
 another by a very slow process, with flint and steel. 
 Indiana winters are sometimes bitter that winter the 
 temperature fell to eleven degrees below zero. Winds 
 sweep fiercely along the Ohio valley and the snow 
 drifts deep on the hillsides. We can picture the boy 
 
MOVING TO INDIANA 11 
 
 and girl as they lay by night on the hard earth inside 
 their half-faced camp, with their feet toward the blaz 
 ing fire, and enjoyed the dreamless sleep that their 
 tired little bodies had earned, while Tom Lincoln, the 
 father, listened to the howl of the storm and, hearing 
 the cry of the wolf somewhere in the darkness, knew 
 that he must keep up the fire or harm would come. 
 
 Without near neighbors and without the ordinary 
 comforts, the Lincolns found life a serious affair. There 
 was no time for play and little chance for learning, as 
 books were lacking, too. But there were trees to be cut 
 down ; and there was underbrush to burn, a well to dig, 
 a garden to get ready for the spring planting, and plans 
 to make for the real log house that they would build as 
 soon as winter was gone. When the weather kept them 
 within the camp and close to the fireside, the father 
 would frighten the boy and girl with his story of how 
 the Indians had shot their grandfather, but he would 
 keep up their courage by pretending that there were 
 no Indians left in the Little Pigeon country ; and the 
 children s mother would read to them out of her Bible 
 the stories that the boy never forgot. So, because they 
 had one another, they were happy and unafraid. 
 
 " At this place," Lincoln wrote of himself years later, 
 "Abraham took an early start as a hunter which was 
 never much improved afterward. A few days before 
 the completion of his eighth year, in the absence of his 
 father, a flock of wild turkeys approached the new log 
 cabin, and Abraham with a rifle gun, standing inside, 
 shot through a crack and killed one of them. He has 
 never since pulled a trigger on any larger game." 
 
 There was no place where clothes could be bought 
 for the children, nor was there any money to spend on 
 them. Abe s cap was of coonskin, the tail hanging down 
 
12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 behind for beauty. His shoes when he wore any 
 were moccasins fashioned by his mother s delicate 
 hands out of deerskin, and his trousers were of deer 
 skin, too. A shirt of home-made linsey-woolsey com 
 pleted his outfit. Stockings he never wore until he was 
 a grown man. Lincoln has described the slipperiness 
 of the deerskin moccasins and trousers when he got 
 wet ; and how, with all their stretching, the deerskin 
 trousers never quite covered his long brown legs. 
 
 Food, except fish and game, was hard to find, and 
 without flour or meal, and without a stove, it was hard 
 to prepare. It is not strange that the hungry boy said 
 in his quaint way, as his father asked a blessing on the 
 dinner of baked potatoes, " Dad, I call these mighty 
 poor blessings." 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 
 
 THE next year the Lincolns were able to put up a 
 new log cabin. This was at least a safer place to live 
 in than the half-faced camp. This cabin had neither 
 window, nor door, nor floor. The children slept 011 a 
 bed of leaves in the loft, which they reached by climb 
 ing a row of pegs driven into the wall. The bed down 
 stairs was built by driving a forked stake into the earth, 
 near the corner of the room, and laying a pole from 
 this stake across to each of two walls. On these cross- 
 poles were laid rough boards, which were made soft 
 and comfortable by covering them with leaves and 
 clothing and the skins of wild animals. Such other 
 furniture as they had, Tom Lincoln made out of the 
 forest timber with his simple woodsman s tools. 
 
 Here, for another year, the mother suffered from the 
 exposure for which she was so little fitted and against 
 which she was so ill-protected. Then came a dread dis 
 ease which struck down people and cattle alike. From 
 this plague, there being no physician within thirty 
 miles to care for her, Nancy Lincoln died. Father and 
 son cut down a tree and out of the green timber built 
 a rough box for her burial. In the woods near by they 
 made her a grave and laid her to rest. 
 
 Not long before this, cousins had come from Ken 
 tucky to live near them. Some of these cousins also 
 died of the plague, and so there were other graves to 
 dig, and strange boxes for the boy to help fashion. 
 The children became familiar with the mystery of 
 
14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 death. Nancy and Abe were now eleven and nine years 
 old, too young to know how to make the home com 
 fortable, and too lonely to keep up the father s spirits. 
 It seemed impossible for the disheartened man to give 
 them proper clothing and food. The cabin continued 
 doorless and windowless and forlorn. 
 
 Abe was a most affectionate child, and the idea of 
 leaving the dead mother alone in those dreadful woods, 
 with no religious service, and no prayer except the 
 unexpressed cry from his own heart, was more than 
 he could bear. In some way he had learned to write a 
 fair hand. He painfully wrote out a letter and gave it 
 to a traveler into Kentucky to be delivered, whenever 
 he could be found, to the missionary preacher, David 
 Elkin, who had been their friend years before. Many 
 months afterward the good preacher found his way to 
 the settlement on Little Pigeon Creek and preached 
 the funeral sermon by the grave of Nancy Hanks 
 Lincoln, paying to her memory the tribute of praise 
 that the little boy had hungered to hear. To this ser 
 vice came women, on horseback, from neighboring set 
 tlements, carrying their children on the saddle-bow, 
 while the men trudged beside them through the woods. 
 And from that day these neighbors kept in their 
 friendly sympathy the serious, odd-looking boy, under 
 standing his sorrow and wondering what dreams there 
 were in the depths of his mysterious eyes. 
 
 Things went from bad to worse, until it began to 
 look as if the family would be scattered, as Thomas 
 Lincoln and his brothers and sisters had been thirty 
 years before. Then there came a change. The father 
 realized what the home needed most, and went back 
 alone to Kentucky. There he found Sarah Johnston, 
 a young widow, whom he had always known, and per- 
 
A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 15 
 
 suaded her to marry him. The coming of this new 
 mother to Little Pigeon Creek was a fortunate thing 
 for the Lincoln children, for she loved them and cared 
 for them as tenderly as their own mother would have 
 done. Her three children, too, brought into Abe s life 
 the cheer of companionship that he had needed, and 
 saved him from much of the melancholy toward which 
 he was always strongly inclined. She was considered 
 rich in the little Hoosier settlement. It took four 
 horses to haul the real furniture that she brought. 
 There were beds and chairs, and there was a fifty-dol 
 lar walnut bureau, the first the children had ever seen. 
 This bureau was an object of such splendor that Tom 
 Lincoln pronounced it " little less than sinful to own 
 such a thing." 
 
 Soon the cheerless cabin was made homelike. Into 
 the open doorway Mrs. Lincoln had them fit a door of 
 split timber. A window was cut through the logs and 
 frames were set in. There was no glass in the frontier 
 country, so they fastened sheets of greased paper 
 across the window to let the light through. Boards 
 were split with axe and wedge and laid on the earth 
 for flooring. The open spaces between the logs in the 
 walls were filled with clay. And so the cabin became 
 a house. These were not the only changes. Between 
 the boy and his new mother there sprang up an under 
 standing that soon ripened into love. She believed in 
 him and encouraged him in a way that his father 
 never did, and she saw to it that the ambitious boy 
 had new arid better opportunities to learn, and that 
 his father and others did not disturb him when he 
 wanted to read. Because she found him unlike other 
 children, she kept watch over him with special tender 
 ness. Fifty years later, when he had grown to man- 
 
16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 hood and had given his life for his country, she re 
 called to a friend the boyhood that had been intrusted 
 to her for guidance. " Abe was a poor boy," she said, 
 " and I can say what scarcely one woman a mother 
 can say in a thousand. Abe never gave me a cross 
 Ttrord or look, and never refused to do anything I re 
 quested him. I never gave him a cross word in all my 
 life. His mind and mine what little I had seemed 
 to run together. He was here after he was elected 
 President. He was the best boy I ever saw, or expect 
 to see." And it was of her that he said in one of his 
 rare bursts of confidence, " All that I am or hope to 
 be I owe to my mother." 
 
 Neighbors have left many accounts of Abraham s 
 boyhood. These all testify that " he saw hardships, had 
 meagre clothing, coarse food, and no advantage of 
 securing an education. All who knew him agreed that 
 his ways were not like those of other boys, and he was 
 not fully understood." One thing is sure from his own 
 accounts of his boyhood, that, with all its hardships 
 and its days of sadness, it was a very happy one. 
 
 It is hard to believe that, in the early days of the 
 West, men and women had the same strange super 
 stitions that the Puritans had in New England two 
 hundred years earlier. It is true, however, that in 
 the country where Abraham Lincoln lived as a boy. 
 people believed that their lives and fortunes were in 
 fluenced by visions, and ghosts, and witches. They be 
 lieved, for instance, that potatoes planted " in the dark 
 of the moon " would suffer blight ; that fences built 
 u in the light of the moon " were bound to fall ; that a 
 bird at the window foretold death ; that the breath of 
 a horse in a child s face would give it the whooping 
 cough ; that work could not be commenced with safety 
 
A BACKWOODS BOYHOOD 17 
 
 on Friday. Women supposed to be witches were driven 
 fram the neighborhood. The men told their dreams to 
 one another and were guided by them, as men were 
 in the days of Pharaoh of old. From the influence of 
 these superstitions Abraham Lincoln never wholly 
 escaped, and in the experiences of his after-life we 
 find evidence of his belief in the supernatural. 
 
 At Little Pigeon Creek the settlers had built a log 
 church, much of the work on the windows, doors, and 
 pulpit being the handiwork of Tom Lincoln and his 
 boy, Abe. Here the younger Lincoln heard sermons 
 from itinerant preachers, some of whom were ignorant 
 and undignified, but all of whom were earnestly devoted 
 to the welfare of their people. At this time a spirit of 
 enmity toward slavery was beginning to be felt among 
 the church folk in the Ohio valley. In many neighbor 
 hoods the people were helping negro slaves from over 
 the river to escape to Canada and freedom, while the 
 wandering preachers, who had seen some of the injus 
 tice of slavery farther south, denounced it from their 
 pulpits and, in secret, helped to organize the anti- 
 slavery movement in the border States. Mr. Lincoln 
 and his wife were devout church members, and Abra 
 ham, although not yet interested in religious things, 
 was regularly to be found at church, just as he was 
 always to be found where men and women gathered, 
 and where he could pick up something of value to add 
 to his store of knowledge. 
 
 For a time, while his sister was serving their neigh 
 bors, the Crawfords, as cook and housemaid, he was 
 their farm-boy, clearing up stumps, plowing, harvesting T 
 or splitting rails, for twenty-five cents a day, and bj 
 uight tending the baby and helping about the house. 
 tie served Mrs. Crawford the more willingly because 
 
18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 she was fond of him and had books to lend him. One 
 of these books he took home to read in his bed in the 
 loft in the early morning. He laid it between the logs 
 in the wall, and a sudden rain in the night drenched 
 it. Mr. Crawford refused to accept the book when he 
 brought it back, and made the boy pull fodder for 
 three days to pay for it. But at the end of three bitter 
 days the boy owned his first book. In the weeks that 
 followed, when he could throw himself down by the 
 fireplace and read at night, he made the book doubly 
 his own by hard study. It was on his way to the inau 
 guration as President Lincoln that he recalled this 
 experience in an address to the legislature of New 
 Jersey : 
 
 " May I be pardoned," he said, " if, upon this occa 
 sion, I mention that away back in my childhood, the 
 earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of 
 a small book, . . . Weems s Life of Washington. I 
 remember all the accounts there given of the battle 
 fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and 
 none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply 
 as the struggle here at Trenton. The crossing of the 
 river the contest with the Hessians the great 
 hardships endured at that time all fixed themselves 
 on my memory . . . ; and you all know, for you have 
 all been boys, how those early impressions last longer 
 than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even 
 though I was, that there must have been something 
 more than common that those men struggled for." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A STRANGE EDUCATION 
 
 NEITHER the work in the woods nor that at the car 
 penter s bench attracted the growing boy. His interest 
 in books made the lonely and exacting labor with axe 
 and hammer harder for him to bear than it was for 
 most boys. He became more and more absorbed in his 
 day-dreams, until his hard-headed employers thought 
 him lazy and tried te discourage his studies. But what 
 he could not learn from his books he was willing to 
 get from men. When a neighbor came down the road, 
 or an emigrant from some far country drove his ox- 
 team past the farm, the boy was found leaning against 
 the fence asking questions, until discovered by his 
 father and driven back to his work. 
 
 In those days men were much given to talking poli 
 tics, growing excited over the respective merits of 
 Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay. In their gather 
 ings, too, they discussed the debates between the Bap 
 tists and the Methodists, or the Campbellites and the 
 Catholics, or they told strange tales about the life 
 Robert Owen and his associates were leading in the 
 New Harmony Community a few miles to the south 
 west, where all goods and lands were held in common, 
 like those of a single family. It is no wonder that the 
 boy had questions to ask, for the one thing that inter 
 ested him most was /hat men were doing in the great 
 world that lay beyond his vision. 
 
 The young farm-boy and carpenter came into con 
 tact with the world of men through two other employ. 
 
SO ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ments, as clerk, one winter, in the general store at 
 Gentryville, near by, and as ferryman, for almost a 
 year, near where Anderson s Creek empties into the 
 Ohio. At the village store, men gathered in the even 
 ings and on Saturday afternoons to read aloud from 
 the weekly newspaper and to talk politics. Here they 
 argued about slavery, and rejoiced that " Indiana had 
 come in free," and that the Supreme Court had just 
 decided that there could never be slaves in the new 
 State. 
 
 At Anderson s Creek, where Abraham plied his trade 
 as ferryman, the Ohio was every day carrying past 
 him cargoes from the East and South, far away. To 
 his boat-landing came strange and interesting travel 
 ers, men of the world, some of them, from New 
 Orleans and St. Louis, or from Pittsburg and New 
 York. Again, on board the river craft, the youth saw 
 companies of slaves, chained together like convicts, 
 bound for the slave market farther south, and the sight 
 was a "continued torment" to i.im. 
 
 It was as ferryman that he earned his first dollar. 
 He was eighteen years old. Two men asked him to row 
 their trunks out to the passing steamer and each paid 
 him half a dollar. He was bewildered by the sudden 
 possession of so much money. * I could scarcely be 
 lieve my eyes," he said afterward. " You may think 
 it was a very little thing, but it was a most important 
 incident in my life. I could scarcely believe that I, a 
 poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day. I was 
 a more hopeful and confident boy from that time." 
 These glimpses of the great world filled him with an 
 eager desire to try his own fortune on the river, and 
 the next year he and a companion took a flatboat cargo 
 for a Mr. Gentry to New Orleans. 
 
THE BOY LINCOLN READING BY THE LIGHT OF THE FIRE 
 (After a painting by Eastman Johnson made in 1868) 
 
A STRANGE EDUCATION 21 
 
 As schools were rare and the need to labor pressing, 
 Abraham Lincoln s whole school life covered less than 
 a single year. Many of his teachers knew little more 
 than their pupils. But some of them, though possessed 
 of scanty book-learning, had what was better, a know 
 ledge of the outside world and a public spirit that 
 made them leaders of men. 
 
 A mile and a half from Little Pigeon Creek a 
 school was taught for a year or two by one of these 
 men of affairs, Azel W. Dorsey. It must have been 
 because in winter time even the busiest of men had 
 leisure that Azel Dorsey was willing to teach, for he 
 was one of the most active public men in the county. 
 He had been coroner, and at this time was county 
 treasurer. It Was in his cabin that the people met to 
 make Rockport the county seat, and in his cabin the 
 first courts were held. He was one of the men who 
 gave money to build the first bridges and to establish 
 the first free library. Mr. Dorsey s little schoolhouse 
 had window-panes of greased paper and a floor of split 
 log puncheon. Here the Lincoln boy, now ten years 
 old, attended for a few months. Here he learned bet 
 ter how to use the few books that came into his pos 
 session. Here he met all the other children for miles 
 around and engaged with them in reading-matches and 
 spelling-contests ; but, best of all, he learned from Azel 
 Dorsey, the man of affairs, that no man has a right to 
 be so busy with his own interests that he forgets his 
 duty to his neighborhood and to the State. 
 
 Four years passed before he went to school agaia 
 This time the course of study added manners to the 
 three standard subjects, reading, writing, and arith 
 metic. The teacher, Andrew Crawford, who afterward 
 rose to the dignity of a justice of the peace in Spencer 
 
22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 County, stood at the door and sent the children out 
 side one at a time to come in and be presented to the 
 others after the fashion of polite society. We can pic 
 ture to ourselves the awkward Lincoln boy, now six 
 feet two inches in height, as he lifted his coonskin cap 
 to pretty Kate Roby and tried to hide his blushes and 
 his laughter in his effort to learn politeness. These 
 lessons in manners, like all his other lessons, he re 
 membered, until, in the greater world of Spring-field 
 and of Washington, people wondered how a man so un 
 gainly and so poorly dressed seemed never to forget to 
 be a gentleman. 
 
 To attend the next school, taught by a Mr. Swaney, 
 Lincoln, now seventeen years old, walked back and 
 forth nine miles each day. Because of the time it took 
 to make the journey, he had to give it up after a few 
 weeks and go to work. In these three schools he found 
 a special interest in the reading-lessons, in the practice 
 of declaiming " pieces " on Friday afternoons, and in 
 writing compositions. One of his school-day writings was 
 on " National Politics " and another was on " Cruelty 
 to Animals." Through the interest of an admiring 
 neighbor, a third essay, on " Temperance," was pub 
 lished in a newspaper. Reading intelligently, writing 
 a clear hand, spelling fairly well, and making simple 
 calculations with figures, these, with a grotesque sort 
 of training in etiquette, made up the boy s schooling. 
 But it was not in the schools that he got his education. 
 The fellowship of trees and streams and of the gentle 
 wild things of the woods, the companionship of boys 
 and men, the pages of the Bible and ^Esop s Fables 
 and the half-dozen other books that he devoured by 
 the blaze of the fire, and the discipline of hard labor 
 with axe and plow, these were his teachers. 
 
A STRANGE EDUCATION 23 
 
 In early days men traveled many miles to attend 
 court, not because they had business there, but because 
 the coming of the judge and lawyers from near and 
 far brought into the life of the people something that 
 was unusual and often dramatic. To the court house at 
 Boonville, the nearest county seat, lawyers sometimes 
 came from as far away as Louisville to try their cases, 
 to settle for all time the questions of property rights, 
 or to defend men charged with crime. Witnesses were 
 examined, and speeches made. In spite of the prohibi 
 tion of slavery in the constitution of Indiana, appeals 
 were made to these courts to permit the holding of 
 negro slaves in the State. To these meetings of the court 
 the young man Lincoln walked through the woods fif 
 teen miles, whenever he could manage to get away from 
 his work. And here he fed his fancy and his ambition 
 with thoughts of something greater in his own life 
 than day labor. Here, too, he got a copy of the laws of 
 Indiana from one of the lawyers, and found within its 
 covers the Declaration of Independence, the Consti 
 tution of the United States, and the Constitution of 
 Indiana. Here he read for the first time the protest of 
 a free people against the wickedness of human slavery. 
 
 As he listened to the lawyers, as in school and out 
 he labored over his compositions, and as he read the 
 few books that he could borrow, one great need im 
 pressed itself more and more upon him. He must learn 
 how to make perfectly plain to others the thoughts 
 that men and books suggested to him. Often he would 
 hear words whose meaning he could not understand 
 and about which his father would not let him ask 
 questions, or he would find in his books things that 
 nobody could explain to him, and as he struggled to 
 make these things clear to his own mind, he saw how 
 
24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 necessary it was to use the right words in order to 
 make his thought plain to others. " I remember," he 
 once said, " how, when a mere child, I used to get irri 
 tated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not 
 understand. I do not think I ever got angry at any 
 thing else in my life; but that always disturbed my 
 temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to 
 my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of 
 an evening with my father, and spending no small part 
 of the night walking up and down and trying to make 
 out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to 
 me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, although I tried 
 to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea, until I had 
 caught it ; and when I thought I had got it, I was not 
 satisfied until I had repeated it over and over ; until 
 I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, 
 for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind 
 of passion with me, and it has stuck by me ; for I am 
 never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till 
 I have bounded it north, and bounded it south, and 
 bounded it east, and bounded it west." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 
 
 THE time had come for restless Thomas Lincoln to 
 undertake another migration. The earnings of the In 
 diana farm, added to what money father and son could 
 save from their wages, had not been enough in four 
 teen years to enable them, with their ways of doing 
 business, to pay the price of two dollars an acre for 
 which the father had bought the place. Thomas Lin 
 coln had begun to hear stories of the richness of the 
 Illinois prairie land. The tide of westward emigration 
 was setting in once more, stronger than ever, and as 
 usual Thomas Lincoln was drifting with the tide. 
 
 The three families of Lincoln, Hanks, and John 
 ston, with Abraham Lincoln as chief teamster, got 
 their worldly goods together in February, 1830, and 
 started their ox-cart caravan on its westward journey. 
 The State toward which they were bent bore the In 
 dian name, Illinois, which means " the land of full- 
 grown men." Surely, here was a country in which the 
 young Lincoln, now six feet and four inches tall, would 
 find a place for himself. Abraham was twenty-one 
 years old, and his own master. He laid in an outfit of 
 notions, and as they traveled through the new country, 
 sold them to the farmers and, by good bargaining, 
 doubled his original capital of thirty dollars. 
 
 The roads were heavy with frost and mud. At the 
 fords for there were no bridges the ice had to be 
 broken to let the wheels pass. The first of the com 
 pany to get into trouble was a small dog that at one 
 
26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 of these crossings was left behind and ran up and down 
 the farther bank protesting piteously. " I could not 
 endure the idea of abandoning even a dog," Lincoln 
 said, " so I took off my shoes, waded across the stream, 
 and triumphantly returned with the shivering animal 
 under my arm. His frantic leaps of joy and gratitude 
 amply repaid me for all the exposure I had undergone." 
 After helping the others establish themselves in their 
 prairie home, Abraham Lincoln found his way to the 
 village of New Salem, on the banks of the Sangamon. 
 Here he entered the employ of Denton Off utt, by turns 
 conducting his general store and flouring-mlll, and 
 finally undertaking for him a trading expedition to 
 New Orleans. For this journey he built a flatboat and 
 loaded it with bacon and farm produce, which he was 
 to sell down the river. The venture was a financial 
 success, and won for the young man Mr. Offutt s enthu 
 siastic good will. Three years before, he had made 
 a similar journey for Mr. Gentry, so that the Missis 
 sippi was not strange to him. The woodsman s habit 
 of close observation now led him, unconsciously, to 
 note the physical features of the country through which 
 the great river was carrying him, so that his retentive 
 memory enabled him thirty years later to follow the 
 movements of the vessels of Farragut and Porter and 
 the armies of General Grant as they closed in upon 
 Vicksburg and permitted " the Father of Waters 
 again to go unvexed to the sea." At New Orleans he 
 attended the slave auction. Here he saw husbands and 
 wives separated and children taken from their mothers 
 and sold to strangers. The unspeakable cruelty of it 
 all stirred the heart of the young man, who, as a boy, 
 had been willing to fight his playmates to save a turtle 
 from abuse, and who, as a man, had waded barefooted 
 
THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 27 
 
 through the ice rather than abandon even a little dog, 
 When he returned to Illinois, it was with a deepened 
 sense of the injustice of human slavery. The sight 
 of men and women in chains was still a "continued 
 torment " to him. 
 
 In his new home, as in Indiana, he was the strongest 
 aian in all the countryside. Wherever men gathered, 
 his admiring employer, Mr. Offutt, was given to brag 
 ging of his clerk s strength, thus involving him in ath 
 letic contests. One of these rough-and-tumble affairs 
 proved more important than Lincoln imagined. Jack 
 Armstrong, the champion of the near-by settlement, 
 Clary s Grove, had heard Mr. Offutt s boasts of young 
 Lincoln s prowess until he could stand it no longer. 
 He challenged Lincoln to a wrestling-match, which a 
 touch of foul play converted into a fist-fight, and in 
 which the champion of Clary s Grove bade fair to be 
 defeated. Before he had finished, Lincoln had to whip 
 the entire gang, one at a time, but he did it so thor 
 oughly and with such good humor that he won their 
 hearty friendship and kept it ever afterward. 
 
 In 1832, war with the Indians broke out in north 
 ern Illinois, and troops were called for to march against 
 Black Hawk and his Indian braves. Lincoln, being 
 out of a job, was among the first to enlist. Through the 
 help of his new friends from Clary s Grove he was 
 chosen captain. This was his first assurance that the 
 thing he had always most desired, the good will of his 
 fellow men, was his. The election to the captaincy 
 was a success, as he declared long afterward, " which 
 gave me more pleasure than any I have had since." 
 By the time Captain Lincoln s company reached the 
 front the war was over. The leisure time of this famous 
 military campaign Lincoln spent in athletic sports, 
 
28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 running foot-races, and jumping and wrestling for the 
 championship among the troops. The months out of 
 doors, in daily touch with thousands of other soldiers, 
 the close companionship, in camp and on the march, 
 with so many young and active comrades in arms, 
 3trengthened in him the social spirit that was always a 
 dominating characteristic, and encouraged him on his 
 return to enter the campaign for the legislature. 
 
 He was now twenty-three years old, and he had but 
 ten days in which to get over the district and make 
 the campaign. He introduced himself to the voters in 
 a way that won their respect : "I was born ... in 
 the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or 
 popular relatives or friends to recommend me. ... If 
 the good people in their wisdom see fit to keep me in 
 the background, I have been too familiar with disap 
 pointment to be very much chagrined." His first cam 
 paign speech was made at an out-of-door meeting, 
 where he had to restore order by getting down from 
 the platform and thrashing a disturber. This won him 
 tha full sympathy of the crowd. The speech that fol 
 lowed is simple and boyish : " Fellow citizens, I pre 
 sume you know who I am. I am humble Abraham 
 Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to be 
 come a candidate for the legislature. My politics are 
 short and sweet, like the old woman s dance. I am in 
 favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal 
 improvement system and a high protective tariff. These 
 are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, 
 I shall be thankful ; if not, it will be all the same." 
 
 Lincoln lost the election, but in his own neighbor 
 hood of New Salem he received all but three votes out 
 of over two hundred. The defeat, instead of discour 
 aging him, only aroused his ambition. He realized that 
 
THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 29 
 
 he must keep on studying men, and that he must know 
 as much as the men knew with whom he had to deal. 
 He made friends with Mentor Graham, the village 
 school-teacher, and being determined to learn how to 
 make what he had to say perfectly clear to the most 
 ignorant of his hearers, he borrowed an English gram 
 mar of Mr. Graham and began to study the science of 
 language. From others he secured the works of Robert 
 Burns and Shakespeare, which he read until he had 
 many of the better passages by heart. His unlettered 
 friends used to laugh at him as they watched him with 
 one of these books in his hand, lying in the shade of 
 a tree-trunk near the store where he worked, with his 
 bare feet above his head, too absorbed to notice pass 
 ers-by or to think of possible customers. From the 
 poet of the common people, from Shakespeare, and 
 from the Bible, which he kept always near at hand 
 and studied and memorized in his hours of leisure, he 
 was getting the mastery of straightforward speech and 
 becoming familiar with the simple, vigorous words that 
 men have always understood. Thus was he fitting him 
 self to become one of the world s masters of English 
 literary style. 
 
 With the grammar to study and the masterpieces 
 of English literature for daily companionship, he had 
 something now to occupy all his thoughts and take his 
 mind away from his day-dreams. But how was he to 
 make a living in the meanwhile? If he continued in the 
 service of other men, his time would not be his own 
 and his studies would suffer. When the opportunity 
 came, not long afterward, to buy the New Salem store 
 on credit, in partnership with a man named Berry, it 
 offered him just what he most wished, the possi 
 bility of making a living and pursuing his studies at 
 
30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 the same time. But the fortunes of New Salem soon 
 began to decline, his partner went to the bad, and the 
 store of Berry and Lincoln " winked out," leaving 
 unpaid a mass of notes whose magnitude led Lincoln 
 to call them " the national debt," but all of which he 
 finally paid in full. 
 
 It was while he was trying to conduct this unfortu 
 nate business enterprise that a happy accident put into 
 jris hands his first law-book, and strengthened his deter 
 mination to become a lawyer. As he tells it : " A man 
 who was migrating to the west drove up with a wagon 
 which contained his household plunder. He asked if 
 I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room, 
 and which he said contained nothing of special value. 
 I did not want it, but to oblige him, I paid a half-dol 
 lar for it, put it away, and forgot all about it. Some 
 time after, I came upon the barrel, and emptying it 
 upon the floor, I found at the bottom of the rubbish 
 a complete edition of Blackstone s Commentaries. I 
 began to read those famous works and I had plenty 
 of time, for during the long summer days, when the 
 farmers were busy with their crops, my customers 
 were few and far between. The more I read, the more 
 intensely interested I became. Never in my life was 
 my mind so absorbed. I read until I devoured them." 
 
 The failure of Berry and Lincoln brought the young 
 student face to face once more with the problem of 
 making a living without giving up his studies. Just at 
 this crisis came an appointment as postmaster at the 
 hands of President Jackson. For a few months he 
 carried the mail in his high hat and read the news* 
 papers that came into his keeping. Then came the first 
 profitable employment he ever had. John Calhoun, 
 the public surveyor, a Democratic official, needed an 
 
THE LAND OF FULL-GROWN MEN 31 
 
 assistant on whose honesty and intelligence he could 
 rely. Although Lincoln was a Whig, Mr. Calhoun 
 persuaded him to study surveying and take the place, 
 assuring him that he might retain his political inde 
 pendence. Following unconsciously in the footsteps of 
 George Washington, he soon mastered the science of 
 surveying, and found himself for the first time earning 
 more money than the bare needs of life required. As 
 postmaster and as surveyor he was enlarging his ac 
 quaintance and winning the regard of men. Already 
 he had become known as " honest Abe Lincoln." 
 
 During these years of struggle there came into his 
 life a few months of great happiness. When he was 
 twenty-three years of age, he met and loved Ann Rut- 
 ledge, a fair-haired, delicate girl of nineteen, and in time 
 he won her love. She had an air of gentleness and 
 distinction and a mind of unusual clearness and power. 
 As soon as he could become a lawyer and be able to 
 provide a home, they were to marry. Suddenly a dread 
 ful illness came and she died. The shock that followed 
 her death plunged Lincoln into such melancholy that 
 his friends were afraid he would lose his mind. He 
 went often to the spot where, he declared, his heart 
 was buried. One stormy night he cried out in his 
 sorrow : " I cannot forget. The thought of the snow 
 and the rain on her grave fills me with indescribable 
 grief." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 
 
 IN 1834, the young man of twenty-five, who had been 
 common laborer, farm-hand, carpenter, ferryman, flat- 
 boatman, peddler, grocer s clerk, soldier, unsuccessful 
 merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, and, all the way 
 along, dreamer and thinktr and student, became for a 
 second time a candidate for the legislature, and was 
 successful. 
 
 His work as lawmaker satisfied the people, and he 
 was elected again in 1836. The announcement of his 
 candidacy for the legislature in 1836 contained one 
 political principle which proved him a statesman rather 
 than a politician. It was : " If elected, I shall consider 
 the whole people of Sangamon my constituents, as 
 well those that oppose as those that support me." 
 
 In the legislative session of 1837, he brought about 
 the enactment of a law which removed the State capi 
 tal from Vandalia to Springfield. This victory showed 
 that, while other legislators were playing party politics, 
 he had learned how to get things done. 
 
 Far more significant than this venture in practical 
 politics was the protest he made against slavery, which 
 he caused to be recorded in the legislative journals, anc? 
 to which he succeeded in getting one other representa 
 tive to sign his name. At this time the negro had few 
 friends. Those who believed in ending human slavery 
 at once and forever seemed not to understand that 
 what they were proposing would not be possible in any 
 lawful way, and their efforts at destroying that great 
 
LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 33 
 
 evil not only made them feared and hated, but put off 
 the longer the reform for which they were laboring so 
 earnestly and so unwisely. Lincoln saw this, and yet 
 both his conscience and his heart rebelled against 
 slavery as an institution which, though lawful and 
 therefore not to be overthrown by violence, was yet 
 a great moral wrong. His feeling in the matter was 
 expressed in a protest containing the following words: 
 " Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery 
 having passed both branches of the General Assembly 
 at its present session, the undersigned hereby protest 
 against the passage of the same. They believe that the 
 institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and 
 bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doc 
 trines tends rather to increase than abate its evils." 
 It required courage to make this protest at a time 
 when those who expressed views on slavery even as 
 moderate as these were unpopular. 
 
 Meanwhile, Lincoln had been diligently reading law, 
 and in 1837 his great ambition was attained he 
 passed his examination for admission to the bar. 
 
 The removal of the State capital that same year 
 to Springfield, chiefly through his own efforts, as we 
 have seen, led Lincoln to believe that in Springfield 
 he would succeed best in the practice of his new pro 
 fession. Putting into his saddle-bags a little clothing 
 and two or three law-books, he borrowed a horse and 
 rode to the new capital. At the store of Joshua Speed, 
 who was to become his intimate friend, he figured on 
 the cost of furnishing a bedroom ; but the price, seven 
 teen dollars, was more than he had, so he asked for 
 credit until Christmas, adding, " If my experiment here 
 as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail 
 in that, I will probably never pay you at all." He 
 
34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 looked so utterly gloomy that Speed offered to share 
 quarters with him. Lincoln took the saddle-bags up 
 stairs, laid them on the floor, and came down, this time 
 beaming with smiles as he exclaimed, " Well, Speed, 
 I m moved." 
 
 At one end of Speed s store was a great fireplace 
 about which the men of Springfield were wont to gather. 
 Here the new lodger spent many spare hours arguing 
 with the leaders of public opinion about the religious 
 and political questions of the day. Here he met Ste 
 phen A. Douglas, then a rising young politician of 
 opposite political faith, whose after-life, with its rival 
 ries, and its bitternesses, and its final loyal friendship, 
 was to be so strangely interwoven with his own. Here 
 a debating tournament was arranged, in which all the 
 leading speakers were to take part. It was held in the 
 Presbyterian church, where they could have a suitable 
 audience, and it was at this gathering that Lincoln and 
 Douglas had their first serious public debate. Some of 
 the younger men in this group organized the literary 
 society of Springfield in which Lincoln was to become 
 a leading spirit. Here, also, he became famous as a 
 teller of stories. 
 
 The practice of law develops in the beginner an 
 infinite patience. Its rewards come slowly. The young 
 lawyer had many friends, for he had a genius for win 
 ning the good will of men. From the first his success 
 was assured, if only he could be patient long enough. 
 Those were days when law-books were few. The attor 
 ney who won his cases needed a clear head and an 
 understanding of a few principles of law, but, more 
 than this, he must be able to win verdicts from jurors, 
 who almost always were men of scanty education and 
 many prejudices. Lincoln was not yet learned in the 
 
LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 35 
 
 law, but he understood human nature. In time it came 
 to be known that no lawyer gained more readily the 
 confidence of a jury and none won more verdicts than 
 " honest Abe Lincoln." The experiment, as he called 
 it, was a success, and his place at the bar was estab 
 lished. Yet while he was winning verdicts he contin 
 ued his studies. " The way to know the law," he said, 
 "is very simple, though laborious and tedious. It is 
 only to get books and read and study them carefully. 
 Work, work, work, is the main thing." 
 
 The best way to build up a practice and so make 
 the problem of a livelihood less serious seemed to lie 
 in the pursuit of politics, for in politics he could gain 
 a larger acquaintance, do favors for others, and so find 
 clients. The lawyers of that day were nearly all poli 
 ticians. Thus his interest in politics steadily increased, 
 while his influence among his fellows was growing 
 wider. In his campaigns he met all sorts and conditions 
 of men, interested himself in their affairs, and discussed 
 with them questions of government, national and 
 state, displaying in his opinions much sound judg 
 ment. In the places of influence and power which he 
 hoped some day to fill he expected opportunities for 
 wider service to the community of which he was a 
 part. 
 
 In 1838 and in 1840, he was again elected to the 
 legislature. In each of these sessions, the Whig party 
 proposed him for presiding officer of the House of 
 Representatives of which he was a member. In 1840, 
 he was their candidate for presidential elector, to 
 vote for William Henry Harrison for President. The 
 men of Illinois had learned by this time to trust his 
 rugged honesty, for in politics, as in the wrestling- 
 matches of years ago, he " played fair." To the well- 
 
36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 dressed and somewhat aristocratic society of Springfield 
 Lincoln still presented the appearance of an overgrown, 
 uncultivated, young countryman. He was young and 
 poor, and he still realized how little he knew. But men 
 no longer despised him for his youth or his ignorance, 
 nor dared ridicule his poverty. Through the practice 
 he had had long ago in his Indiana boyhood in making 
 stump speeches and in public debate, as well as in his 
 later experiences in the Springfield debating society, 
 and in his discussions in the tavern and at the coun 
 try store, he had become a master of debate, and was 
 abundantly able to take care of himself in a running 
 discussion that called for a ready response to every 
 interruption, whether looked for or not. 
 
 In Springfield a prominent citizen and legislator 
 named Forquer had built himself a new house upon 
 which he had set up a lightning-rod, the only one 
 in that part of the world. This man had recently de 
 serted the Whig party and become a Democrat, and 
 Jiis disloyalty to his former principles had just been 
 rewarded by appointment to an office that brought him 
 a good income, but cost him the respect of many of his 
 former associates. Lincoln s friend, Speed, tells how, 
 after one of Lincoln s campaign speeches, Forquer 
 asked leave to be heard. He commenced by saying 
 that the young man, Lincoln, would have to be "taken 
 down," and that he was sorry the task had fallen to 
 him. He went on to answer Lincoln s speech in a way 
 that showed how much older and wiser he thought 
 himself than the young upstart whose ambition it 
 had become his duty to rebuke. Lincoln waited until 
 Forquer had finished, but his flashing eye showed that 
 he did not intend to accept such treatment meekly. He 
 closed his reply to Forquer by saying : " The gentle- 
 
LAWYER AND LAWMAKER 37 
 
 man has seen fit to allude to my being a young man ; 
 but he forgets that I am older in years than I am in 
 the tricks and trades of politicians. I desire to live, 
 and I desire place and distinction ; but I would rather 
 die now, than, like the gentleman, live to see the day 
 that I would change my politics for an office worth three 
 thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to 
 erect a lightning-rod to protect a guilty conscience 
 from an offended God." 
 
 It was in one of these campaign speeches that Lin 
 coln was interrupted by some one in the audience who, 
 thinking to humiliate him by reminding the people of 
 his poverty, called out in the midst of his speech : " Mr. 
 Lincoln, is it true that you entered this State bare 
 footed, driving a yoke of oxen ? " After a pause, the 
 speaker replied that he thought he could prove the fact 
 by at least a dozen men in the crowd, any one of whom 
 was more respectable than his questioner. 
 
 Hard as it was to be laughed at, it was not for 
 Abraham Lincoln to become embittered by these un 
 kind attacks, for through years of exposure to the real 
 hardships of life, he had learned patience. As he once 
 said : " I have endured a great deal of ridicule without 
 much malice ; and I have received a great deal of kind 
 ness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it a " 
 But ridicule was not all that he had had to bear. He 
 had endured suffering and sorrow ; and he had walked 
 through the valley of the shadow of death. Yet through 
 it all he had kept his faith in a destiny which sorrow 
 could not mar. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 
 
 SPRINGFIELD, in 1840, was an ambitious country 
 town of about twenty-five hundred inhabitants. There 
 was some wealth and some " flourishing around in 
 carriages," as Lincoln put it. Among those who had 
 money the young lawyer would have had little reason 
 to expect to be treated especially well, for he was " poor, 
 without the means of hiding his poverty." Fortunately 
 he had no false pride ; he was not ashamed that he 
 had nothing, nor did he boast of it in his speeches. The 
 men of Springfield respected him for what he had 
 accomplished. In society, although he was quiet and 
 timid, he was a welcome guest, because he talked intel 
 ligently on the subjects that interested people, and his 
 droll sayings were often repeated and laughed at. It 
 seems odd that the rough flatboatman of ten years 
 before should be put on the cotillion committee to 
 manage the fashionable dances of the winter s season, 
 but the fact was that he was liked by everybody, and 
 in that society a man was not despised if he had 
 real ability and was willing to help others and able to 
 interest them. 
 
 In the social life of the little town a young Demo 
 cratic politician, James Shields, afterward a United 
 States Senator, and by President Lincoln s own ap 
 pointment a general in the Union Army, was making 
 himself disliked by his airs of superiority. Lincoln, 
 whose spirit of fun was apt to get him into trouble, 
 tfrote for the Whig paper a latter which he signed 
 
MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 39 
 
 "Aunt Rebecca," and in which he made sport of 
 Shields. This letter Miss Mary Todd and another 
 Springfield belle followed up with one or two more of 
 the same sort. They made the people laugh at Shields, 
 and they made Shields angry. To protect the young 
 women, Lincoln let Shields believe that he was wholly 
 to blame. Shields challenged Lincoln to fight a duel. 
 Lincoln, being the challenged party, had the choice of 
 weapons and chose broadswords. When we remember 
 that Lincoln was a giant, six feet and four inches tail, 
 and strong enough to lift a load of six hundred pounds, 
 and that Shields was a little man with short arms and 
 short legs, we can believe that in calling for broadswords 
 Lincoln was really preventing a fight, for he knew that 
 Shields s sword could not touch him at any point, while 
 he with his gigantic arms could disarm his opponent 
 in a moment. Ic was his way of " laughing the case 
 out of court." The duel never took place. Lincoln had 
 made Shields look very foolish, but he had gone far 
 enough in the affair to be heartily ashamed of himself. 
 One lasting result of the Shields duel was that it 
 brought Lincoln and Mary Todd together. Not long 
 afterward they were married. Mrs. Lincoln was young 
 and handsome and proud, and she was ambitious both 
 for herself and for her husband. She had accepted 
 attentions from Stephen A. Douglas, the most admired 
 public man in Illinois, but she was saying already, 
 what her friends thought very foolish, that she had pre 
 ferred Lincoln because he would live to become Presi 
 dent of the United States. They had four boys, only 
 one of whom, Robert Todd Lincoln, lived to manhood. 
 The boys were their father s comrades, and brought 
 into his very serious and sometimes unhappy life much 
 genuine fun. 
 
10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 For eight years Lincoln had served the people of 
 Illinois in the State legislature. As the nominee of the 
 Whig party for presidential elector, he had spoken in 
 all parts of the State in the exciting Harrison cam 
 paign of 1840. The people everywhere wanted to hear 
 him, for his speeches were carefully prepared, and they 
 gave the people something to think about. In Congress, 
 at Washington, things were being done that made men 
 anxious and uneasy, and no one understood better than 
 Lincoln the meaning of events, or saw more clearly 
 than he what the future had in store for the American 
 people. 
 
 In 1844, the Whig party nominated Henry Clay for 
 President. Excepting only Andrew Jackson, no pub 
 lic man had been so loved as Henry Clay. He was one 
 of the greatest of American orators, and school-boys 
 liked to declaim his speeches on Friday afternoons. 
 But he was more than an orator ; for he was the head 
 of a great political party, and, notwithstanding the fact 
 that he represented a slave State in Congress, he was 
 in sympathy with freedom. This power he had been able 
 to use to keep the friends and the enemies of slavery 
 from plunging the country into war. It was through his 
 efforts, twenty-four years before, that an agreement 
 between North and South had been reached which 
 men had hoped would end the slavery struggle for all 
 time. This was known as the Missouri Compromise. 
 Missouri had asked admission into the Union, and 
 the Northern people objected because Missouri would 
 have to come in as a slave State. The Missouri Com 
 promise provided that Missouri should be admitted as 
 a slave State, on condition that, in the future, all new 
 States lying north of the south line of Missouri and 
 west of its west line should come in as free States. It 
 
MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 41 
 
 was largely because of his connection with the Mis 
 souri Compromise that Henry Clay was so greatly 
 loved. 
 
 When Clay was nominated, Lincoln was no longer 
 in the legislature. He had become more interested in 
 national politics, and his services being needed by the 
 Whig party, he was again put on the electoral ticket 
 and sent to make speeches in every part of Illinois. 
 The people outside the State were asking for him, and 
 he went back to the old home country in Indiana, near 
 Rockport and Gentryville. To be able to campaign for 
 Henry Clay, whom he idolized, and to go back to Indi 
 ana, where he was remembered as " Josiah Crawford s 
 hired man," and find himself respected as an orator 
 and a party leader, seemed to him to be the realization 
 of his fondest ambition. Fourteen years had made great 
 changes in the young laborer who had begun to find 
 his fortune in Illinois, and they had changed the little 
 circle of his boyhood friends. In his sensitive nature 
 these changes stirred a poetic feeling that found ex 
 pression in some verses that he wrote on " Memory," 
 at his old home at Gentryville. 
 
 Among the people of the Northern States there had 
 been growing a feeling that it was wicked to keep 
 human beings in slavery. Along the Ohio River and 
 the north line of Maryland was a boundary, known as 
 Mason and Dixon s Line, which separated the free 
 States from the slave States. South of this line the 
 States were represented in Congress by men who fa 
 vored slavery, and who, because the feeling in the North 
 was growing more and more unfriendly, were looking 
 in every direction for some means of increasing the 
 number of States in which slavery would be permitted. 
 They knew they could not persuade the States north 
 
42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 of Mason and Dixon s Line to permit slavery within 
 their borders, but they believed that if they could get 
 slavery introduced into the Territories, they would in 
 time admit these Territories as slave States. As every 
 State sent two Senators to Congress, the more Sena 
 tors there were who favored slavery, the longer would 
 the slave States keep their control in national affairs. 
 There had been more free States than slave States, but 
 while practically everybody in the slave States favored 
 slavery, the feeling in the free States was divided. 
 In the free States, some men, known as abolitionists^ 
 wished to destroy slavery at once all over the land, 
 while others were content if they could keep slavery 
 from being introduced into the Territories. In the free 
 States, too, there were large numbers of men who sym 
 pathized with the South. The aim of the slaveholders, 
 then, was to push slavery into the Territories, and 
 finally into all the States, while the aim of the men 
 with whom Lincoln had allied himself was to keep 
 slavery where it was, in the hope that with the admis 
 sion of the new Territories as free States the power of 
 slavery in national politics would grow gradually but 
 surely less. 
 
 Many of the slaves in the South were well cared 
 for ; probably only a few masters were cruel to their 
 negroes. But wherever there were slaves, whether 
 treated kindly or harshly, under the law the negro had 
 no rights which the white man was bound to respect. 
 It was not because the masters were cruel, but because 
 the law permitted them to do what they pleased with 
 their slaves, treating them as property and not as hu 
 man beings, and because this view of the law seemed 
 morally wrong, that the movement against slavery was 
 becoming more powerful in the Northern States. It 
 
MARRIAGE AND CONGRESS 43 
 
 was not because the slaveholders actually did wrong, 
 but because the law permitted them to do wrong, that 
 men were beginning to protest against the extension of 
 slavery. 
 
 Henry Clay, the Whig candidate for the presidency, 
 was defeated by James K. Polk of Tennessee, a friend 
 of the slaveholders. The election of Polk encouraged 
 the politicians in the Southern States to bring on a 
 war with Mexico, in the expectation that the success 
 of the war would add Texas to the Union as a slave 
 State. It was a war for the extension of slavery which 
 Lincoln and his friends believed was altogether wrong. 
 Lincoln determined to go to Congress and fight the 
 proposed wrong. He was elected in 1846, and was the 
 only Whig Congressman from Illinois. His eight years 
 in the State legislature, together with his close study 
 of politics and the history of his country, helped make 
 his influence felt at Washington. His old rival, Doug 
 las, was elected the same year from another district, 
 but before his term commenced he was made Senator. 
 
 When Lincoln got to Washington, he found the slave- 
 holding interests protected by law on all sides. Although 
 the Whigs were in the majority, there was nothing they 
 could do to put an end to slavery. The city of Wash 
 ington was in a little District ten miles square, sur 
 rounded by the slave territory of Virginia and Mary 
 land. Just in sight of his boarding-place Lincoln saw 
 what he described as " a sort of negro livery stable," 
 where black men and women were bought and sold. 
 This District was under the control of Congress. So 
 Lincoln conceived the idea of persuading the people 
 of the District to sell their slaves and of paying for 
 them out of the United States Treasury, and forbidding 
 slavery in the District of Columbia for all time to come. 
 
44 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 But Lincoln s plan failed. People did not yet fully 
 realize the wickedness of slavery ; Lincoln saw that 
 something more must be done to awaken men s con 
 sciences, or slavery would not only keep its hold on 
 the South and in the new State of Texas, but would 
 spread into the Territories and some day even into the 
 free States. The Democratic party was in power and 
 was controlled by the South, and the Whig party was 
 unwilling to take sides on the great question. A few 
 brave men were opposing slavery, but there was no 
 political party organized to carry on the fight. The 
 Republican party was not yet born. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 RIDING THE CIRCUIT 
 
 WITH Texas admitted into the Union as a slave 
 State, the troubles between the South and the North 
 seemed at an end. The South had gained what it 
 wanted, while the North still had the assurance that 
 the Missouri Compromise would save Kansas and Ne 
 braska and all the new Territories to freedom. Politics 
 settled down to a struggle among the politicians for 
 the offices. Lincoln went home to Springfield and took 
 up again the practice of the law. 
 
 For eight years he devoted his whole time to his 
 profession. Innumerable stories are told of his law 
 practice during these years. The judge, David Davis, 
 afterward a justice of the Supreme Court of the 
 United States, held court in fourteen different coun 
 ties in central Illinois. Every week he would move 
 on to the next county seat, the leading members of 
 the bar going with him. They rode horseback over the 
 prairie, and filled in the spare hours as they rode, or 
 consoled themselves for the poor fare at the country 
 taverns, by telling stories or talking politics. The law 
 yers who rode the circuit with Lincoln and Judge 
 Davis were men of ability, who had to try their cases 
 and argue their points of law without the help of books. 
 " Rough-and-ready " practitioners, they had learned to 
 reason out their cases upon broad principles, and to 
 take care of themselves and of their client s interests 
 by thinking clearly and quickly upon their feet. Lin 
 coln seemed particularly well fitted to succeed undef 
 
46 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 these conditions, and his reputation as a lawyer grew 
 steadily. 
 
 It is said of him that he could try a good case better 
 than any of the others, but that, when convinced that 
 his client was in the wrong, he would withdraw from 
 the case rather than show the court, as he was sure 
 to do, that he believed his client was wrong.. Once a 
 mean man came to engage him to sue a widow. After 
 hearing his story Lincoln said : " Yes, there is a rea 
 sonable chance of gaining your case for you ! I can set 
 a whole township at loggerheads. I can distress a poor 
 widow and her six fatherless children, and so get for 
 you six hundred dollars which rightfully belongs as 
 much to her as to you. But you should remember that 
 some things that are legally right are not morally 
 right. I shall not take your case, but I 11 give you 
 some advice for nothing. You seem to be an active, 
 energetic man. I would advise you to try your hand at 
 making six hundred dollars some other way." 
 
 He was fair and even generous to the other side 
 unless he believed there was fraud or meanness for 
 him to punish. Then he was merciless. A paper of his 
 has been preserved which gives the notes of a closing 
 speech he made to a jury. It was a case in which he 
 was attorney for the widow of a Revolutionary soldier 
 who had been cheated out of her pension money by 
 a dishonest agent. His notes for his argument read : 
 " No contract. Not professional services. Unrea 
 sonable charge. Money retained by defendant. 
 Not given by plaintiff. Revolutionary War. De 
 scribe Valley Forge, privations, ice, soldier s bleeding 
 feet. Plaintiff s husband. Soldier leaving home for 
 army. SKIN DEFENDANT. Close." Lincoln was 
 deeply stirred in delivering this speech, and the juij/ 
 
RIDING THE CIRCUIT 47 
 
 were in tears, while the miserable pension agent whom 
 Lincoln had " skinned " suffered tortures under the 
 operation. 
 
 Lincoln was often criticised by the other lawyers 
 because he charged such small fees. They declared that 
 it was no wonder he was poor. On one occasion Judge 
 Davis put him through a mock trial for this offense, 
 and, in fun, censured him at the bar of the court. On 
 another occasion he embarrassed one of his law part 
 ners by making him pay back half of a fee that a 
 client had willingly paid. " The money comes out of 
 the pocket of a poor crazy girl," Lincoln said, "and I 
 would rather starve than swindle her in this way." 
 
 He was absolutely fair with the court. Once a part 
 ner prepared for filing in a case an answer which was 
 not founded on facts, and Lincoln made him withdraw 
 it. " You know it s a sham," he said, "and a sham is 
 very often but another name for a lie. Don t let it go 
 on record. The cursed thing may come staring us in 
 the face long after this suit has been forgotten." 
 
 He had heard the word " demonstrate " as one of the 
 things that were done in geometry. He made up his 
 mind, as he had in his boyhood, that he would learn 
 how to demonstrate his points, that is, make them so 
 clear that men could not help accepting them. He got 
 himself a copy of Euclid s geometry and, as he rode 
 the circuit, he committed to memory many of Euclid s 
 demonstrations. He was still learning how to bound 
 his thought on all sides. His speech became so crystal 
 clear that men said, " If Lincoln is in the case, there 
 will be no trouble in understanding what it is all 
 about." He once said to his young partner, Mr. Hern- 
 don, as he found fault with his high-flown, oratorical 
 way of arguing his cases : " Billy, don t shoot too high 
 
48 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 aim lower, and the common people will understand 
 you. They are the ones you want to reach. The edu 
 cated and refined people will understand you anyway." 
 His reading and observation had taught him that one 
 of the best ways to make a point stick in memory is to 
 illustrate it by a story, and he constantly told stories, 
 both in his speeches and conversation. Court in the old 
 eighth circuit, with Lincoln and his colleagues travel 
 ing about, eating and sleeping together, and trying 
 their cases together, day after day, week in and week 
 out, and telling stories wherever they met, was not a 
 dignified, solemn place like the chambers of the Su 
 preme Court of the United States. Lincoln was irre 
 pressible. When he came on the scene he would intro 
 duce himself in this fashion, " Well, fellows, are n t 
 you glad I ve come ? " and then, out of his unlimited 
 store, he would bring forth a new story that would 
 sometimes make the good-natured judge adjourn court 
 to hear it. 
 
 The clerk of the court tells how he was once fined 
 for laughing out in the midst of a trial. " Lincoln had 
 just come in," he tells us, " and leaning over my desk 
 had told me a story so irresistibly funny that I broke 
 into a loud laugh. Judge Davis called me to order in 
 haste, as he said sternly, 4 This must be stopped. Mr. 
 Lincoln, you are constantly disturbing this court with 
 your stories. Mr. Clerk, you may fine yourself five 
 dollars for your disturbance. I apologized, but told 
 the judge the story was worth the money. A few min 
 utes later he called me to him. 4 What was that story 
 Lincoln told you ? he asked. I told him, and he 
 laughed aloud in spite of himself. 4 You need not pay 
 that fine, he said." 
 
 In the earlier years of his practice. Lincoln used his 
 
RIDING THE CIRCUIT 49 
 
 stories with great effect in his jury speeches. Once he 
 was trying to make plain that his client, on trial for 
 striking a man, had done the deed in an effort to defend 
 himself, and illustrated his point by saying that his 
 client was in the fix of the man who while carrying a 
 pitchfork along a country road was suddenly attacked 
 by a vicious dog. In the trouble that followed, the 
 prongs of the pitchfork killed the dog. " What made 
 you kill my dog ? " the farmer angrily cried. " What 
 made him try to bite me?" "But why didn t you go 
 at him with the other end of the pitchfork ? " " Why 
 did n t he come at me with the other end of the dog ? " 
 The jury saw what self-defense meant. 
 
 In one of his cases he made fun of an opponent s 
 long speeches. " My friend," he said, " is peculiarly 
 constructed. When he begins to speak, his brain stops 
 working. He makes me think of a little old steamboat 
 we used to have on the Sangamon River in the early 
 days. It had a five-foot boiler and a seven-foot whistle, 
 and every time it whistled, it stopped." 
 
 His practical sense and his understanding of human 
 nature enabled him to save the life of the son of his 
 old Clary s Grove friend, Jack Armstrong, who was on 
 trial for murder. Lincoln, learning of it, went to the 
 old mother who had been kind to him in the days of his 
 boyhood poverty and promised her that he would get 
 her boy free. The witnesses were sure that Armstrong 
 was guilty, and one of them declared that he had seen 
 the fatal blow struck. It was late at night, he said, and 
 the light of the full moon had made it possible for him 
 to see the crime committed. Lincoln, on cross-exami 
 nation, asked him only questions enough to make the 
 jury see that it was the full moon that made it possible 
 for the witness to see what occurred, got him to say two 
 
50 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 or three times that he was sure of it, and seemed to give 
 up any further effort to save the boy. But when the 
 evidence was finished and Lincoln s time came to make 
 his argument, he called for an almanac, which the clerk 
 of the court had ready for him, and handed it to the 
 jury. They saw at once that on the night of the mur 
 der there was no moon at all. They were satisfied that 
 the witness had told what was not true. Lincoln s case 
 was won. 
 
 He argued his cases in a straightforward way, with 
 out oratorical effort, shunning long words and strange 
 expressions, using the language of the Bible, or illus 
 trating what he had to say with an apt story, talking 
 with the court and the jury as a man would talk famil 
 iarly with a group of old friends and neighbors, and 
 " demonstrating " his points as Euclid had taught him. 
 
 Mr. Herndon, who continued as Lincoln s law part 
 ner during the later years of his life, has told of his 
 way of keeping a crowd amused: "I have seen him 
 surrounded by as many as two or three hundred per 
 sons, all deeply interested in the outcome of a story. 
 His power of mimicry and his manner of recital were 
 remarkable. All his features seemed to take part in 
 the performance. As he neared the point of the joke, 
 or story, every vestige of seriousness disappeared from 
 his face. His little gray eyes sparkled ; a smile seemed 
 to gather up, curtain-like, the corners of his mouth ; his 
 frame quivered with suppressed excitement ; and when 
 the point or 4 nub of the story, as he called it, came, 
 no one s laugh was heartier than his." 
 
 In those days he seemed not to know, or care, how 
 he looked. He was poor, and he had a growing family. 
 His very poverty made friends for him. His dress was 
 simple. His hat was rusty and faded with age. He 
 
RIDING THE CIRCUIT 51 
 
 wore a gray shawl. His coat hung loosely on his gaunt 
 frame, and his trousers were always too short. He 
 carried a faded green umbrella, with the letters " A. 
 Lincoln," sewed on in white muslin. Its handle was 
 gone, and it was usually held together with a bit of 
 string. 
 
 With all his traveling about over the circuit, there 
 were still four or five months in every year when court 
 was not in session. This gave the lawyers time for 
 other things. Lincoln s spare days were spent "mous 
 ing about the libraries in the State House." He was 
 studying the Constitution of the United States, mak 
 ing himself familiar with his country s history, and, in 
 season and out of season, studying the slavery question. 
 It was not in his years of successful law practice, when 
 he was one of the leaders of the bar in Illinois, that 
 he proved his greatness as a lawyer, so much as it was 
 in his complete mastery of the Constitution in its rela 
 tion to the slavery question, as he afterward revealed 
 it in his debates with Douglas. In the prairies of Illi 
 nois, sometimes dreaming, sometimes thinking deeply, 
 this country attorney became one of the learned con 
 stitutional lawyers of his time. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 
 
 BUSY as he was in the practice of law, Lincoln 
 kept on studying the signs of the times. The speeches 
 of abolitionist leaders came into his hands and he read 
 regularly two Southern newspapers. He wrote an 
 occasional political editorial for a Springfield paper 
 and he made a few campaign speeches, but his real 
 interest was in the practice of his profession. 
 
 While Lincoln was a looker-on at the great drama 
 of national politics, his old-time rival, Stephen A. 
 Douglas, Senator from Illinois, was becoming one of 
 the chief actors, restraining, as well as he could, the 
 growing feeling of discontent that the anti-slavery 
 spirit in the North had bred, nnd casting about for 
 some safe way in which the slave States might be held 
 loyal to the Union. Already the politicians in the 
 South were threatening to carry their States out of 
 the Union unless the demands of slavery were granted. 
 Already Douglas was dreaming that he himself might 
 be the means of holding South and North together, 
 and become the choice of both sections for President. 
 
 The admission of Texas as a slave State had strength 
 ened the slave power, but it had not satisfied it. The 
 threats of secession continued. Clay and Webster and 
 Douglas and others of those who dreaded war and were 
 willing to yield almost anything to preserve the Union, 
 devised a new measure called the Compromise of 1850, 
 the effect of which was to increase the feeling between 
 the North and the South. One of its features was the 
 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 5S 
 
 passing of a new Fugitive Slave Law, which compelled 
 citizens in the free States to help the officers of the 
 United States capture runaway slaves and send them 
 &ack to their masters. Men of the North had not seen 
 human beings bought and sold, and, because they knew 
 little about slavery, had thought little about it. Some 
 who would not have been willing to own slaves believed 
 that perhaps the negroes were better off as slaves than 
 as free men. But when they saw a runaway black man 
 flying through the streets, and learned that they were 
 bound by law to help catch him and send him back to 
 life-long bondage, they began to awaken to the serious 
 ness of slavery as a moral question. Wherever this 
 law was enforced, the anti-slavery feeling became more 
 bitter. 
 
 But the passing of a new Fugitive Slave Law did 
 not satisfy the South. If slavery was right, as many 
 Southerners believed, it seemed hard that a slaveholder 
 should lose his slaves when he took them into free ter 
 ritory. So the Southern leaders in Congress, believing 
 that the anti-slavery spirit was unjust, sought every 
 opportunity to strengthen the political power of the 
 South, and compelled the passage of a law repealing the 
 Missouri Compromise and clearing the way, as they 
 hoped, for introducing slavery into the vast territories 
 west and northwest of Missouri. Nebraska, as that 
 country was called, was unsettled except by Indians. 
 It was not to be opened for settlement until Congress 
 could decide whether it was to continue free or becomt 
 slave territory like Missouri. In 1854, Senator Douglas 
 secured the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, open 
 ing Nebraska to settlement and leaving to the new set 
 tlers the decision of the question whether there should 
 be slaves in the Territory or not. This plan of having 
 
54 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 the people of the Territory settle the slavery ques 
 tion for themselves was called "popular sovereignty." 
 Douglas believed that to leave to the people most con 
 cerned not counting the slaves as people, of course, 
 the decision of this troublesome question was fair 
 to everybody, and he hoped that the North as well as 
 the South would be satisfied with it. But the South 
 protested at once that slavery could gain nothing, for 
 most of the voters in the Territories would favor free 
 dom. And in the North the enemies of slavery believed 
 that they saw in Douglas s " popular sovereignty " one 
 more surrender of principle to the slave power. If slav 
 ery was wrong, they argued, why should the people of 
 the Territories be allowed to make it lawful ? This was 
 the question that Douglas had to answer when he came 
 back to Illinois on the adjournment of Congress in 
 1854. A crisis had come. The enemies of slavery were 
 at last ready to say to the slave power in Congress, 
 " Thus far shalt thou go and no farther ! " 
 
 Lincoln saw the danger and threw himself into poli 
 tics again, heart and soul. The " irrepressible conflict" 
 between slavery and freedom had begun in earnest. It 
 was not long after this that he wrote a letter to his 
 friend Joshua Speed, who had gone back to Kentucky 
 to live. In this letter he showed how the Fugitive Slave 
 Law and thr other laws in favor of slavery had stirred 
 his feelings. He wrote : " I confess I hate to see the 
 poor creatures hunted down and caught and carried 
 back to their stripes and unrequited toil ; but I bite 
 my lips and keep quiet. ... It is not fair for you to 
 assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, 
 and continually exercises, the power of making me 
 miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much 
 the great body of the Northern people do crucify their 
 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 55 
 
 feelings in order to maintain their loyalty to the Con 
 stitution and the Union." 
 
 He was fair enough to see, at the same time, that 
 there was a sincere difference of opinion between the 
 men of the South and the men of the North. He at 
 tacked slavery as an institution, and tried to persuade 
 men to join him in his effort to keep slavery from grow 
 ing. But he had no unkind words for those who did 
 not agree with him. One of his addresses, delivered at 
 Peoria, in 1854, makes this clear : " Let me say that I 
 think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. 
 They are just what we would be in their situation. If 
 slavery did not now exist among them, they would not 
 introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should 
 not instantly give it up." 
 
 The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and the 
 repeal of the Missouri Compromise, largely through 
 Douglas s efforts, created instant alarm in Illinois. 
 Party feeling had not run high for many years. Doug 
 las, who was believed at heart to be opposed to the 
 extension of slavery, had enjoyed the confidence of the 
 State in a remarkable way. Suddenly the entire situa 
 tion changed. Thousands of Illinois Democrats who 
 were opposed to slavery began to doubt Douglas and 
 to be dissatisfied with his leadership. 
 
 The senatorial term of James Shields, Lincoln s an 
 cient adversary and Douglas s friend, came to an end, 
 and Lincoln was the choice of the Whigs to succeed 
 him. When the legislature met to elect a Senator, 
 Lincoln needed five more votes to secure an election. 
 There were five anti-slavery Democrats in the legisla 
 ture, but they were unwilling to vote for Lincoln and 
 held out for Lyman Trumbull. Trumbull s five votes 
 and Lincoln s forty-four were enough to control the 
 
56 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 election. So Lincoln, fearful lest a Douglas Democrat 
 might be elected, made haste to withdraw from the 
 race and to persuade his friends to vote for Trumbull. 
 In this way Lincoln suffered one more disappointment, 
 but, by securing Trumbull s election, gained for free 
 dom one more vote in the United States Senate. 
 
 Up to this time in the Northern States, party lines 
 had not been drawn on the slavery question. There 
 were Slavery Democrats and Free Soil Democrats, 
 and there were Slavery Whigs and Free Soil Whigs. 
 But by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the 
 adoption of measures which made slavery possible in 
 Kansas and Nebraska, the voters of Illinois were so 
 aroused that they refused to interest themselves in any 
 other political question. The Whig party began to go 
 to pieces, and many Democrats questioned Douglas s 
 leadership for the first time. Anti-slavery men broke 
 away from both Whigs and Democrats and organized 
 the Republican party, whose one aim was to keep slav 
 ery out of the Territories. The friends of slavery within 
 the Whig party in Illinois became Douglas Democrats, 
 while the Republicans chose Lincoln for their leader. 
 
 From this time until Lincoln defeated Douglas for 
 the presidency in 1860, there was only one great na 
 tional issue the slavery question ; and the two men v 
 Lincoln and Douglas, by virtue of their leadership, 
 were constantly pitted against each other, the one de 
 claring that slavery was a moral wrong and demanding 
 that it be kept out of the Territories, the other saying 
 nothing about the right or wrong of slavery, but insist 
 ing that the people of the Territories be allowed to 
 decide for or against it as they saw fit, and adding 
 that he " did not care whether slavery was voted up 
 or voted down." 
 
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS BORN 57 
 
 The first national convention of the new Republican 
 party was held, in 1856, at Philadelphia. It named 
 John C. Fremont for President and William L. Day 
 ton for Vice-President. In this convention Lincoln 
 received 110 votes for Vice-President. He was evi 
 dently not disappointed with the result, for he wrote 
 to one of the delegates afterward : " When you meet 
 Judge Dayton, present him my respects, and tell him 
 I think him a far better man than I for the position 
 he is in." 
 
 The presidential campaign of 1856 was, from the 
 first, a straight-out fight between the friends and the 
 enemies of slavery. James Buchanan led the slavery 
 forces and John C. Fremont commanded the hearty 
 support of nearly all the anti-slavery people. A small 
 number of Whigs, still unwilling to take sides, either 
 against slavery or in favor of it, nominated Millard Fill- 
 more for President, and adopted a platform, charging 
 the other parties with trying to destroy the Union. 
 The plan of the Democrats to give over to slavery the 
 new States of Kansas and Nebraska, if the people liv 
 ing there should vote that way, and the declaration of 
 Senator Douglas that he did not care which way the 
 people of Kansas and Nebraska voted, filled Lincoln 
 with indignation. He went into the political struggle 
 with a grim determination to " demonstrate " to the 
 people of his State that slavery was wrong. 
 
 The idea of celebrating the Fourth of July by read 
 ing the Declaration of Independence to the people and 
 proclaiming that " all men are created equal," in a 
 land where slavery was permitted and where new ter 
 ritory was being turned over forever to the control 
 of the slave power, seemed horrible to him. In bit 
 terness he exclaimed : " The Fourth of July has not 
 
58 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 quite dwindled away; it is still a great day for 
 burning firecrackers ! ! ! " 
 
 The time was at hand when men could no longer 
 refuse to take sides. Buchanan was elected, but the 
 Republicans had cast nearly a million and a half votes. 
 Lincoln and the other enemies of slavery felt that their 
 fight for freedom had not been in vain. In his next 
 great public address in the summer of 1858, Lincoln 
 spoke these words of cheer to his followers : " Two 
 years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over 
 thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under 
 the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, 
 with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, 
 discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from 
 the four winds, and formed and fought the battle 
 through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, 
 proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to 
 falter now, now, when that same enemy is wavering, 
 dissevered, and belligerent ? The result is not doubtful. 
 We shall not fail if we stand firm, we shall not fail. 
 Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but| 
 sooner or later, the victory is sure to come." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 
 
 THE term of Stephen A. Douglas, as United States 
 Senator, was about to expire in 1858. He returned 
 to Illinois in the summer of that year to find the 
 people aroused over the slavery question as they never 
 had been before, and the new Republican party under 
 Lincoln s leadership eager to do battle. 
 
 The two men had been rivals for twenty years. It 
 was while Lincoln was serving his first term in the 
 legislature that Douglas, a young man of twenty-one, 
 had come from Vermont to Illinois. He was as poor as 
 Lincoln had been four years before, when at the same 
 age he drove his father s ox-team across the prairie. 
 But Lincoln remained poor and obscure, while Douglas 
 rose at once to prominence. At twenty-two Douglas 
 was State s attorney, and in six years more he had 
 been legislator, register of the land-office, secretary of 
 state, and judge of the supreme court. At thirty-three 
 he had served two terms in Congress and was made 
 United States Senator. He was reflected Senator in 
 1852, and now, in 1858, he was asking the people of 
 Illinois to elect him again. He had been twice a promi 
 nent candidate for President, and he was now the most 
 conspicuous man in public life in the United States. 
 In the legislature of the State and in Congress, in court 
 and on the stump, he and Lincoln had been constantly 
 in each other s way. Even in the social life of Spring- 
 field and in seeking the good graces of Mary Todd, he 
 had been Lincoln s rival. 
 
60 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 The two men were most unlike, in looks, in manner 
 of speech, in social condition, and in temperament. It 
 was a strange rivalry. Lincoln was a physical giant, 
 lank and bony in figure, yellow in face, with high cheek 
 bones, a long neck, a heavy jaw, and a large mouth 
 with deep lines drawn about it. With his hollow cheeks 
 and his look of hopeless melancholy, when his face was 
 in repose, his gray eyes deep set beneath bushy eye 
 brows and giving out no expression, except when he 
 was aroused from his habit of absent-minded contem 
 plation, he was at times a figure at once fascinating 
 and unapproachable. When he was awakened from 
 his far-away mood, his eyes flashed and his face lighted 
 up with a smile whose sweetness and charm were irre 
 sistible. 
 
 His voice was a high, clear tenor which, in his occa 
 sional moments of passionate excitement, became thin 
 and shrill. He wore shabby clothes, probably because 
 he could not afford anything better, but he cared little 
 for appearances. His mind was absorbed with serious 
 things. 
 
 Douglas was a little over five feet in height, and 
 thickset, with a lion-like head crowned with a luxuri 
 ance of soft brown hair. His voice has been compared 
 with the rich bass tones of a cathedral organ, thrilling 
 men s bodies as well as their souls. He dressed with 
 scrupulous neatness, and carried himself with the grace 
 and some of the imperious air of a prince of the blood 
 royal. His life had been one continuous series of suc 
 cesses. Everything he wanted had come to him, as if 
 by right, until he considered himself a child of fortune; 
 while Lincoln had learned by bitter experience all the 
 lessons that disappointment and sorrow have to teach. 
 In this struggle for the senatorship, Douglas was to 
 
THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 61 
 
 have one more victory and Lincoln another disap 
 pointment. 
 
 In one of his speeches, Lincoln paid this tribute to his 
 adversary : " Twenty-two years ago," he said, " Judge 
 Douglas and I became acquainted. We were both 
 young then, he a trifle younger than I (four years). 
 Even then we were both ambitious I perhaps quite 
 as much as he. With me the race of ambition has been 
 a failure a flat failure. With him it has been one of 
 splendid success. His name fills the nation and is not 
 unknown in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the 
 high eminence he has reached. I would rather stand 
 upon that eminence than wear the richest crown that 
 ever decked a monarch s brow. The judge means to 
 keep me down not put me down, for I have never 
 been up." In this tribute Lincoln showed in his own 
 nature a modesty for which the world has always loved 
 him. 
 
 Having made up his mind that the slavery question 
 must be brought home to every voter, and that Doug 
 las s position, of not caring whether slavery was ex 
 tended into the Territories or not, was wrong, Lincoln 
 challenged Douglas to a public discussion of theljaes- 
 tion. He believed that a series of debates in which he 
 and Douglas should speak from the same platform to 
 the same people w r ould give him an opportunity to reach 
 many of the Democrats who would not come to Repub 
 lican meetings, and would keep the people alive to the 
 seriousness of the situation. Douglas accepted the chal 
 lenge. The debates were arranged so that one should 
 occur at each of seven different places. Each debate 
 was to last for three hours, the time being divided 
 equally between the two speakers. The places chosen 
 were Ottawa, Freeport, Jonesboro, Charleston, Gales- 
 
62 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 burg, Quincy, and Alton. These were small country 
 towns widely scattered over the State. 
 
 Hither flocked the friends of each speaker, each 
 jrowd wild with enthusiasm for its own candidate. 
 Men came from other States, and reporters from Chi 
 cago, New York, and other cities, traveled with the 
 speakers, the Chicago reporters sending to their papers 
 every word that was spoken, so that straightway the 
 world was reading the speeches and discussing every 
 where the right and wrong of slavery and the argu 
 ments for and against popular sovereignty which 
 Douglas and Lincoln were making. 
 
 The two men were equally matched. Each had had 
 a lifelong training in public speaking and each was 
 perfectly at home on the platform, quick to take ad 
 vantage in the discussion, and ready to meet any at 
 tack, however savage. It was a battle of the giarts. 
 .Each was admired and loved by his own supporters 
 and admired and feared by the supporters of the other. 
 And each, firmly convinced that he was right, had the 
 confidence in his own cause which a conviction of the 
 right always gives. Both were terribly in earnest. 
 
 Lincoln commenced his speech accepting the nomi 
 nation to the senatorship with a prophecy about slav 
 ery which he believed might not come true for "a 
 hundred years at least," but which was actually ful 
 filled seven years later, when, as a result of the Civil 
 War, the slaves were set free throughout the United 
 States. He said : " i A house divided against itself 
 cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure 
 permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect 
 the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house 
 to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. 
 It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either 
 
THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 63 
 
 the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread 
 of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in 
 the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinc* 
 tion ; or its advocates will push it forward till it shal? 
 become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as 
 new, North as well as South." 
 
 This was a statement of what he believed to be true, 
 but Douglas insisted that it expressed Lincoln s wish 
 rather than his belief. In Douglas s mind it meant 
 that Lincoln would destroy the Union unless he could 
 drive slavery out of all the States. " Mr. Lincoln goes 
 for a war of the sections," Douglas argued, " until one 
 or the other shall be subdued. I go for the great 
 principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the right of 
 the people to decide for themselves." But Lincoln re 
 sponded that when Douglas denied the truth that " a 
 house divided against itself cannot stand," he was dis 
 puting a much higher authority than Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 It was during the debate at Charleston that Lincoln 
 found an opportunity to make use of the knowledge of 
 geometry which he had picked up as he rode the cir 
 cuit not many years before. Judge Douglas had an 
 swered some direct charges relating to his public acts 
 that had been made by Senator Trumbull by calling 
 Senator Trumbull a liar. Douglas was greatly excited 
 throughout this particular debate, and Lincoln s attacks 
 had not been soothing. " If you have ever studied 
 geometry," Lincoln argued, " 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 to show that it is 
 erroneous, would you prove it to be false by calling 
 Euclid a liar?" 
 
M ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 As the debates proceeded, the public interest grew 
 to a feverish state of excitement. The audience in 
 some places numbered twenty thousand, the men and 
 women and children coming into the town on horse 
 back, in wagons, and on foot, with brass bands arid 
 with fife and drum, and crowding the dusty highways 
 for fifteen or twenty miles in every direction. As they 
 neared the town, processions were formed with ban 
 ners and transparencies on which some political senti 
 ment was printed, such as, " The government was made 
 for white men Douglas for life"; or "Old Abe 
 the Giant-Killer and Rail-Splitter." A common feature 
 of the parade was a group of pretty girls in white on 
 horseback representing the States of the Union, while 
 a sad-looking girl in black rode alone bearing a banner 
 that proclaimed her to the world, " Kansas I will 
 be free." The Democratic procession had to follow a 
 different road from that taken by the Republicans to 
 avoid the danger of a riot. 
 
 When the speaking began, the shouting and the 
 tumult ceased and men listened breathless to the man 
 they loved or feared, feeling that on the words they 
 heard the fate of the nation rested. Sometimes one or 
 the other debater caught the infection of the popular 
 excitement and sprang to his feet to deny his oppo 
 nent s statements, but was pulled back into his seat 
 with the reminder that silence would be wise. 
 
 When Lincoln arose to speak, he showed at first 
 some timidity as he stood at full height towering above 
 his rival, so that as he began to answer the elegant 
 Douglas, even his friends, for the moment, felt sorry 
 for him. He planted himself squarely on his feet, with 
 his hands clasped behind him, and stood almost motion 
 less, talking in an awkward, friendly fashion to men 
 
THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 65 
 
 whom he treated like old acquaintances. As he warmed 
 to his subject, he would soon forget himself. He had a 
 fashion of standing still, while he spoke in his deliber 
 ate, familiar way, until he came to some climax where 
 he thought he had made a point on Senator Douglas, 
 when he would swing his long right arm with his long 
 bony forefinger in an abrupt circle as if drawing a line 
 in the air about the point he had just made, and there 
 would come over his face a smile of assured good will, 
 as if to say in confidence to an audience of old friends, 
 "Did n t I get the Little Giant that time?" This char 
 acteristic trick of speech and the warmth of the smile 
 that went with it seldom failed to win the sympathy 
 of any wavering voter into whose eager face he looked. 
 
 A boy who heard the debates recalls that "while I 
 had thought Lincoln the homeliest man I ever saw, he 
 was the handsomest man I ever listened to in a speech. 
 Lincoln, in action, no one has ever been able to de 
 scribe. He was simply grandeur itself." 
 
 One of the reporters who later became a journalist 
 of note has described his unique way of speaking: 
 "The impression made upon me by the orator was 
 quite overpowering. I have never heard anything since 
 that I would put on a higher plane of oratory. All the 
 strings that play upon the human heart and under 
 standing were touched with masterly skill and force, 
 while beyond and above all skill was the overwhelming 
 conviction pressed upon the audience that the speaker 
 was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty td 
 his fellow men. Although I heard him many times 
 afterward, I shall longest remember him as I then saw 
 the tall, angular form with the long, angular arms, at 
 times bent nearly double with excitement, like a large 
 flail animating two smaller ones, the mobile face wet 
 
66 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 with perspiration which he discharged in drops as he 
 threw his head this way and that like a projectile 
 not a graceful figure, yet not an ungraceful one. After 
 listening to him a few minutes, nobody would rnind 
 whether he was graceful or not. All thought of grace 
 or form would be lost in the exceeding attractiveness 
 of what he was saying." 
 
 The debates started all America to thinking. The 
 slavery question was no longer only a question of poli 
 tics ; it had come to be a question of good and evil. 
 And the man who had presented unanswerably the 
 cause of liberty had become a national figure, to whom 
 all who would restrain the slave power were beginning 
 to turn for leadership. 
 
 Lincoln summed up the whole controversy in these 
 words, which left nothing more to be said : " That is 
 the real issue. That is the issue that will continue 
 in this country when these poor tongues of Judge 
 Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal 
 struggle between these two principles, right and wrong, 
 throughout the world." 
 
 Douglas won the senatorship, but his advocacy of 
 popular sovereignty had driven President Buchanan 
 and the Southern leaders into active hostility to him 
 and to all that he had argued for, and split the Demo 
 cratic party in two, the Northern Democrats being for 
 him and the Southern Democrats bitterly opposed to 
 him. Lincoln lost the senatorship, but he had gained 
 the whole North for an audience, and had given the 
 Republican party courage for the national struggle 
 that was soon to come. He himself was no longer an 
 obscure country lawyer. The world was beginning to 
 listen to him and to watch with eagerness for what 
 ever he might have to say. 
 
THE DEBATES WITH DOUGLAS 67 
 
 He was disappointed at his defeat, but he felt that 
 the fight had not been in vain, for it had awakened 
 the enemies of slavery to the real danger that confronted 
 them. He wrote to a friend : " I am glad I made the 
 late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable 
 question of the age, which I could have had in no other 
 way ; and though 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." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE NOMINATION 
 
 THE campaign for the senatorship had left Lincoln 
 poorer than ever ; it had kept him from earning any 
 thing at the law, and it had burdened him with heavy 
 expense. Douglas had gone about in private cars and 
 special trains, while Lincoln had only such accommoda 
 tion as he had the money to pay for, sometimes a horse, 
 sometimes a crowded railway coach, sometimes the 
 caboose of a leisurely freight train. When he made his 
 contribution to the campaign fund, it was with the con- 
 fession that he was " absolutely without money now, 
 even for household purposes." He went back reluc 
 tantly to the law, for he felt that his country needed 
 his services now more than ever before. To a friend 
 he wrote, " The fight must go on. The cause of civil 
 liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, 
 or even one hundred defeats." He earned a little by 
 delivering a few lectures, and he got back for a few 
 months into a fairly active law practice. But it was 
 only for a few months. To him came appeals from al] 
 parts of the country to help in the fight against slavery. 
 He declined an invitation to speak in Boston in ApriL, 
 1859, because he could not leave his work; but in the 
 fall, he spoke in Kansas and Wisconsin, and followed 
 Douglas into Ohio, speaking in the same places and 
 answering the Little Giant s arguments much as he 
 had done in Illinois the year before. 
 
 Lincoln s speeches had been printed and read all over 
 the country. Republicans here and there were begin* 
 
 
THE NOMINATION 69 
 
 ning to say to one another, " If Douglas is to be the 
 Democratic candidate for the presidency, what better 
 choice could there be for his antagonist than Abra 
 ham Lincoln ? " When an occasional suggestion of this 
 sort reached him, Lincoln was entirely sincere in his 
 answer, " I must say I do not think myself fit for the 
 presidency " ; or, as he wrote to a Western judge, " It 
 seems as if they ought to find somebody who knows 
 more than I do." 
 
 Early in 1860, he was invited to New York to lec 
 ture at Cooper Institute. The audience which was to 
 hear him was made up of some of the most cultivated 
 people in the United States. David Dudley Field and 
 Horace Greeley were on the committee. William Cullen 
 Bryant was to preside. The idea that he, the self-taught, 
 modest country lawyer could possibly bring anything 
 to this educated company of Eastern people that they 
 would care to hear, seemed strange to him, and he hesi 
 tated to accept the invitation. 
 
 It is interesting to know how the orator from the 
 prairies impressed one of that audience who has given 
 us his recollections of the speech. " It is now forty 
 years," said Mr. Joseph H. Choate, "since I first saw 
 and heard Abraham Lincoln, but the impression which 
 he left on my mind is ineffaceable. . . . He appeared 
 in every sense of the word like one of the plain people 
 among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight 
 there was nothing impressive or imposing about him 
 except that his great stature singled him out from the 
 crowd ; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame, 
 his face was of a dark pallor without the slightest tinge 
 of color ; his seamed and rugged features bore the fur 
 rows of hardship and struggle ; his deepset eyes looked 
 sad and anxious ; his countenance in repose gave little 
 
70 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 evidence of that brain-power which had raised him from 
 the lowest to the highest station among his countrymen ; 
 as he talked to me before the meeting, he seemed ill at 
 ease, with that sort of apprehension which a young man 
 might feel before presenting himself to a new and 
 strange audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded. 
 * . . When he spoke he was transformed ; his eye kin 
 dled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light 
 up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held 
 his audience in the hollow of his hand." 
 
 Lincoln chose for a text Senator Douglas s proposition 
 that the men who had created the nation and framed 
 its Constitution " had understood the slavery question 
 just as well and even better than we do now," and 
 proceeded to show that they had seen the evils of slavery, 
 and planned the government so as to keep slavery out 
 of the Territories and put it in the way of ultimate 
 extinction. He went on : " As those fathers marked it, 
 so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, 
 but to be tolerated and protected only because of and 
 so far as its actual presence among us makes that tol 
 eration and protection a necessity." This was as far 
 as Lincoln s party had yet gone in its opposition to 
 slavery, that it was" an evil not to be extended." 
 The difference between South and North, as he explained 
 it, was a difference as to whether slavery was right, as 
 the South believed, or wrong, as the North believed. 
 
 " Wrong as we think slavery is," Lincoln said in 
 the conclusion of his speech, "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 
 
THE NOMINATION 77 
 
 this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and 
 effectively. . . . 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 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." 
 
 From New York he went into New England, where 
 he followed the same line of argument, insisting that 
 under the Declaration of Independence the negro was 
 entitled to an equal right with the white man in the 
 enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness. " One of the 
 reasons why I am opposed to slavery is just here," he 
 argued. " When one starts poor, as most do in the race 
 of life, free society is such that he knows he can bet 
 ter his condition ; he knows that there is no fixed con 
 dition of labor for his whole life. I am not ashamed 
 to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired 
 laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flatboat just what 
 might happen to any poor man s son. I want every 
 man to have a chance and I believe a black man is 
 entitled to it in which he can better his condition 
 when he may look forward and hope to be a hired 
 laborer this year and the next, work for himself after 
 ward, and finally to hire men to work for him. That is 
 the true system." 
 
 At New Haven he made his hearers think of slavery 
 as a serpent. He said : " If I saw a venomous snake 
 
 ; crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize 
 the nearest stick and kill it ; but if I found that snake 
 
 ; in bed with my children, that would be another ques 
 tion. 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 
 
n ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 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 gen 
 tleman alone. But if there was a bed newly made up, 
 to which the children were to be taken, and it was pro 
 posed 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." 
 
 The representation of slavery as a deadly snake 
 turned loose among innocent children was not a pleas 
 ant illustration, but it captured the attention of men 
 and stuck in their memory. So, when at Hartford, 
 Connecticut, he followed it by comparing slavery to a 
 wen he had once seen on an old gentleman s neck, he 
 appealed to the imagination and made it impossible to 
 think of slavery without something of a sense of hor 
 ror. "Everybody would say the wen was a great evil, 
 and would cause the man s death after a while; but 
 you could n t cut it out, for he d bleed to death in a 
 minute. But would you ingraft the seeds of that wen 
 on the necks of sound and healthy men ? He must 
 endure and be patient, hoping for possible relief. The 
 wen represents slavery on the neck of this country. 
 This only applies to those who think slavery is wrong. 
 Those who think it right would consider the snake a 
 jewel and the wen an ornament." 
 
 Before he had spoken in the East, Lincoln s fame 
 as a successful jury lawyer and a teller of stories had 
 preceded him. The Cooper Institute speech revealed 
 
THE NOMINATION 73 
 
 an entirely different sort of man. He gave his audi 
 ence no jokes and he told them no stories. He did 
 not even talk politics. The message he brought had to 
 do with national morality with the eternal question 
 of good and evil. They had looked for an " ^Esop of 
 the prairies," and Lincoln had come to them a prophet, 
 like Isaiah or John the Baptist, calling a nation to 
 repentance. In that time that tried men s souls, when 
 the South, determined to impose slavery on the whole 
 country, was threatening to break up the Union and 
 destroy the national government, the men of the East 
 began to see in Lincoln s patience and wisdom quali 
 ties that other leaders did not have. It seemed to 
 them that Lincoln saw all sides of the great question, 
 and that he alone discussed it wisely and without bit 
 terness. When he returned to Illinois, his name was 
 in everybody s mouth. In the man who, against such 
 odds, had proved himself the equal of Douglas in de 
 bate and had forced Douglas to split the Democratic 
 party in two and who was now winning the confidence 
 of the East, Illinois saw the strongest possible candi 
 date for the presidency. The newspapers over the 
 State began to urge his nomination, while the politi 
 cians, most of whom had practiced law on the circuit 
 with him and knew him well, became missionaries in 
 his behalf, visiting Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and 
 the States farther west and interesting the Kepubli 
 can workers in his candidacy before the convention 
 which was about to be held in Chicago in May, 1860. 
 Meanwhile the Democrats were at war among them 
 selves. They had been hopelessly divided ever since 
 Douglas in his debates with Lincoln had disappointed 
 the South by refusing to give up popular sover 
 eignty, and become a straight-out slavery man. The 
 
74 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Democratic National Convention met in April at 
 Charleston, South Carolina. Over half the delegates 
 were for Douglas, but it required a two-thirds vote to 
 make a nomination. They adopted a platform in favor 
 of popular sovereignty over the protest of the South 
 ern delegates, who wanted the party to declare for 
 universal slavery. " We want nothing more," the 
 slavery delegates said, " than a simple declaration that 
 negro slaves are property, and we want the recogni 
 tion of the obligation of the federal government to 
 protect that property like all other." To this the Doug 
 las delegates refused to agree. Delegates from twelve 
 of the slave States left the convention and later nomi 
 nated John C. Breckenridge for President. What was 
 left of the convention adjourned until June, and then 
 nominated Stephen A. Douglas. From this time until 
 the election, the Democratic party remained divided, 
 the Southern Democrats supporting Breckenridge and 
 most of the Northern Democrats remaining loyal to 
 Douglas. 
 
 The week before the Republican National Conven 
 tion at Chicago, the Illinois Republicans held their State 
 convention at Decatur. Lincoln was sitting on the 
 platform when a delegate announced that an old De 
 mocrat of Macon County wanted to make a contribu 
 tion. Just at this moment John Hanks came into the 
 hall bearing two old-time fence-rails decorated with 
 flags and a streamer, on which was printed : 
 
 "ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 The Rail Candidate for 
 
 President in 1860. 
 
 Two rails from a lot of three thousand made in 1830 by 
 John Hanks and Abe Lincoln/ 
 
THE NOMINATION 75 
 
 It was an exciting moment. To the convention the 
 rails meant that, under Abraham Lincoln s leadership, 
 the struggle they were just entering would be between 
 the plain people of the Lincoln type and a powerful 
 slave aristocracy who had no sympathy for labor. The 
 convention went wild. Lincoln stood awkwardly, almost 
 bashfully, smiling at the enthusiasm of his friends 
 while he waited for quiet to say : " Gentlemen, I sup 
 pose you want to know something about those things," 
 pointing to the rails. " I don t know whether we made 
 those rails or not; the fact is, I don t think they are 
 a credit to the makers" (laughing as he spoke). u But 
 I do know this. I made rails then, and I think I could 
 make better ones than those now." 
 
 The Chicago Convention met on May 16. Among 
 its delegates were the greatest orators and statesmen 
 of the day. They were seeking a candidate whom men 
 of all shades of opinion could support, from the aboli 
 tionists demanding Seward s nomination, to the men 
 of the border States, who, although favoring slavery, 
 were loyal to the Union. The candidate of whose 
 nomination the Eastern delegates were confident was 
 William H. Seward of New York, who had been the 
 governor of New York and the Republican leader in 
 the United States Senate. But Seward s hatred of 
 slavery had led him to go much farther than Lincoln 
 had ever gone and to speak of a law that was higher 
 than the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Besides 
 this it was feared that his extreme opinions on other 
 political questions might make it harder to elect him 
 than it would be to elect a more moderate man. People 
 who admired Seward as a brilliant leader still feared 
 that he could not carry the Northern vote as against 
 Douglas. So it came about that Lincoln was chosen. 
 
76 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 While the balloting was going on, Lincoln was wait 
 ing for the news at Springfield, tossing ball and try 
 ing hard to restrain his excitement. When at last the 
 message came that he was nominated, he was sitting in 
 a newspaper office. He looked long at the message, 
 folded.it and put it into his vest-pocket as he remarked 
 quietly, " There s a little short woman down at our 
 house who would like to hear this. I 11 go down and 
 tell her." 
 
Copyright, 1881, George B. Ayres, Philadelphia 
 LINCOLN IN I860 
 
 (From an original negative taken at Lincoln s home in Springfield, soon after his nomina 
 tion. When he saw the proof Lincoln remarked, " Well, that expresses me better than 
 anv I have sean") 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE ELECTION 
 
 THROUGH the long, anxious summer and fall of 
 1860, Lincoln stayed at home in Springfield. In a room 
 at the State House he made welcome the multitude of 
 visitors who came to see him, meeting in the same easy, 
 friendly fashion, the dignified statesman from far away 
 and the old lady from New Salem who had brought a 
 pair of woolen socks of her own knitting for " Old Abe " 
 to wear when he became President of the United States. 
 It took no card of admission to get into Lincoln s pre 
 sence. Daily, men crowded into the room to learn the 
 news of the campaign and to laugh with Lincoln at his 
 own inimitable stories. 
 
 The fact that men spoke familiarly of him as " Old 
 Abe the Rail-Splitter " made many Eastern Republicans 
 uneasy lest he prove unfit for the fearful responsibility 
 that would come to the new President. But when they 
 had talked with him at Springfield, their eyes were 
 opened and they knew him. They found him wise and 
 strong and calm ; and as the months passed, something 
 in his spirit took hold upon them as it has upon the 
 world in these later years, and awoke in them a ten- 
 ierness of affection for this man who had made his 
 ivay through poverty and sorrow to the leadership of 
 a great people. 
 
 There were three other candidates for the presi 
 dency, each supported by a strong political party arid 
 each advocating different principles of government. 
 The Northern Democrats, believers in popular sover- 
 
78 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 eignty, and caring little about slavery, were for Ste 
 phen A. Douglas. The Southern Democrats, believing 
 firmly in the righteousness of slavery and demanding 
 that Congress protect slave property in the Territories, 
 supported Breckenridge of Kentucky. The men who 
 were afraid lest the agitation of the slavery question by 
 either its friends or its enemies would bring ruin to the 
 country organized the Constitutional Union party and 
 nominated John Bell of Tennessee, on a campaign 
 platform which "recognized no political principle 
 other than the Constitution of the country, the Union 
 of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." 
 
 Those who opposed slavery in the Territories were 
 all within the Republican party, and, as the cam 
 paign went on and they came to know Lincoln better, 
 worked tirelessly and almost passionately for his elec 
 tion. Those who either favored slavery or did not care 
 whether it won or lost made up more than half of all 
 the voters in the United States, but their vbtes were 
 divided among Douglas and Breckenridge and Bell. 
 Before November came, it was plain that the Republi 
 cans would profit by the divisions among the other 
 three parties and would elect Abraham Lincoln to the 
 presidency. 
 
 The feeling of unrest in the South was growing. 
 Threats of secession continued, and became so frequent 
 that Lincoln began to wonder if the South really meant 
 it. Every effort was made to get him to say something 
 that would satisfy the South of his kindly feeling, or 
 something that would persuade his equally violent anti- 
 slavery friends in the North that he meant to do no 
 thing to strengthen the cause of slavery. To those who 
 tried to get him to say what he intended to do he 
 answered : " The time comes upon every man when it 
 
THE ELECTION 79 
 
 is best for him to keep his lips closed. That time has 
 come upon me." And when they insisted on his assur 
 ing the South that he would not interfere with slavery, 
 he only answered by reminding 1 them of what he had 
 said in his many speeches in the past : " Those who 
 will not read or heed what I have already publicly said 
 would not read or heed a repetition of it. 4 If they hear 
 not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be per 
 suaded, though one rose from the dead. " So he wrote 
 no letters, and made no speeches, but waited patiently 
 and in silence for the people to make their choice. 
 
 The men who had been candidates for the Repub 
 lican nomination for the presidency, and particularly 
 William H. Seward of New York and Salmon P. Chase 
 of Ohio, wrote and spoke and worked day and night in 
 aid of his election. Seward gave to his home newspaper 
 on the night of his own defeat an editorial article in 
 which he said: "No truer or firmer defender of the 
 Republican faith could have been found than the dis 
 tinguished citizen on whom the honors of the nomi 
 nation have fallen." The men of letters, Holmes, 
 Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, and George William Curtis, 
 came at once to his support. But the entire North was 
 not friendly. There were the abolitionists, many of 
 whom fought him bitterly and applied to him that 
 scornful name, " the Slave Hound of Illinois." Al 
 though their only hope of ever getting rid of slavery 
 lay in his election, they refused to trust him. More 
 disappointing to him than the unreasoning enmity of 
 the abolitionists was the unfriendly feeling of many of 
 the preachers in his own town of Springfield. He could 
 not understand it. Nor could they understand, in after 
 years, how it was that they had so misjudged him. 
 
 " These men," he said, " well know that I am for 
 
80 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 freedom in the Territories, freedom everywhere as fat 
 as law will permit, and that my opponents are for slav 
 ery. They know this, and yet with this book" (draw 
 ing the New Testament from his pocket) " in their 
 hands, in the light of which human bondage cannot 
 live a moment, they are going to vote against me. I 
 do not understand it at all. I know there is a God, 
 and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the 
 storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He 
 has a place and work for me, and I think He has, I 
 believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is every 
 thing ; I know I am right because I know that liberty 
 is right. . . . Douglas does n t care whether slavery 
 is voted up or down, but God cares, and humanity 
 cares, and I care, and with God s help I shall not fail. 
 I may not see the end ; but it will come, . . . and 
 these men will find they have not read their Bible 
 right." 
 
 The future as he saw it was in God s hands. As he 
 heard from the South the mutterings of rebellion, the 
 threats of the ruin that would come upon the country 
 if he should be chosen its President, a sense of his own 
 helplessness and of his need of divine strength came 
 to him. He grew more religious as this sense of need 
 became greater. " If any church will make as its only 
 requirement obedience to the command, Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and 
 strength, and thy neighbor as thyself, " he declared, 
 " I will join it." 
 
 As the months passed the excitement grew. Lincoln 
 kept silence at home while Douglas traveled over the 
 country, in the South as well as in the North, address 
 ing the people in his passionate, imperious way and 
 seeking to arouse them to a sense of the dangers they 
 
THE ELECTION 81 
 
 were facing. He boldly attacked the Southern politi 
 cians for their threats of breaking up the Union, and 
 appealed to the loyalty of the masses who had always 
 listened to him before, only to find they had lost faith 
 in him and were bent on his defeat. 
 
 The telegrams on election night soon told of Lin 
 coln s success. Before morning he fell into one of 
 his melancholy moods, weighed down with the vision of 
 a divided country to govern and a bitter war to fight, 
 and wanting to be left alone with his anxious thoughts. 
 In the strain of the excitement which he was going 
 through, there came to him a vision that seemed to fore 
 tell disaster. From his boyhood he had believed that 
 through men s dreams come promises and warnings for 
 their guidance, from on high. He had thrown himself 
 upon a couch to rest and, as he lay there, he saw his 
 giant figure reflected in a mirror. But there were two 
 images of himself, the face of one bearing the flush of 
 health, while the other was gray, with something of the 
 pallor of death upon it. It made him uneasy, and he got 
 up and walked about to get rid of the horror it gave 
 him ; yet when he came back a second and a third time, 
 the double image was still there. He spoke of it to 
 Mrs. Lincoln, and they made up their minds that this 
 was a prophecy that he was to be President twice, but 
 that he would not live through his second term. 
 
 In one of his dreams he saw himself passing through 
 a great throng of people. Men made way for him, but 
 as they did so, one said with scorn, " He s a common- 
 looking fellow." " Friend," he said in his dream, u the 
 Lord prefers common-looking people ; that is why He 
 made so many of them." 
 
 During the next four months the excitement contin 
 ued at fever-heat. The Southern leaders began to carry 
 
82 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 out the threats they had made during the campaign. 
 The conspiracy to break up the Union became a reality 
 four days after the election, when the Senators from 
 South Carolina resigned. The Southern States held 
 conventions, voted to withdraw from the Union, and 
 provided millions of dollars for war. The South was 
 confident that secession would come about without shed 
 ding a drop of blood, while the North was panic-stricken, 
 ready to give up almost anything that the South might 
 ask. Until he should become President in March, 
 Lincoln was helpless. He kept his temper sweet, as he 
 had learned to do in his long struggle with adversity. 
 At the mass meeting held in celebration of his elec 
 tion he was able to say : " In all our rejoicings let us 
 neither express nor cherish any hard feelings toward 
 any citizen who has differed with us. Let us at all times 
 remember that all American citizens are brothers of a 
 common country." 
 
 To those who were urging the North to give up all 
 that it had won by the election, he privately counseled 
 patience and firmness. " There is no possible compro 
 mise upon the extension of slavery," he wrote. "On 
 that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel." 
 
 As the time drew near when he must go East to take 
 up his duties as President, he went from Springfield for 
 a little visit to his stepmother at her farm near Charles 
 ton, Illinois. He visited his father s grave and left direc 
 tions for a monument to his father s memory. Here he 
 met the survivors of the Johnston and Hanks families 
 with whom he had come to Illinois, a barefooted immi 
 grant, thirty-one years before. The mother, whose love 
 had followed him through all the years, gave him her 
 blessing, and as in tears she said good-by, told him of 
 her fear that wicked men would kill him. To this same 
 
THE ELECTION 83 
 
 melancholy prophecy which another old-time friend 
 gave him he answered gayly, " Well, Hannah, if they 
 do kill me, I shall never die again." 
 
 On the morning of February 11, 1861, it rained 
 neavily. A special train had been provided to take the 
 new President and his party to Washington. Two or 
 three hundred people had gathered at the little Spring 
 field station. Just as the train was starting, Mr. Lin 
 coln asked the conductor to wait a moment. He turned 
 toward the people, removed his tall hat, paused for 
 several seconds until he could control his emotions, 
 and then slowly and with deep feeling gave them this 
 simple farewell : 
 
 " No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feel 
 ing 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 century, and have passed from 
 a young to an old man. Here my children have been 
 born, and one is buried. All the strange checkered 
 past seems to crowd upon my mind. 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 assistance of that Divine 
 Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With 
 that assistance, 1 cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who 
 can go with me, and remain with you, and be every 
 where for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet 
 be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in 
 your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affec 
 tionate farewell." 
 
 An old friend, who stood with bared head in the 
 pouring rain while these words were spoken, has de 
 scribed the scene for us : " We have heard Mr. Lincoln 
 speak upon a hundred different occasions, but we never 
 
84 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 saw him so profoundly affected, nor did he ever utter 
 an address which seemed to us as full of simple and 
 touching eloquence. . . . Although it was raining fast 
 when he began to speak, every hat was lifted, and 
 every head bent forward to catch the last words of the 
 departing chief." 
 
UNIV. OF 
 
CHAPTER Xin 
 
 THE PRESIDENCY 
 
 THE new President had decided to make a round 
 about journey to Washington, stopping on the way at 
 the chief cities of the North and East. He had a special 
 purpose in doing this. Though he had faith in the peo 
 ple, he was not sure that they were yet fully aroused 
 to their responsibility ; and he realized that they were 
 not at all sure of him. He must lead them to see that 
 the preservation of the Union depended on them. 
 
 At Indianapolis, his appeal to the citizens was meant 
 for the loyal people of all the States. He said : " I ap 
 peal to you again to constantly bear in mind that not 
 with politicians, not with Presidents, not with office- 
 seekers, but with you, is the question : Shall the Union 
 and shall the liberties of this country be preserved to 
 the latest generations ? " 
 
 War was at hand. South Carolina, Mississippi, 
 Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, one 
 at a time, had declared themselves to be independent 
 States, and by resolution proclaimed the Union at 
 an end between themselves and the United States of 
 America. Only two days before Lincoln started from 
 Springfield, Jefferson Davis was elected President of 
 the Confederate States of America. While Lincoln 
 was greeting hundreds of thousands of loyal citizens 
 of the North on his journey to Washington, Davis was 
 on his journey to his inauguration at Montgomery, Ala 
 bama, making speeches in all the cities and promising 
 his Southern audiences that those who should interfere 
 
86 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 with the new nation would " smell Southern powde: 1 
 and feel Southern steel." 
 
 On his journey Lincoln came face to face with an 
 uncounted multitude of loyal men, and left them in 
 spired with a stronger faith in the cause and a greatei 
 loyalty to the Union. For nearly a year he had kept 
 silence, and now, as his time of power and responsi 
 bility at last approached, he spoke cautiously, arousing 
 no passions, making neither promises nor threats, but 
 trying, in his own gentle way, to learn for himself how 
 strong was the people s love of country and how far 
 they would go with him in his task of saving the Union. 
 
 His was a strange nature. He felt the sorrows of 
 men as few have ever done, for he had sounded the 
 depths of human suffering. He sympathized and he 
 understood. At the same time he did not allow the 
 seriousness of life to break him down or make his sweet 
 and gentle nature bitter. Men did not understand how 
 he could have the heart to laugh while all the world 
 was in tears ; but somehow, in his laughter as well as 
 in his tears, he found a way into men s hearts, and he 
 held his place there as much by the cheer he brought 
 as by the sorrow that he shared. 
 
 The events which were happening in the South dur 
 ing this momentous journey had aroused the anxiety 
 of the whole country. The new President s speeches 
 showed how fully he realized the seriousness of the sit 
 uation ; and yet he was able, at times, to play with his 
 audience as he had done in his happiest moods at home. 
 At Lebanon, Indiana, when the car on which he stood 
 jerked about and almost threw him from the platform, 
 he laughingly called the attention of the crowd to how 
 well he was learning the poetry of motion ; and at 
 Thorntown, he had nis fun with the anxious company 
 
THE PRESIDENCY 87 
 
 that had gathered to see him, excusing himself from 
 a speech because there was no time to make one, but 
 offering to tell them a story if every person there 
 would promise solemnly never to repeat it. As soon 
 as the promise was secured, the train pulled out, as 
 Lincoln doubtless knew it would, leaving the crowd 
 without its story, but shouting after the departing 
 President, " We won t ever tell." 
 
 At the little town of Westfield, New York, he said, 
 " I have a correspondent in this place, a little girl 
 named Grace Bedell, and I would like to see her." 
 Grace was there, eleven years old, and Lincoln stepped 
 from the train to greet her. The year before she had 
 written to him to suggest that he would look better 
 with a beard, and he had answered her letter. And now, 
 with all the cares of state and the thoughts of war 
 crowding his mind, he was able to remember the little 
 girl and where she lived ; and he was simple-minded 
 enough to say to her as he greeted her, " You see I 
 have let these whiskers grow for you, Grace." 
 
 He continued to remember that there was no per 
 sonal tribute to himself in the outpouring of the people 
 as they greeted him on his journey. It merely showed 
 their loyalty to the country he had been called to serve. 
 " It is true," he said at Albany, " that, while I hold 
 myself, without mock modesty, the humblest of all 
 individuals that have ever been elevated to the presi 
 dency, I have a more difficult task to perform than 
 any one of them." 
 
 In the same humility of spirit he said to another 
 gathering of Union men : " I cannot but know what 
 you all know, that without a name, perhaps without a 
 reason why I should have a name, there has fallen upon 
 me a task such as did not rest even upon the Father 
 
88 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 of his Country ; and so feeling, I can turn and look 
 for that support without which it will be impossible 
 for me to perform that great task. I turn, then, and 
 look to the American people, and to that God who has 
 never forsaken them." 
 
 At Philadelphia, on Washington s birthday, he was 
 asked to speak at Independence Hall. Here he gave 
 new expression to the spirit which had given the De 
 claration of Independence to the world, and here there 
 seemed to come to him again the thought that in time 
 death by violence might be his lot. To a friend he 
 once told of the many times he had been warned that 
 he would be killed. " Soon after I was nominated at 
 Chicago," he said, " I began to receive letters threat 
 ening my life. The first one or two made me a little 
 uncomfortable, but I came at length to look for a regu 
 lar installment of this kind of correspondence in every 
 week s mail, and up to inauguration day I was in con 
 stant receipt of such letters, but they have ceased to 
 give me any apprehension." The friend expressed sur 
 prise at this, but Lincoln replied in his peculiar way, 
 " There is nothing like getting used to things." 
 
 The morning of March 4 found the new President 
 still in doubt as to who were to be in his cabinet, for 
 Seward, whom he had depended upon from the first, 
 had taken offense because Chase was to be Secretary 
 of the Treasury, and he was now declining to serve 
 as Secretary of State. At the last moment, and after 
 the ceremony of the inauguration was over, Lincoln 
 persuaded Seward to change his mind, and the cabi< 
 net list was complete. William H. Seward of New 
 York was to be Secretary of State ; Salmon P. Chase 
 of Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury ; Simon Cameron 
 of Pennsylvania, Secretary of War; Edward Bates of 
 
THE PRESIDENCY 89 
 
 Missouri, Attorney-General ; Gideon Welles of Con 
 necticut, Secretary of the Navy ; Caleb B. Smith of 
 Indiana, Secretary of the Interior ; Montgomery Blair 
 of Maryland, Postmaster-General. Of these seven 
 men, upon whose loyal support and wise advice the 
 success of his administration as President was so 
 largely to depend, he had no real knowledge. The first 
 four were chosen because in the nominating convention 
 at Chicago they had been his prominent rivals for the 
 presidency. Bates of Missouri, and Blair of Maryland, 
 he had chosen because they were from slave States 
 and so could help him in the effort that he knew must 
 be made to keep the slave States that bordered upon 
 Mason and Dixon s Line loyal to the Union. Among 
 them all, not one was his personal friend ; and yet it 
 was to them he must look for guidance in the struggle 
 he was now entering. 
 
 At noon, James Buchanan, the retiring President, 
 worn and broken with the cares of state, and glad to 
 escape the responsibilities of war, called at Lincoln s 
 hotel and the two drove together to the Capitol. The 
 day was clear and beautiful, and the streets and public 
 places were thronged. A peaceful revolution was tak 
 ing place. James Buchanan, the friend of the slave 
 power, who without protest had allowed the South to 
 take possession of the nation s forts and arsenals, was 
 courteously escorting to the inauguration Abraham 
 Lincoln, the champion of the Union, who on his part 
 was pledged to reclaim from the seceding States the 
 property which Buchanan had permitted them to take. 
 Close beside their carriage rode a guard of mounted 
 soldiery. At every corner, on the housetops, and even 
 underneath the platform on which the two Presidents 
 were to stand, there were armed men. On a hilltop 
 
90 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 near by a company of artillery commanded the scene. 
 It was a peaceful revolution, but the spirit of war was 
 in the air. " All thoughts were anxiously directed to 
 an impending civil war. All dreaded it ; all sought to 
 avert it. While the inaugural address was being de 
 livered, devoted altogether to saving the Union without 
 war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to de 
 stroy it without war. . . . Both parties deprecated war ; 
 but one of them would make war rather than let the 
 nation survive ; and the other would accept war rather 
 than let it perish. And the war came." Thus Lincoln 
 described the situation four years later. Many of the 
 troops that guarded the presidential party wore citi 
 zens clothes, and the day, to all outward seeming, 
 gave no signs of the feeling that stirred every man s 
 heart. The excitement was intense. As far as the eye 
 could see, southward into Virginia and northward into 
 Maryland, there was slave territory, and on every side 
 there was hostility toward all that the new President 
 represented. 
 
 As Lincoln rose to deliver his inaugural address 
 there was a moment of embarrassment. He held a 
 gold-headed cane in one hand and his printed speech 
 in the other. When he took off his new high hat, he 
 did not know what to do with it. He is said to have 
 remarked in his droll way, as he looked up at the mar 
 ble columns of the Capitol, " I don t see any nail on 
 those columns to hang this on." Just then Stephen A. 
 Douglas, for so many years his rival, stepped forward 
 and took the hat, as he remarked with a smile, u If I 
 can t be President, at least I can hold his hat." 
 
 Lincoln s old-time friend, Edward D. Baker, who 
 with Lincoln and Douglas had practiced law on the 
 Illinois circuit twenty years before, and was now a 
 
THE PRESIDENCY 91 
 
 Senator from Oregon, introduced him to the audience 
 of over a hundred thousand people that had gathered 
 by the east portico of the Capitol. The speech, read 
 in a clear tenor voice, was heard throughout the vast 
 throng, and the next morning was discussed in every 
 household in the land. The South as well as the North 
 had been waiting to learn what the President would do. 
 Would he let the " wayward States depart in peace," 
 as one of his advisers had urged ? Would he carry war 
 into the South, and compel the seceding States to yield 
 to the federal power? Or would he wait until the South 
 should strike the first blow ? The world listened eagerly 
 to this first expression of his purposes toward the South. 
 The speech left no one in doubt either as to the Presi 
 dent s intention to maintain the authority of the gov 
 ernment and defend it against all assaults, or as to his 
 firm determination that if war was to come, the South 
 must strike the first blow. To the South he said : " In 
 your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not 
 in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The gov 
 ernment will not assail you. You can have no conflict, 
 without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no 
 oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, 
 while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, 
 protect, and defend it. " Nor was there any doubt of 
 his kindly feeling toward his " dissatisfied fellow coun 
 trymen," for in the face of threats and violence, he was 
 still able to reason with them and beg them to wait 
 patiently a little longer in the assurance that their 
 rights under the Constitution and the laws would be as 
 secure now as ever they had been. 
 
 The closing words of the address, written by Presi 
 dent Lincoln upon the suggestion of Secretary Seward, 
 have become almost as familiar to the American people 
 
92 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 as the Gettysburg oration : " I am loath to close. We 
 are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. 
 Though passion may have strained, it must not break 
 our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, 
 stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to 
 every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad 
 land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again 
 touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of 
 our nature." 
 
 He turned to the venerable Chief Justice of the 
 United States, Roger B. Taney, and with his hand upon 
 the Bible slowly repeated the oath : " I, Abraham Lin 
 coln, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute 
 the office of President of the United States, and will, 
 to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend 
 V}he Constitution of the United States." 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 WAR BEGINS 
 
 THE day, which had opened fair, now became bleak 
 Buchanan drove with Lincoln from the Capitol to th 
 White House, and there bade the new President good- 
 by. As Lincoln entered into the possession of the bare 
 and comfortless mansion that for four years the rest 
 of his life was to be his home, he felt more keenly 
 than ever the pang of loneliness that had been his most 
 familiar experience. He soon found himself in the 
 midst of a mob of the idly curious that roamed about 
 the place as if it belonged to them. An army of office- 
 seekers that already had begun to make his life a bur 
 den were camping there from daybreak until they were 
 put out at night, watching eagerly for a chance inter 
 view and fairly thrusting their applications and petitions 
 into his pockets. The trouble and anxiety that the 
 approach of war had brought, bore heavily upon him. 
 The persistency of the men who sought offices at his 
 hands at this distressing time was so great that the 
 President exclaimed, " I feel just like a man who is 
 trying to rent out apartments in one end of his house 
 while fire is raging in the other." 
 
 There is no loneliness to compare with that of one 
 who finds himself in the midst of a multitude from 
 whom he is unable to escape and who will give him 
 neither sympathy nor peace. The country was divided. 
 The nation s arms had been sent to Southern forts and 
 arsenals, and its soldiers to the far-away Indian fron 
 tier. The government service was in the hands of men 
 
04 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 whom he neither knew nor trusted. How many of them 
 were at heart hostile to the Union, no one could tell. 
 How soon the armies of the Confederate States mi^ht 
 march across the Potomac and make the city of Wash 
 ington the capital of the new slave republic, he could 
 only conjecture. He knew that the regular army of the 
 United States had been scattered, and that there were 
 only a few hundred soldiers in Washington to guard 
 the capital. Its commander, General W infield Scott, 
 was seventy-five years old and too feeble now for active 
 service. Seven States, with seven millions of people, 
 had declared their independence. The fate of the other 
 slave States, particularly of Virginia and Maryland, 
 within whose borders the city of Washington lay, hung 
 in the balance. Every effort was being made at Rich 
 mond and at Baltimore, by Southern conspirators and 
 those in sympathy with the slave Confederacy, to draw 
 these two border States into the secession movement. 
 There was only a faint hope that they might remain 
 loyal to the Union. A rash word or an unwise step 
 would drive Virginia and Maryland, and possibly Del 
 aware and Kentucky and Missouri, into the Confed 
 eracy, and plunge the country into war, and that, too, 
 at a time when there were no troops at hand to defend 
 the capital, and the government was without arms or 
 ammunition or money or credit. 
 
 This was the situation as President Lincoln saw it 
 yn the day he entered the White House. It was a time 
 that called for patience and wisdom. He saw now still 
 more clearly the truth of his prophetic words at Indian 
 apolis, that the question of preserving the liberties of 
 the country was not with politicians, nor with office- 
 seekers, nor with Presidents, but with the people. And 
 be saw more clearly than any of his advisers that he 
 
WAR BEGINS 95 
 
 could not hope to save the Union unless he could win 
 the confidence of the people and command their help 
 in all that he had to do. He resolved to treat the South 
 with all possible patience, and to wait for the South to 
 strike the first blow. Trusting the people as he did, he 
 felt sure that if the South should fire on the flag, the 
 North would unite to resist the attack. It is interesting 
 to imagine in what different ways the other great men 
 of that day would have met the difficulties that Lincoln 
 settled with such wise forbearance ; how Seward would 
 have declared war not only against the rebellious States, 
 but against the European powers as well ; how Thaddeus 
 Stevens would have proclaimed the slaves free from 
 the very beginning and so lost the support of Delaware 
 and Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri ; how Gen 
 eral Scott would have recognized the Confederacy as 
 an independent nation ; and how Stephen A. Douglas 
 would have gone boldly into the heart of the South and 
 pronounced its leaders traitors worthy of death ; and 
 how, in the plans of all these counselors who differed 
 with Lincoln so often, there was a certainty of ruin, 
 while the only hope of saving the Union proved to be in 
 the slow and cautious policy of Lincoln, which permit 
 ted him to act only after he had learned all there was to 
 be learned, and, after taking counsel, had made up his 
 mind what course the people wanted him to pursue. 
 
 The day after the inauguration brought him face to 
 face with a question which he must soon answer. If he 
 answered it in one way, the Union would be dissolved 
 and the Constitution which he had just promised 
 44 to preserve, protect, and defend" would be set at 
 naught, if he answered it in the only other way, the 
 South would declare war. 
 
 Within a little island fortification in Charleston 
 
96 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 Harbor, known as Fort Sumter, Major Robert Ander 
 son and a hundred and twenty-eight men upheld the 
 authority of the national government, and from its 
 flagstaff each day flung to the breeze the flag of the 
 United States. They were really prisoners within its 
 walls, for across the bay five thousand Confederate 
 soldiers under General Beauregard were encamped 
 beneath the flag of the Palmetto State awaiting the 
 command to open fire. Within the fort the provisions 
 were almost gone. The governor of South Carolina had 
 forbidden President Buchanan to come to Sumter s re 
 lief. But President Lincoln had said in his inaugural 
 address that the power confided to him would be used 
 44 to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places 
 belonging to the government," and that 44 the declared 
 purpose of the Union " was " to defend itself." Fort 
 Sumter belonged to the national government, and its 
 men had reached a point where they must either desert 
 their place of duty or face starvation. On March 5, 
 President Lincoln received word from Major Anderson 
 that there were only provisions enough to last a week, and 
 that unless help came soon the fort must be abandoned. 
 What was President Lincoln to do ? Should he send 
 food to Anderson and his men ? Or must the flag be 
 hauled down ? 
 
 Lincoln determined to find out if possible just what 
 the feeling of the people of South Carolina was, and 
 whether they would plunge the country into war rather 
 than allow the handful of Union soldiers in Charleston 
 Harbor to be fed. The President s former law partner, 
 Ward H. Lamon, a Virginian by birth, offered to go to 
 Charleston and see what the people there were likely 
 to do if the President should make good his inaugural 
 pledge of holding all "places belonging to the govern- 
 
WAR BEGINS 97 
 
 ment." It was a dangerous journey. Secretary Seward 
 tried to prevent it, insisting that Lamon could not 
 come back alive ; and yet it was of the utmost impor 
 tance to know the whole situation at once. Lamon 
 was eager to go, and the President said, " By Jing ! I 11 
 risk him. Go, Lamon, and God bless you ! Bring back a 
 palmetto if you can t bring good news." Lamon went. 
 He soon learned the temper of the South, and reported 
 to the President all that he had discovered. Lincoln 
 then put to each member of the cabinet this question : 
 " Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort 
 Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt 
 it ? " General Scott, the commander of the army, had 
 already advised against it, and now all but one of the 
 President s cabinet were agreeing with General Scott. 
 In the face of this, the President determined to hold 
 the fort. A vessel was made ready and sent to Charles 
 ton, and, according to promise, Governor Pickens was 
 notified. 
 
 Before the vessel containing food for the besieged 
 men reached the harbor, General Beauregard ordered 
 an attack on the little fort. For two days Major An 
 derson and his half-starved men kept up a brave but 
 hopeless defense. At last the flag, torn by hostile bul 
 lets, was lowered. The little garrison, holding out as 
 long as it could without food or ammunition, surren 
 dered. A new and strange banner was raised over 
 Sumter. " And the war came." 
 
 On Sunday morning, April 14, 1861, the news 
 flashed to every village in the land, " Sumter has been 
 fired on. Sumter has fallen." From that moment the 
 flag of the Union, that had been only a decoration, 
 became a sacred thing, that brought tears to men s eyes 
 as they saw it outlined against the sky. 
 
98 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 The next morning the President issued a proclama 
 tion calling for seventy-five thousand troops and con 
 vening a special session of Congress to meet on July 4. 
 In this proclamation he said : " I appeal to all loyal 
 citizens to ... aid this effort to maintain the honor, 
 the integrity, and the existence of our 4 National Union 
 and the perpetuity of popular government, and to 
 redress wrongs already long enough endured." Many 
 loyal men of the country responded instantly. Within 
 a week, camps were established and men and boys from 
 every station in life were taking their first lessons in 
 military science and getting ready to fight for the flag. 
 The streets in every city echoed the tramp of marching 
 men, and every wind carried to anxious ears the rattle 
 of the drum and the scream of the bugle. And so was 
 created the volunteer army which, before peace came 
 again, numbered nearly three millions of men. 
 
 The war, long threatened, had begun ; and of the army 
 of the Union, soon to become the greatest army that 
 the world ever knew, Abraham Lincoln, whose military 
 training had been confined to an eight weeks campaign 
 against Indians that he never saw, became the com- 
 mander-in-chief. 
 
 The news that Fort Sumter had fallen put an end 
 at once to party differences in the North. Democrats 
 and Republicans forgot politics and became Union 
 men. Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, and 
 both in Congress and among the people the leader of 
 the Democratic party, hurried to the White House to 
 offer his help to President Lincoln in putting down 
 the rebellion. It was the one thing that the President 
 needed most. Lincoln and Douglas, rivals no longer 
 but loyal friends, spent three hours together on that 
 fateful Sunday evening planning to save the Union. 
 
WAR BEGINS 99 
 
 Senator Douglas gave to the newspapers as soon as 
 he left the White House the information that " Mr. 
 Douglas called on the President this evening and had 
 an interesting conversation on the present condition 
 of the country. The substance of the conversation was 
 that ... Mr. Douglas . . . was prepared to sustain 
 the President in the exercise of all his constitutional 
 functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the 
 government, and defend the federal capital." From 
 that meeting, the last that ever took place between 
 the two friends, Douglas went to Illinois to rally the 
 people of that State, and especially the Democrats, to 
 Lincoln s support. To the legislature on April 25, 
 1861, he made his last great public address, for he 
 died a few weeks later. " Whenever our government 
 is assailed," he declared, " the shortest way to peace is 
 the most stupendous preparation for war." He closed 
 by saying : " It is with a sad heart, with a grief that 
 I have never before experienced, that I have to con 
 template this fearful struggle ; but I believe, in my 
 conscience, that it is a duty we owe to ourselves, our 
 children, and our God, to protect this government and 
 that flag from every assailant, be he who he may." 
 
 It was the last message of a great man. Its effect 
 was instantaneous. Not only in Illinois, but through 
 out the North, the men of the nation gave evidence to 
 their President that they would stand by him and 
 defend the Union until the flag should float in peace 
 over every foot of soil. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 A PEOPLE S SORROW 
 
 THE attack on Fort Sumter was a call to arms, 
 South as well as North. The chief difference was that 
 it found the South ready, while it took the North by 
 surprise. Southern orators charged that in sending 
 bread to Sumter, Lincoln had " invaded sacred soil " 
 and was trying to " coerce " a sovereign State. On 
 April 17, Virginia, by the vote of a bare majority, 
 joined the Confederacy ; and in May Tennessee, also 
 by a close vote, and Arkansas and North Carolina fol 
 lowed. The Confederate States of America, eleven in 
 number, with Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as Presi 
 dent, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia as Vice- 
 President, had organized what they dreamed would 
 become a new republic, with the right to buy and sell 
 and hold human beings as slaves under national pro 
 tection as its chief principle of government, and the 
 fear of losing that right through Lincoln s election its 
 only reason for being. 
 
 The Confederate leaders had hoped to unite all the 
 slave States, but they were doomed to disappointment. 
 Maryland and Kentucky and Missouri remained loyal, 
 although among their citizens many showed their sym 
 pathy with the South by enlisting and marching with 
 " the boys in gray." To keep these border States loyal 
 was Lincoln s constant purpose, while many were the 
 efforts to break them away from his firm yet sympa 
 thetic hold. 
 
 The different States, in proportion to their popula- 
 
A PEOPLE S SORROW 101 
 
 tion, began at once to organize their soldiers into regi 
 ments and put them under the command of the Presi 
 dent, to be trained for war. To the city of Washing 
 ton, defenseless on the Virginia border, the first troops 
 hastened, reaching the capital four days after the 
 President s call went forth. The city was practically 
 in a state of siege. Barricades of all kinds had been 
 put up about the public buildings. Famine was threat 
 ening, and the people were in terror lest a few of the 
 Southern regiments, already in* camp and awaiting 
 marching orders, should move against the city. Wait 
 ing through the weary night for the Massachusetts and 
 New York regiments to reach Washington, Lincoln 
 walked the corridors of the W hite House alone, repeat 
 ing to himself the despairing cry, " Why don t they 
 come ? Why don t they come ? " 
 
 The conduct of the war presented many problems to 
 the President and his military advisers. The Confeder 
 ate coast-line from the Potomac to the Mexican bor 
 der, many thousands of miles long, was blockaded, and 
 had to be watched to prevent the South from getting 
 provisions or arms or relief from abroad. The border 
 line of Virginia and Tennessee and Arkansas must 
 be guarded lest injury be done to the Northern cities, 
 particularly Washington and Baltimore and Philadel 
 phia. The Mississippi River, with the Ohio opening 
 the way into the great Middle West, must be patrolled 
 by war-boats and guarded by forts and military camps. 
 With the same vigilance must they watch the Potomac 
 on the east and the Cumberland and the Tennessee 
 rivers on the west. At all hazards Washington, the 
 national capital, must be kept in safety. 
 
 Three general fields of military activity seemed to 
 open : the capture of Richmond, the new Confederate 
 
10* ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 capital; the establishment, through the army, of the 
 federal authority among the loyal Union people of east 
 ern Tennessee by way of the Tennessee River ; and 
 the capture of the Confederate fortifications along the 
 Mississippi, so as to open the " Father of Waters " to 
 free passage by Union vessels. To carry out this plan 
 of warfare required the building-up and training of a 
 larger army than the world had yet known. It required 
 four years in camp and on the march, on the battle 
 field, in attack, and on retreat, until the South, whose 
 troops were fewer and whose wealth was less, should 
 at last be worn out and cry, " Enough." 
 
 The story of the four years of waiting and fighting 
 cannot be told here. Lincoln, as commander-in-chief of 
 army and navy and President of the United States, 
 had it all to oversee and direct. The sorrows it brought 
 were his sorrows, and its hourly cares and anxieties 
 were his. 
 
 One member of the little party that had traveled 
 with Lincoln from Springfield to Washington was 
 young Elmer Ellsworth, who, when the war broke out, 
 was made colonel of a regiment of zouaves. While 
 passing through Alexandria, Virginia, with his regi 
 ment, Colonel Ellsworth saw a Confederate flag float 
 ing from the roof of a hotel. Ke dashed up the stairs 
 and, tearing the flag from its staff, started back to the 
 jtreet. On the stairway he was shot and killed. The 
 reckless courage he had shown and the cruelty of his 
 untimely death made the men of the North still more 
 eager to fight for the flag for whose honor Colonel 
 Ellsworth had died. 
 
 When the President was aroused in the early dawn 
 and told the news, he stood by the window in silence 
 looking across the Potomac toward Alexandria, while 
 
A PEOPLE S SORROW 103 
 
 the tears streamed clown his face. Turning toward the 
 bearers of the heart-breaking tidings he said slowly : 
 " So this is the beginning murder ! Ah, my friends, 
 what shall the end be ? " On the next day, in the midst 
 of his overwhelming labors, he found time to write with 
 his own hand this letter to the father and mother whose 
 boy had been killed : 
 
 May 25, 1861. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR AND MADAM, In the untimely loss of 
 your noble son, our affliction here is scarcely less than your 
 own. So much of promised usefulness to one s country, and 
 of bright hopes for one s self and friends, have rarely been 
 so suddenly dashed as in his fall. In size, in years, and in 
 youthful appearance a boy only, his power to command men 
 was surpassingly great. This power, combined with a fine 
 intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether mil 
 itary, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural 
 talent in that department 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 intimate 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 conclu 
 sive 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 sacred- 
 ness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address you this 
 tribute to the memory of my young friend and your brave 
 and early fallen child. 
 
 May God give you that consolation which is beyond all 
 earthly power. 
 
 Sincerely your friend in a common affliction, 
 
 A. LINCOLN. 
 
104 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 This was the first of a great number of personal 
 griefs that the war brought upon Lincoln. A few 
 months later, Colonel Edward D. Baker, the friend 
 who had introduced him at the inauguration, was killed 
 in battle at Ball s Bluff. As there came to the Presi 
 dent from day to day the news of defeat and disaster 
 on many battlefields, it found him overborne by the 
 sorrow of the people and bearing the suffering of others 
 upon a heart already heavy with its own grief. When 
 the report of a battle was looked for, he would wait all 
 through the night for news of the outcome, or hurry 
 through the darkness to the telegraph-office in the War 
 Department Building to learn the news and talk it over 
 with his advisers. To him the report of a battle was the 
 story of so many of his own people, his friends, who 
 were suffering in his service. When he heard of a sol 
 dier s death, he thought first of what that death meant 
 at home, and in every way he could, he tried to make 
 the sorrow of it easier to bear. 
 
 Most of the soldiers who fought for the Union were 
 mere boys. Many of their colonels and generals were 
 less than thirty years old. In the heart of the President 
 they were his boys in blue, whom he loved as he loved 
 his own Robert and Willie and Tad ; and in their hearts 
 he was the " Father Abraham " for whom they prayed, 
 and to whom they sang their rallying song, " We are 
 coming, Father Abraham." 
 
 He went to the hospitals so often to cheer the 
 wounded that the high officials thought he was neglect 
 ing the business of his office. A story is told of hip 
 stopping beside a young soldier s death-bed to writt 
 a last letter to the father and mother of the boy. At 
 the foot of the brave little note he added as a sort of 
 comfort to the sufferer, " This letter was written by 
 
A PEOPLE S SORROW 105 
 
 Abraham Lincoln," and as he turned to leave, asked 
 if he could do anything more. The boy reached a 
 trembling hand toward him and said : " I 11 not live 
 over an hour or two. Can t you hold my hand until it s 
 all over?" 
 
 When the army was in camp in northern Virginia, 
 he found comfort in visiting the boys and watching 
 them drill, and when in the fortune of war they came 
 to the Washington hospitals, wasted with disease or 
 broken with wounds, he visited them there and brought 
 them the comfort of a father s gentle touch and cheer 
 ing word. 
 
 He wrote many letters of sympathy to friends and 
 sometimes to strangers to whom the war had brought 
 some personal loss. In one of these letters he said to 
 the daughter of a friend who had died : 
 
 DEAR FANNY, In this sad world of ours sorrow comes 
 to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because 
 it takes them unawares. The older have learned ever to ex 
 pect it. ... You cannot now realize that you will ever feel 
 better. Is not this so ? And yet it is a mistake. You are 
 sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly 
 true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had 
 experience enough to know what 1 say, and you need only 
 to believe it to feel better at once. The memory of your 
 clear father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad, sweet feel 
 ing in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have 
 known before. 
 
 Your sincere friend, 
 
 A. LINCOLN. 
 
 To a mother whose five sons had died for their coun 
 try he wrote this letter : 
 
 DEAR MADAM, I have been shown in the files of the 
 War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of 
 Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have 
 
106 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and 
 fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt 
 to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. 
 But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation 
 that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died 
 to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the 
 anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished 
 memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that 
 must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar 
 of freedom. 
 
 Yours very sincerely and respectfully, 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 
 
 When, after a year of the horrors of war, death en 
 tered his own household and took his eight-year-old boy 
 Willie, his nature changed greatly. The lines of care 
 deepened about his eyes and mouth. In a few months 
 he had grown to be an old man. He slept scarcely at 
 all. Those who saw him from day to day said that his 
 was the saddest face they had ever seen. To one of 
 his associates he once said, " 1 shall never be happy 
 again." 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 
 
 IT would be a mistake to believe that President 
 Lincoln allowed sorrow to overwhelm him. He had 
 learned through long* experience to meet it with a smil 
 ing face. There were times when no one else dared to 
 be either hopeful or happy. His stories and his jokes 
 were the despair of his counselors. " Why can t the 
 President be serious?" they exclaimed in their impa 
 tience. Because he interrupted a council of state to 
 tell a story or read a page that he thought funny from 
 " Artemus Ward, His Book," shallow men called him 
 heartless. " I tell you," he said, " I simply must do it. 
 If I could not laugh, I should die. It is my safety- 
 valve." 
 
 Life in the White House had little privacy. During 
 the first three years the conduct of the war was directed 
 from there. In the White House the cabinet held its 
 meetings, to agree, and quite as often to disagree, over 
 what should be done. To the White House came letters 
 and telegrams by the thousand, from people in distress, 
 from applicants for office, from politicians, inventors, 
 abolitionists, and " cranks." Men came with schemes 
 for ending the war or for enriching themselves. Those 
 with grievances sought the President for redress. Fa 
 vors and privileges of all sorts were demanded. But 
 most of all, and at all hours of the day and night, came 
 appeals for the pardon of unhappy soldiers condemned 
 to death for sleeping on duty or for running away from 
 military service. The President had given strict orders 
 
108 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 to turn no one back who came with appeals for a soldier s 
 life ; and against the protest of the head of the army 
 he granted innumerable prayers of this sort, giving as 
 his excuse, " I believe this boy can serve his country 
 better living than dead." 
 
 Most of the demands upon him were unnecessary, 
 for people in difficulty naturally turned to him as the 
 only person who would hear them. One instance is 
 told of a Kentuckian who demanded the President s 
 help to reclaim a runaway slave. With such a request 
 at such a time Lincoln had no patience. " You remind 
 me," he exclaimed, "of a small boy on a St. Law 
 rence steamer. Just as they were in the midst of the 
 rapids at the most dangerous point, the boy rushed 
 to the pilot and said, 4 Say, Mr. Captain, I wish 
 you would stop this boat ; I ve lost my apple over 
 board. " 
 
 The President was very fond of John Hay, his young 
 secretary, who lived in the White House, and who saved 
 him from many an unpleasant meeting, and from many 
 a wearing duty. In the long sleepless nights the Presi 
 dent was wont to court rest from his anxieties by going 
 across the White House in his night-clothes to sit on 
 the edge of John Hay s bed and read to him for hours 
 at a time from Shakespeare s plays or from the poems 
 of Holmes and Hood and Burns. 
 
 The Lincoln boys, eight and ten years old, went 
 wherever they liked about the building, bursting into 
 the cabinet-room while affairs of vast importance were 
 under discussion, and climbing over their good-natured 
 father s giant frame as if it were their play-hour and 
 the austere Secretary of War and his fellow statesmen 
 were intruders. Mr. Hay has told of the comradeship 
 that prevailed between Lincoln and his two younger 
 
LINCOLN AND TAD 
 
PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 109 
 
 sons. " The two little boys, with their Western inde 
 pendence and enterprise, kept the house in an uproar. 
 They drove their tutor wild with their good-natured 
 disobedience : they organized a minstrel show in the 
 attic ; they made acquaintance with the office-seekers, 
 and became the hot champions of the distressed. Tad 
 was a merry, warm-blooded, kindly little boy, perfectly 
 lawless, and full of odd fancies. . . . Sometimes, escap 
 ing from the domestic authorities, he would take refuge 
 in that sanctuary [his father s office] for the whole 
 evening, dropping to sleep at last on the floor, when the 
 President would pick him up and carry him tenderly 
 to bed." 
 
 Once, when hope of success for the Union cause 
 seemed far away, the President issued a proclamation 
 setting apart a day of fasting and prayer, Mid. asking 
 " all the people to abstain on that day from their or 
 dinary secular pursuits and to unite, at their several 
 places of worship and their respective homes, in keep 
 ing the day holy to the Lord." When little Tad Lin 
 coln was told that this meant going without food for a 
 whole day, he began to be afraid that he might starve. 
 For some days before the fast-day, and with the utniosfc 
 secrecy, he busied himself with hiding in the carriage- 
 house scraps of food from the table and the kitchen. 
 The discovery of his storehouse of provisions enraged 
 the small boy, but amused his father greatly. " If he 
 grows to be a man," the President said with a laugh, 
 44 Tad will be what the women all dote on a good 
 provider." 
 
 One of the President s secretaries has described the 
 part Tad took in one of his father s White House 
 speeches. " From a point of concealment behind the 
 window drapery, I held a light while he read, drop- 
 
110 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 ping the pages of Lis written speech, one by one, upon 
 the floor as he finished them. Little Tad . . . scram 
 bled around on the floor, importuning his father to 
 give him l another paper, as he collected the sheets of 
 paper fluttering from the President s hand. Outside 
 was a vast sea of faces, illuminated by the lights that 
 burned in the festal array of the White House, and 
 stretching far out into the misty darkness." 
 
 On another occasion, when Secretary Stanton play 
 fully made Tad a lieutenant in the army, Tad threw 
 the White House into an uproar by assuming full 
 military authority. He had a lot of firearms sent over, 
 discharged the guard, mustered all the house-servants, 
 drilled them with the muskets, and put them on guard. 
 When the confusion he had created was reported to 
 President Lincoln, he treated it as a joke, sent Tad 
 to bed, and then relieved the novel guardsmen from 
 duty. 
 
 The Lincoln children s dogs and cats and goats 
 seemed to get their share of the busy President s 
 thoughts. When there were new puppies or kittens in 
 the family, he announced it in all seriousness to his 
 visitors. When Tad was away with his mother, tele 
 grams kept the boy posted as to the welfare of his 
 pets. In one of these dispatches the President said, 
 " Tell Tad the goats and father are very well, espe 
 cially the goats." In one of his letters to Mrs. Lin 
 coln he wrote : " Tell dear Tad poor 4 Nanny goat is 
 lost and Mrs. Cuthbert and I are in distress about it. 
 T le day you left, Nanny was found resting herself and 
 chewing her little cud on the middle of Tad s bed ; 
 but now she s gone. The gardener kept complaining 
 that she destroyed the flowers, till it was concluded to 
 bring her down to the White House. . . . The second 
 
PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 111 
 
 day she disappeared and has not been heard of since. 
 This is the last we know of poor Nanny." In a later 
 dispatch he telegraphed his wife, " All well, includ 
 ing Tad s pony and the goats." 
 
 Once in a while the boys would succeed in enticing 
 their father into the grounds, where they would play 
 ball with him, and in high glee keep him running the 
 bases with his giant strides. For the children he was 
 willing to do anything. 
 
 A boy of thirteen had displayed unusual courage 
 in the gunboat service and sought the President s help 
 in getting into the Naval Academy. He bowed to the 
 President and began to tell his story when he was 
 interrupted by Mr. Lincoln s hearty, " Bless me ! 
 is that the boy who did so gallantly in those two 
 great battles? Why, I feel that I should bow to him 
 and not he to me." When the President found the 
 boy was a few months too young to have his wish, 
 he put his hand affectionately on his shoulder and 
 said to him : " Now, my boy, go home and have good 
 fun until fall. It is about the last holiday you will 
 get." 
 
 Another boy of thirteen had been a drummer and 
 had lost his place because he had offended his colonel. 
 Sick and disheartened, he was waiting to see if the 
 President would not give him another chance. Lincoln 
 asked him where he lived and who his parents were. 
 " I have no mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, 
 and no friends nobody cares for me." The Presi 
 dent wrote on a card an order " to care for this poor 
 boy," and sent him away happy. 
 
 Through all the years, with the wisdom and foresight 
 of a statesman, he had kept the childlike spirit. The 
 little children, who knew nothing of his trials, came to 
 
112 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 him for help and comfort as freely as if he belonged to 
 them. 
 
 In the crowds that hung about the doorway of his 
 private office the woman who brought a baby with her 
 always managed to get a hearing. The little folk who 
 attended his receptions he singled out for some special 
 word of kindness, stopping the rapidly moving proces 
 sion until he could take a baby into his arms, or " shake 
 hands with this little man." A boy of seven, who was 
 brought to the White House and introduced to Mr. 
 Lincoln as the son of one of the great Union generals, 
 remembers with what tenderness the tall President 
 laid a tired hand on his head as he said : " My boy, I 
 hope you will live to be as good a man as I know your 
 father is." 
 
 At one of the big receptions three timid little girls 
 followed the long line of visitors to where Mr. Lincoln 
 stood, and then suddenly lost their courage. The Presi 
 dent noticed them and called out, " Little girls, are you 
 going to pass me without shaking hands ? " 
 
 To one of the youngsters at Springfield whose state 
 ment that he had talked to Abraham Lincoln had been 
 disputed, the President found time to write : 
 
 EXECUTIVE MANSION, March 19, 1861. 
 
 Whom it may concern : I did see and talk with George 
 Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. 
 
 Respectfully, 
 
 A. LINCOLN. 
 
 This interest in the happiness of children Abraham 
 Lincoln had always shown. He did not hesitate to 
 sacrifice the dignity of his high place and the comfort 
 and convenience of a very busy man to give pleasure to 
 any child that needed him. 
 
PRESIDENT LINCOLN AT HOME 113 
 
 In the old days, when Lincoln was one of the lead 
 ing lawyers of the State, he noticed a little girl of 
 ten who stood beside a trunk in front of her home cry 
 ing bitterly. He stopped to learn what was wrong, and 
 was told that she was about to miss a long-promised 
 visit to Decatur because the wagon had not come for 
 her. " You need n t let that trouble you," was his cheer 
 ing reply. " Just come along with me and we shall 
 make it all right." Lifting the trunk upon his shoulder, 
 and taking the little girl by the hand, he went through 
 the streets of Springfield a half-mile to the railway 
 station, put her and her trunk on the train, and sent 
 her away with a happiness in her heart that is still 
 there. 
 
 George Pickett, who had known Lincoln in Illinois, 
 years before, joined the Southern army and by his 
 conspicuous bravery and ability had become one of 
 the great generals of the Confederacy. Toward the 
 close of the war, when a large part of Virginia had 
 fallen into the possession of the Union army, the 
 President called at General Pickett s Virginia home. 
 The general s wife, with her baby on her arm, met him 
 at the door. She herself has told the story for us. 
 " 4 Is this George Pickett s home ? he asked. With 
 all the courage and dignity I could muster I replied, 
 4 Yes, and I am his wife and this is his baby. 4 1 am 
 Abraham Lincoln. 4 The President ! I gasped. I had 
 never seen him, but I knew the intense love and rev 
 erence with which my soldier always spoke of him. 
 The stranger shook his head and replied, 4 No ; Abra 
 ham Lincoln, George s old friend. The baby pushed 
 away from me and reached out his hands to Mr. Lin 
 coln, who took him in his arms. As he did so an ex 
 pression of rapt, almost divine tenderness and love 
 
114 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 lighted up the sad face. It was a look that I have never 
 seen on any other face. The baby opened his mouth 
 wide and insisted upon giving his father s friend a 
 dewy kiss. As Mr. Lincoln gave the little one back to 
 me he said, 4 Tell your father, the rascal, that I forgive 
 him for the sake of your bright eyes. " 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 HIGH TIDE 
 
 Iis T the earlier years of Lincoln s life he believed that 
 fate directed the affairs of men and determined their 
 success or failure for them. But as he grew older, he 
 came to feel that Providence had intrusted to him a 
 great duty toward mankind, and that in some way, thus 
 far undiscovered, he was to have a part in bringing 
 freedom to the slaves. In the campaigns with Douglas, 
 ambitious though he was, he found himself less inter 
 ested in his own personal success than he was in bring 
 ing the people to see the wickedness of slavery. When 
 he came to the presidency it was with a feeling that 
 it was God who had put upon him the burden of sav 
 ing the Union, and that the efforts of men and, least 
 of all, his own efforts, had little to do with the results. 
 To his mind the contest with slavery, and, later on, 
 the war to save the Union, were a single death-struggle 
 between right and wrong, in which he was chosen to 
 execute God s will in God s own good time. It was for 
 this reason that he gave no thought to his own safety, 
 traveling unprotected except when Secretary Stanton 
 forced a guard upon him, and when he made his visits 
 to the front, walking unconcernedly within easy range 
 of the Confederate guns. It was his faith that God 
 would use him as long as he was needed, and would let 
 him die whenever his work was finished. 
 
 This attitude toward Providence he wrote down, in 
 the fall of 1862, when there seemed to be no hope that 
 would come to an early end : " The will of God 
 
116 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in 
 accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one 
 must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the 
 same thing at the same time. In the present Civil War 
 it is quite possible that God s purpose is something dif 
 ferent from the purpose of either party ; and yet the 
 human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are 
 of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost 
 ready to say that this is probably true ; that God wills* 
 this contest and wills that it shall not end yet. By His 
 mere great power on the minds of the now contestants 
 He could have either saved or destroyed the Union 
 without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, 
 having begun, He could give the final victory to either 
 side any day. Yet the contest proceeds." 
 
 During 1861 and 1862 the loyal States stood by 
 him faithfully, sending troops by hundreds of thou 
 sands as rapidly as he called for them. Upon the ques 
 tion of freeing the slaves they continued to disagree. 
 The war was a war to preserve the Union ; upon that 
 all could stand together, Kentucky and Maryland and 
 Missouri, as well as the free States of the North. But 
 in the background the problem of what to do with 
 the slaves loomed large. Hundreds of thousands of 
 negroes in the South were helping the enemies of the 
 Union, supporting the families of the soldiers in rebel 
 lion while their masters fought, and digging the trenches 
 and building the fortifications to enable their masters 
 to prolong the war. The time was rapidly approaching 
 when this use of the slaves must be stopped. If only 
 the President would set them free, men said, the end 
 would soon come. But emancipation could not come so 
 long as it would offend the loyal border States. Day 
 by day the anti-slavery feeling grew stronger in the 
 
HIGH TIDE 117 
 
 North, and day after day abolition committees and del 
 egations waited on the President to urge him to act. 
 At the same time other loyal people just as earnestly 
 warned him of the mischief that such a step would 
 work. 
 
 The President found a strong reason for emanci 
 pation in the effect it would have upon the feeling of 
 England, for with all their sympathy with the South, 
 the English were distinctly hostile to slavery. Lincoln 
 knew that if ever the success of the South came to 
 mean the perpetuation of slavery, English sympathy 
 would shift toward the Union side. 
 
 During the summer of 1862, it became plain that 
 emancipation could not be put off much longer. The 
 military necessity of taking from the enemy the power 
 to use negro labor in aid of the rebellion became more 
 and more evident, even to the loyal people on the bor 
 der. Lincoln, having made up his mind to free the 
 slaves, kept his own counsel, waiting for the fit time to 
 come, and bearing in silence the criticism of the anti- 
 slavery people. 
 
 To Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, 
 who, under the title, " The Prayer of Twenty Millions," 
 had printed a savage attack on him for delaying to free 
 the slaves, he wrote : " I would save the Union. I 
 would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. 
 ... 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. ... I have here stated my purpose according 
 to my view of official duty ; and I intend no modifi 
 cation of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men 
 everywhere could be free." 
 
118 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 This is the answer he made to a committee of church 
 people who came to him to urge him to act : " I am 
 approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, 
 and that by religious men who are equally certain that 
 they represent the divine will. ... I hope it will not 
 be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that 
 God would reveal His will to others on a point so con 
 nected with my duty, it might be supposed He would 
 reveal it directly to me ; for, unless I am more deceived 
 in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to 
 know the will of Providence in this matter. And if I 
 can learn what it is, I will do it." 
 
 Meanwhile he had made his decision. He went into 
 the cabinet meeting one July afternoon with a volume 
 of Artemus Ward in his hand and commenced the 
 deliberations by reading aloud a page of flippant non 
 sense that angered Secretary Stanton and seemed to 
 the rest to be inexcusably out of place. Becoming sud 
 denly serious, he said : " When the rebel army was at 
 Frederick, I determined as soon as it should be driven 
 out of Maryland to issue a proclamation of emancipa 
 tion. I said nothing to any one : but I made the pro 
 mise to myself, and " hesitating for a moment "to 
 my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out and I 
 am going to fulfill that promise." 
 
 In September there came a Union victory in the bat 
 tle of Antietam, and at once the Emancipation Procla 
 mation was published, giving freedom to all who should 
 be slaves within the enemy s country on January 1, 
 1 863. The proclamation closed with this prayer : "And 
 upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice 
 warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, 
 I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the 
 gracious favor of Almighty God." 
 
HIGH TIDE 119 
 
 No sooner were the slaves in the Confederate States 
 set free than it became necessary to organize negro 
 regiments. Many in the North who had been slow to 
 approve of emancipation opposed the arming of the 
 black men. The feeling against it ran high in the North, 
 while in the South, President Davis and the Confeder 
 ate Congress threatened the officers of negro regiments 
 with death. To a Union mass meeting, held at Spring 
 field, Illinois, in August, 1863, the President sent a 
 letter in which he explained the necessity for freeing 
 the slaves and employing them as soldiers. " Peace," 
 he wrote, " does not appear so distant as it did. I 
 hope it will come soon, and come to stay ; and so come 
 as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will 
 then have been proved that among freemen there can 
 be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, 
 and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose 
 their case and pay the cost. And then there will be 
 some black men who can remember that with silent 
 tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well- 
 poised bay one t> they -have helped mankind on to this 
 great consummation, while I fear there will be some 
 white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart 
 and deceitful speech they strove to hinder it." 
 
 On July 4, 1863, the tide of war began to turn. 
 The Union armies under General Grant, with the 
 help of Farragut and Porter and their boats, cap 
 tured Vicksburg and opened the Mississippi, sepa 
 rating Louisiana and Arkansas and Texas from the 
 Confederacy, and Lincoln announced, " The Father of 
 Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." On the 
 same day, at Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania, 
 General Lee and his army, who had marched into 
 the North, were turned back toward Richmond. The 
 
120 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 free States never again echoed the tread of hostile 
 armies. 
 
 At the battle of Gettysburg, which lasted for three 
 days, there had been killed, wounded, or missing over 
 forty-three thousand men, the Union losses being greater 
 than the Confederate. The battle-ground where the 
 soldiers had been buried, almost as they fell, was set 
 apart at once as a national cemetery. On November 
 19, 1863, the dedication took place. Edward Everett 
 delivered the oration. To Abraham Lincoln an invita 
 tion had been given to " set apart these grounds to 
 their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks." The 
 President came by train the day before. The speech 
 was half written, and in his bedroom at Gettysburg he 
 wrote the rest in pencil. A hundred thousand people 
 had assembled in the cemetery, toward which in the 
 morning the great procession moved slowly forward. 
 Lincoln rode his horse with a dignity befitting the 
 commander-in-chief of the nation s army. Mr. Ever 
 ett s address held the audience profoundly attentive 
 from noon until two o clock. A-b*mi**am*&rem*m*g 
 
 " We trust, O God, Thy gracious power 
 To aid us in our darkest hour. 
 This be our prayer, Fattier, save 
 A people s freedom from its grave. 
 All praise to Thee ! " 
 
 As the last words of if* hymn, sung by a Baltimore 
 chorus of a hundred voices, died away, Lincoln stepped 
 forth with the sheets containing the little speech in 
 his left hand. He spoke slowly, in a voice that, like the 
 notes of a bugle, reached the farthest borders of the 
 crowd^There was tenderness in the words : " The brave 
 men, living and dead, who struggled here, have conse- 
 
HIGH TIDE 121 
 
 crated 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." 
 As he continued, " 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 was plain that the people to whose loyalty he had 
 always trusted would prove faithful to the cause for 
 which the honored dead had given " the last full mea 
 sure of devotion." 
 
 The next summer peace seemed farther away than 
 ever. The battle-line crept once more dangerously near 
 to free territory. Impatient men, weary of Lincoln s 
 caution, began to look about for some one for Presi 
 dent who would drive the armies unprepared to their 
 destruction, while others, weary of the daily record 
 of disaster, were in search of a candidate who would 
 consent to a peace that meant disunion. 
 
 A mass convention of all the dissatisfied Union men 
 was held at Cleveland, Ohio, to denounce the Presi 
 dent s "imbecile policy in the conduct of the war," 
 and nominate John C. Fremont to succeed him. In 
 stead of being a representative gathering of thousands 
 of loyal citizens, it brought together only a few disap 
 pointed politicians and personal enemies of Mr. Lin 
 coln. To the President came a report of the affair as 
 he sat with a group of friends at the White House. 
 14 How many people were at the meeting ? " he asked. 
 "About four hundred," was the answer. He reached 
 for the Bible that lay on his desk, and, turning to the 
 first book of Samuel and the twenty-second chapter, 
 read aloud : " And every one that was in distress, and 
 every one that was in debt, and every one that was dis 
 contented, gathered themselves unto him ; and he be^ 
 
122 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 came a captain over them : and there were with him 
 about four hundred men." 
 
 The Republicans made no nomination in 1864, but 
 the Union party, as it called itself, met at Baltimore 
 and nominated Abraham Lincoln for President and 
 Andrew Johnson of Tennessee for Vice-President. 
 Many of the Democrats supported the Union ticket. 
 The others nominated George B. McClellan for Pre 
 sident. 
 
 In the fall, as the campaign went on, the Union 
 began to win victories by sea and by land. Admiral 
 Farragut captured Mobile, and Sherman took Atlanta. 
 The effect on the campaign was stimulating. To use 
 Lincoln s homely words, the people became convinced 
 that " it would not do to swap horses while they were 
 crossing the stream," and by a tremendous vote 212 
 to 21 reflected Abraham Lincoln. He was serenaded, 
 the night after the election, and in his response said : 
 "The rebellion continues, and now that the election i& 
 over, may not all having a common interest reunite in 
 a common effort to save our common country ? For my 
 own part, I have striven and shall strive to avoid plac 
 ing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been 
 here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man s 
 bosom. While I am deeply sensible to the high com 
 pliment of a reelection, and duly grateful, as I trust, to 
 Almighty God for having directed my countrymen 
 to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, 
 it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man 
 may be disappointed or pained by the result." 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 PEACE 
 
 THE reelection of Lincoln proved that the only way 
 to peace, to a peace that would "come to stay" and be 
 " worth the keeping in all future time," was to fight it 
 out. To the Confederate army it gave the courage of 
 despair, a courage that enabled brave men to die for a 
 cause already lost ; to the Union soldiers it gave a con 
 fidence that made success secure. It was plain that the 
 armies under Lee in Virginia and under Johnston in 
 the Carolinas were struggling to put off the inevitable 
 end. The opening of the Mississippi River, in 1863, 
 had cut the South in two and put the Western States 
 out of the contest. From the Tennessee River, General 
 Sherman had fought his bloody way into the heart 
 of Georgia and was now leading his victorious army 
 " from Atlanta to the sea," thus separating the Gulf 
 States from what was left of the Confederacy. Mean 
 while Grant was driving Lee, inch by inch, by " the 
 road of death," back from the Potomac and into the 
 devastated South. The Confederacy was at bay. The 
 end was in sight. 
 
 On March 4, 1865, standing where, four years be 
 fore, he had sworn " to preserve, protect, and defend 
 the Constitution," President Lincoln was inaugurated 
 a second time. The four years of war had wrought 
 great changes in the people and in the man. No mili 
 tary escort was needed this time to bring him to the 
 Capitol, for he was now among friends. With little 
 Tad beside him, he drove rapidly from the White House 
 
124 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 to the ceremony. In the parade and in the audience, 
 for the first time in American history, a multitude of 
 negroes, soldiers and civilians whom he had set free, 
 were gathered to do him honor. The President, hag 
 gard and worn, stood before the people. He was sad 
 dened by his own cares and borne down by the burden 
 of the nation s grief. He might have said, as Henry 
 Ward Beecher did, " I am surrounded by those who 
 are sorrowing almost unto death." 
 
 As he arose, a deep silence fell upon the people. It 
 was as if a prophet of the elder day were speaking 
 the word of inspiration to the nation that his faith had 
 saved. The sky had been overcast, but suddenly a 
 burst of sunshine brought the giant figure into a glare 
 of light, thrilling the speaker and giving to the people, 
 as he thought, an omen of the triumph that was so 
 near at hand. 
 
 44 The Almighty has his own purposes," he declared. 
 44 4 Woe unto the world because of offenses ! for it must 
 needs be that offenses come ; but woe to that man by 
 whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose 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 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 ascribed to Him? Fondly do we 
 hope fervently do we pray that this mighty 
 scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God 
 wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
 bondsman s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited 
 toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn 
 
II 
 
 2 I 
 
 !J 
 
PEACE 125 
 
 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. 
 
 " With malice toward none ; with charity for all ; 
 with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the 
 right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; 
 to bind up the nation s wounds ; to care for him who 
 shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and 
 his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish 
 a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all 
 nations." 
 
 The change that the years of war had made in the 
 President was noted by every one. " When I last saw 
 him," Horace Greeley tells us, " I was struck by his 
 haggard, care-fraught face, so different from the sunny, 
 gladsome countenance he first brought from Illinois. 
 I felt that his life hung by so slender a thread that 
 any new access of trouble or excess of effort might 
 suddenly close his career. . . . 4 The sunset of life was 
 plainly looking out of his kindly eyes and gleaming 
 from his weather-beaten visage." 
 
 The weeks that followed brought no little happiness 
 to the President. The Thirteenth Amendment passed 
 Congress and was in a fair way to become a part of 
 the Constitution. By it liberty was given to the slaves 
 in the loyal States, as, by the President s Emancipa 
 tion Proclamation, liberty had already been given to 
 the slaves within Confederate territory. The President 
 took every opportunity to help in the adoption of this 
 amendment. 
 
 Late in March he took Tad with him to City Point 
 in Virginia, where, as General Grant s guest, he could 
 watch the movement of the armies. The last days of 
 
126 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 the struggle were no holiday for the tender-hearted 
 President. As the news came, from hour to hour, of 
 Lee s retreat and of the capture of Confederate pris 
 oners by thousands, he sent messages of joy to Wash 
 ington, while the reports of men wounded and men 
 killed on either side deepened the lines of sadness in 
 his face. He knew that, as in surgery, the most mer 
 ciful way to peace was to bring it quickly by sharp and 
 decisive action. So when General Sheridan reported 
 that, if the thing were pressed, he thought General Lee 
 would surrender, he set himself grimly to the inevitable 
 and telegraphed to Grant, " Let the thing be pressed." 
 
 During the President s stay at City Point, Jefferson 
 Davis and the Confederate officials gathere.d their 
 papers together, left Richmond by night, and sought 
 safety farther south. As they left, followed by all who 
 were able to crowd into the railway coaches, some one 
 set fire to the city, making the place even more deso 
 late than war had made it. Lee had only a few more 
 days to fight and the end was at hand. 
 
 Without military protection Lincoln led little Tad 
 by the hand into the abandoned capital of the dying 
 Confederacy. No triumphal entry like this is told in 
 history. The negroes, free at last by his hand and by 
 the ratification of war, crowded about him as he walked 
 through their midst. Many proclaimed him "the great 
 Messiah," and falling to the ground before him, tried 
 to kiss his feet. It was a strange experience to this 
 simple-minded man. " Don t kneel to me," he said. 
 " That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and 
 thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy." 
 But from their tender gratitude he was unable to 
 escape. Barefooted, in the garb of slavery, they pur 
 sued him eagerly, singing hymns of worship in which 
 
PEACE 127 
 
 " Massa Lincoln " bore quite as great a part as did 
 the Lord of Hosts. Finally, he made them a speech: 
 " My poor friends, you are free free as air. Liberty 
 is your birthright. But you must try to deserve it. 
 . . . Learn the laws and obey them ; obey God s 
 commandments and thank Him for giving you liberty, 
 for to Him you owe all things." 
 
 An accident to Secretary Seward called Lincoln to 
 Washington earlier than he had wished. On Saturday, 
 the 8th of April, he left City Point by boat, by way of 
 the Potomac, for Washington. Confident that within 
 a few hours the surrender of General Lee would bring 
 the peace for which he had so long prayed, he was able 
 for a time to forget the cares of state as he read aloud 
 from the tragedy of Macbeth. 
 
 Many were now beginning to abandon the Confed 
 erate cause. In Richmond, during the President s brief 
 stay, a movement had been started, with his help, for 
 the withdrawal of the Virginia troops from the Con 
 federate army and the repeal of Virginia s ordinance 
 of secession. But it came to nothing. 
 
 The prospect of an immediate end to the war brought 
 the President and Congress face to face with the grav 
 est political questions the country has ever had to solve. 
 How should the Union be restored? Should Jefferson 
 Davis and his associates be arrested and punished for 
 treason, or should they be received into citizenship, to 
 take part again in the administration of a government 
 they had sought to destroy ? Should the policy toward 
 the leaders in the rebellion be one of revenge, of pun 
 ishment, or of pardon ? Northern sentiment was di 
 vided. In the bitterness of spirit to which the war and 
 its losses had given birth, many found it hard to forgive 
 the men who, by the attack on Fort Sumter, had plunged 
 
128 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 the country into war. Many, too, found fault with Presi 
 dent Lincoln because he felt that the South had suf 
 fered enough, and that the victors in the awful strug 
 gle should yield to the command of Scripture, "Judge 
 not, that ye be not judged." Some of the bitter parti 
 sans in the North, including Vice-President Andrew 
 Johnson, were opposing any settlement with the de 
 feated Confederates which would permit the pardon of 
 their leaders and the restoration to the States of their 
 political rights as a part of the restored Union. The 
 President was not one of these. For the prostrate South 
 he had 110 word of bitterness. He was a stranger to 
 hate. 
 
 As he had exposed himself day after day to dangers 
 of all sorts, the fear for his safety increased. When he 
 was approaching Washington Mrs. Lincoln said to him, 
 " The city is filled with our enemies." But Lincoln ex 
 claimed, " Enemies ! We must never speak of that ! * 
 The President was a constant visitor to the hospitals 
 where the wounded from both armies were being cared 
 for by the women of the North. On one of these visits 
 an attendant tried to turn him aside by saying, " Those 
 patients are rebels." But he answered gently, " Not 
 rebels, Confederates." 
 
 Peace came at last. On Sunday, the 9th of April, 
 General Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and with the 
 help of Grant, whose generosity in victory had won the 
 admiration of the South, and of Lincoln, whose sym 
 pathy for the South in its distress had won the hearts 
 of many of his former enemies, he was now ready to 
 44 bind up the nation s wounds." 
 
 When the news from Appomattox reached Wash 
 ington, the cabinet was in session at the White House. 
 At Lincoln s bidding they all knelt in silent prayer. 
 
PEACE 129 
 
 Outside, men, women, and children thronged the pub- 
 lie places. For the first time the voice of the cannon 
 proclaimed good will to men. Bands played in all the 
 streets. From Sunday until Friday the celebration 
 continued. In the South, the boys in gray, no longer 
 soldiers, were glad that with the return of peace they 
 could go back to the hard work for which they were 
 already eager and to the homes where, among those 
 they loved, they could recount the story of their strug 
 gle to uphold a hopeless cause. 
 
 After the flight from Richmond, Jefferson Davis 
 and his high officials had become fugitives. Advice 
 was sought of President Lincoln regarding their cap- 
 ture and punishment. He did not seem interested. He 
 merely told a story and suggested that if only it could 
 be managed so that these persons could escape " unbe 
 knownst" to him, it would save a lot of trouble. 
 
 In the White House grounds on Tuesday evening, by 
 a common impulse, the happy crowds gathered, eager 
 for a speech from the President. They loved to listen 
 to him, and they wanted to hear what he would say 
 about the South. As the war drew near its close, he 
 had been seeking a plan that would secure forever the 
 results of the war, freedom and union, and at the same 
 time, bring about the fulfillment of the hope he had 
 expressed at his first inauguration, that " the mystic 
 chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and 
 patriot grave would yet swell the chorus of the Union." 
 The time had indeed come to " bind up the nation s 
 wounds." To Abraham Lincoln this meant above all 
 else generosity toward a defeated enemy. He stood at 
 the open window while he made plain to the crowd his 
 plan for restoring the old relations between the States? 
 upon terms that no enemy of the South would have 
 
130 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 dreamed of offering. As the bands played patriotic 
 airs, the President called for " Dixie," explaining to 
 the people that the Attorney-General had looked into 
 the question and had decided that " Dixie " was now 
 a national air by right of conquest. 
 
 On Thursday night he had a strange dream that had 
 come to him just before each of the great victories o( 
 the war. He dreamed that he was in a mysterious ves 
 sel, drifting silently, rapidly, toward an unknown shore. 
 He told the dream to his cabinet ministers and to 
 General Grant the next morning, assuring them as he 
 told it that they would soon have news of the sur 
 render of Johnston s army, the only remnant of the 
 Confederate forces still in arms. 
 
 The arrival of General Grant at Washington aroused 
 popular enthusiasm to its highest pitch, and brought 
 thousands to the city to see the great commander for 
 the first time. It was arranged and advertised that, on 
 Friday evening, Grant was to go with the President 
 and occupy a box at Ford s Theatre. The city was 
 full of strangers, many of them still hostile to the 
 Union. The intensity of the war feeling led the 
 authorities to fear for the safety of Grant and Lincoln, 
 if they should appear in public together. At the 
 last moment Grant declined the invitation. The Presi 
 dent did not want to go, but was loath to disap- 
 point the people. With Mrs. Lincoln and two guests 
 he entered the State Box at Ford s Theatre at about 
 nine o clock. For a moment the play was stopped. The 
 Audience rose to its feet, cheering and waving hats and 
 handkerchiefs and flags, while the orchestra played 
 * Hail to the Chief." 
 
 The evening wore on. The tired President, happy 
 to forget his anxieties for an hour, became absorbed ID 
 
PEACE 131 
 
 the play. Presently a young man slipped noiselessly 
 into the President s box, held a pistol to Lincoln s 
 head, and fired. An instant later, the assassin leaped to 
 the stage and disappeared. All night long it rained 
 dismally. The startled nation dumbly waited for the 
 news that came in the early morning. In a forlorn little 
 room into which he had been carried from the theatre, 
 Abraham Lincoln lay dead. 
 
 In the camps of the Union armies and throughout 
 the North on that Saturday morning, the joy that 
 peace had brought was turned to grief. Every home 
 in the North was widowed, and even the little children 
 cried in their sorrow. It was as if one might say, as 
 was said in the midnight of Egypt s sorrow, " There 
 was not a house where there was not one dead." 
 
 Of a great ruler who gave up his life for his people, 
 three centuries ago, it was said as we may say of 
 Abraham Lincoln : " He went through life bearing the 
 load of a people s sorrows upon his shoulders, with a 
 smiling face. . . . While he lived he was the guiding 
 star of a whole brave nation ; and when he died the 
 little children cried in the streets." 
 
 O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN! 
 
 O CAPTAIN ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done, 
 
 The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought if 
 
 won, 
 
 The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
 While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: 
 But O heart ! heart ! heart ! 
 
 O the bleeding drops of red, 
 Where on the deck my Captain lies, 
 Fallen cold and dead. 
 
132 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 
 O Captain ! my Captain ! rise up and hear the bells ; 
 
 Rise up for you the flag is flung for you the bugle trills, 
 
 For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths for you the shores 
 
 a-crowding, 
 
 For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning ; 
 Here Captain ! dear father ! 
 
 This arm beneath your head ! 
 
 It is some dream that on the deck 
 
 You ve fallen cold and dead. 
 
 My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, 
 My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, 
 The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, 
 From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won : 
 Exult O shores, and ring O bells ! 
 
 But I with mournful tread, 
 Walk the deck my Captain lies, 
 Fallen cold and dead. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
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 APR 4 1935 
 MAR 141939 
 
 27 T944 
 JAN 12 1945 
 
 NOV 21 1648 
 
 lS 
 
 LD 21-20m-fi, 32 
 
YB 3756T 
 
 
 [64405 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY