Sketch of the life of Abraham Lincoln

In four years, this man crushed the most stupendous rebellion, supported by armies more vast, and resources greater than were ever before combined to overthrow any government. He held together and consolidated, against warring factions, his own great party, and strengthened it by securing the confidence and bringing to his aid a large proportion of all other parties. He was re-elected almost by acclamation, and he led the people, step by step, up to emancipation, and saw his work crowned by the Constitutional Amendment, eradicating Slavery from the Republic for ever. Did this man lack firmness? Study the boldness of the Emancipation! See with what fidelity he stood by his Proclamation! In his message of 1863, he said: "I will never retract the proclamation, nor return to slavery any person made free by it." In 1864, he said: "If it should ever be made a duty of the Executive to return to slavery any person made free by the Proclamation or the acts of Congress, some other person, not I, must execute the law."

When hints of peace were suggested as obtainable by giving over the negro race again to bondage, he repelled it with indignation. When the rebel Vice-President, Stephens, at Fortress Monroe, tempted him to give up the freedman, and seek the glory of a foreign war, in which the Union and Confederate soldiers might join, neither party sacrificing its honor, he was inflexible; he would die sooner than break the nation's plighted faith.

Mr. Lincoln did not enter with reluctance upon the plan of emancipation; and in this statement I am corroborated by Lovejoy and Sumner, and many others. If he did not act more promptly, it was because he knew he must not go faster than the people. Men have questioned the firmness, boldness, and will of Mr. Lincoln. He had no vanity in the exhibition of power, but he quietly acted, when he felt it his duty so to do, with a boldness and firmness never surpassed.

What bolder act than the surrender of Mason and Slidell, against the resolution of Congress and the almost universal popular clamor, without consulting the Senate or taking advice from his Cabinet? The removals of McClellan and Butler, the modification of the orders of Fremont and Hunter, were acts of a bold, decided character. He acted for himself, taking personally the responsibility of deciding the great questions of his administration.

He was the most democratic of all the presidents. Personally, he was homely, plain, without pretension, and without ostentation. He believed in the people, and had faith in their good impulses. He ever addressed himself to their reason, and not to their prejudices. His language was simple, sometimes quaint, never sacrificing expression to elegance. When he spoke to the people, it was as though he said to them, "Come, let us reason together." There can not be found in all his speeches or writings a single vulgar expression, nor an appeal to any low sentiment or prejudice. He had nothing of the demagogue. He never himself alluded to his humble origin, except to express regret for the deficiencies of his education. He always treated the people in such a way, that they knew that he respected them, believed them honest, capable of judging correctly, and disposed to do right.

I know not how, in a few words, I can better indicate his political and moral character, than by the following incident: A member of Congress, knowing the purity of his life, his reverence for God, and his respect for religion, one day expressed surprise, that he had not joined a church. After mentioning some difficulties he felt in regard to some articles of faith, Mr. Lincoln said, "Whenever any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, Christ's condensed statement of both Law and Gospel, 'Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart."

Love to God, as the great Father, love to man as his brother, constituted the basis of his political and moral creed.

One day, when one of his friends was denouncing his political enemies, "Hold on," said Mr. Lincoln, "Remember what St. Paul says, 'and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.'"

From the day of his leaving Springfield to assume the duties of the Presidency, when he so impressively asked his friends and neighbors to invoke upon him the guidance and wisdom of God, to the evening of his death, he seemed ever to live and act in the consciousness of his responsibility to Him, and with the trusting faith of a child he leaned confidingly upon His Almighty Arm. He was visited during his administration by many Christian delegations, representing the various religious denominations of the Republic, and it is known that he was relieved and comforted in his great work by the consciousness that the Christian world were praying for his success. Some one said to him, one day, "No man was ever so remembered in the prayers of the people, especially of those who pray not to be heard of men, as you are." He replied, "I have been a good deal helped by just that thought."

The support which Mr. Lincoln received during his administration from the religious organizations, and the sympathy and confidence between the great body of Christians and the President, was indeed a source of immense strength and power to him.

I know of nothing revealing more of the true character of Mr. Lincoln, his conscientiousness, his views of the slavery question, his sagacity and his full appreciation of the awful trial through which the country and he had to pass, than the following incident stated by Mr. Bateman, Superintendent of Public Instruction for Illinois.

On one occasion, in the autumn of 1860, after conversing with Mr. Bateman at some length, on the, to him, strange conduct of Christian men and ministers of the Gospel supporting slavery, he said: —

"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, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God. I have told them that a house divided against itself can not stand; and Christ and Reason say the same; and they will find it so.

"Douglas don'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 I shall be vindicated; and these men will find that they have not read their Bibles right."

Much of this was uttered as if he were speaking to himself, and with a sad, earnest solemnity of manner impossible to be described. After a pause, he resumed: "Doesn't it appear strange that men can ignore the moral aspect of this contest? A revelation could not make it plainer to me that slavery or the Government must be destroyed. The future would be something awful, as I look at it, but for this rock on which I stand (alluding to the Testament which he still held in his hand). It seems as if God had borne with this thing (slavery) until the very teachers of religion had come to defend it from the Bible, and to claim for it a divine character and sanction; and now the cup of iniquity is full, and the vials of wrath will be poured out." After this, says Mr. Bateman, the conversation was continued for a long time. Every thing he said was of a peculiarly deep, tender, and religious tone, and all was tinged with a touching melancholy. He repeatedly referred to his conviction that the day of wrath was at hand, and that he was to be an actor in the terrible struggle which would issue in the overthrow of slavery, though he might not live to see the end.9

Perhaps in all history there is no example of such great and long continued injustice as that of the British press during the war toward Mr. Lincoln. His death shamed them into decency. While he lived they sneered at his manners. Let them turn to their own Cromwell. They said his person was ugly. Has the world recognized the ability of Mirabeau, or that of Henry Brougham, notwithstanding their ugliness? They made scurrile jests about his figure, as though a statesman must be necessarily a sculptor's model! They were facetious about his dress, as though a greater than a Fox or a Chatham must be a Beau Brummel. They were horrified by his jokes. If the same had been told by the patrician Palmerston, instead of the plebeian Lincoln, they would not have lacked the "Attic salt," but would have rivaled Dean Swift or Sidney Smith.

It has been truly said there is one parallel only, to English journalism's treatment of Lincoln, and that is to be found in their treatment of Napoleon. "The Corsican Ogre," and the "American Ape," were phrases coined in the same mint. But the great Corsican was England's bitter foe; Lincoln was never provoked either by his own or his country's wrongs, to hostility against Great Britain. Yet at the great Martyr's grave, even this injustice changed to respect and reverence; even "Punch" repented and said —

"Yes he had lived to shame me from my sneer,To lame my pencil, and confute my pen;To make me own this hind, of princes peer,This rail-splitter a true-born King of men."

The place Mr. Lincoln will occupy in history, will be higher than any which he held while living. His Emancipation Proclamation is the most important historical event of the nineteenth century. Its influence will not be limited by time, nor bounded by locality. It will ever be treated by the historian as one of the great landmarks of human progress.

He has been compared and contrasted with three great personages in history, who were assassinated, – with Cæsar, with William of Orange, and with Henry IV. of France. He was a nobler type of man than either, as he was the product of a higher and more Christian civilization.

The two great men by whose words and example our great continental Republic is to be fashioned and shaped are Washington and Lincoln. Representative men of the East, and of the West, of the Revolutionary era, and the era of Liberty for all. One sleeps upon the banks of the Potomac, and the other on the great prairies of the Valley of the Mississippi. Lincoln was as pure as Washington, as modest, as just, as patriotic; less passionate by nature, more of a democrat in his feelings and manners, with more faith in the people, and more hopeful of their future. Statesmen and patriots will study their record and learn the wisdom of goodness.

1

When the compiler of the Annals of Congress asked Mr. Lincoln to furnish him with data from which to compile a sketch of his life, the following brief, characteristic statement was given. It contrasts very strikingly with the voluminous biographies furnished by some small great men who have been in Congress: —

"Born, February 12th, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky.

"Education defective.

"Profession, a Lawyer.

"Have been a Captain of Volunteers in Black Hawk War.

"Postmaster at a very small office.

"Four times a member of the Illinois Legislature, and was a member of the Lower House of Congress.

"Yours, &c.,"A. Lincoln."

2

The settlers have an expression, "Corn dodger and common doin's," as contradistinguished from "Wheat bread and chickin fixin's."

3

Vide "History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery," p. 76.

4

Hon. Jos. Gillespie.

5

That they "should be perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way."

6

See Letter of the President to A. G. Hodges, dated April 4, 1864.

7

See letter of Mr. Lincoln to State Convention of Illinois.

8

The substance of what follows is from chapter 29th of "The History of Abraham Lincoln, and The Overthrow of Slavery," by Isaac N. Arnold.

9

The foregoing statement has been verified by Mr. Bateman as substantially correct.