The Gettysburg speech and other papers

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Number 32

January, 1888

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A Popular School Reader, containing Good Literature drawm

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[Extensively used in the 8th and 9th Grades of Grammar Schools.]

^1 afterpieces of American literature.

J2ino, 470 pages, 'fl.OO, 7tet^ postpaid.
With a portrait of each author.

CONTENTS.

f^RViNG : Biographical Sketch ; Rip Van Winkle.

Bryant : Biographical Sketch ; Tha natopsis ; To a
Waterfowl.

Franklin : Biographical Sketch ; Poor Richard's Al-
manac ; Letter to Samuel Mather ; Letter to the
Rev. Dr. Lathrop, Boston ; Letter to Benjamin
Webb.

Holmes : Biographical Sketch ; Grandmother's Story
of Bunker Hill Battle ; The Ploughman ; The
Chambered Nautilus ; The Iron Gate.

Hawthorne : Biogra23hical Sketch ; The Great Stone
Face ; My Visit to Niagara.

Whittier : Biographical Sketch ; Snow-Bound ; The
Ship-Builders ; The Worship of Nature.

Thoreau : Biographical Sketch ; Wild Apples.

O'Reilly: Biographical Sketch; The Pilgrim Fa-
thers.

Lowell : Biographical Sketch ; Books and Libraries ;
Essay on Lincoln [with Lincoln's Gettysburg
Speech] ; The Vision of Sir Launfal.

Emerson : Biographical Sketch ; Behavior ^ Boston
Hymn.

Webster: Biographical Sketch; Address delivered
at the Laying of the Corner-Stone of Bunker Hill
Monument, June 17, 1825.

Everett : Biographical Sketch ; From " The Char-
acter of Washington."

LoNGFELLOAV : Biographical Sketch ; Evangeline«

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY,

4 Park Street, Boston; 11 East 17th Street, New York;
158 Adams Street, Chipauo.

SDtje Hit)crsiDc Ilitcraturc ^eric0

THE GETTYSBURG SPEECH

AND OTHER PAPEKS

BY

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

AND

AH" ESSAY OX LIlSrCOLlS

BY

JAIVIES RUSSELL LOWELL

WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

Boston: 4 Park Street; New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
Chicago: 158 Ada'ans Street

(Cbc JliitJcrsitJe ^iccss, Cambridge

Copyright, 1871,
By JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

Copyright, 1888,
Bt HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass,, U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company.

PREFACE.

It Is still too early to know Abraham Lincoln, but
it is none too soon to use sucb knowledge as we have
for adding to our conception of him, and for shaping
our praise and honor. He lived so openly among men,
and he was surrounded by such a mass of eager, posi-
tive men and women in a time when the mind of man
was especially alert, he was so much the object of criti-
cism and of eulogy, and above all he was himself a
man of such varied attitude toward other men, that
we are likely for years to come to have an increasing
volume of testimony concerning him.

Meanwhile there is slowly taking form in the
general apprehension of men a figure so notable, so
individual, so powerful, that men everywhere are rec-
ognizing the fact, that however other Americans may
be regarded, there is one man who holds the interest,
the profound respect, and the affection of the people
as none other has yet done. Franklin has been widely
influential, but he has not appealed to the highest
spirit. He does not invite reverence, and only he is
truly great to whom we look up. Washington has a
place by himself, so aloof from other men, that with
all our efforts we cannot perfectly succeed in human-
izing him, but are content to leave him heroic. Jack-
son is the idol of a party ; but Lincoln, appearing at a
critical period, and showing himself a great leader, is

4 PREFACE.

so humane, he comes so close to the eye, his homely
nature seems so familiar, that every one makes him a
personal acquaintance. He had detractors during his
lifetime; there are a few now who are repelled by
some characteristics of the man, but his death did
»much to hallow his memory, and the emphatic testi-
mony of poets and statesmen, who are quick to recog-
nize their peers and their superiors, has been accumu-
lating an expression of feeling which represents the
common sentiment that has never been absent from
the minds of plain people.

Every year the anniversary of Lincoln's birth is
likely to have increased honor : its nearness to Wash-
ington's birthday is likely to cause a joint celebration
of the two great Americans. Both then and at other
times, Lincoln's career will be studied, and this pam-
phlet is put forth as a modest aid to those who desire
some brief handbook. It contains as an introduction
the important essay by James Russell Lowell, who was
one of the earliest, and he has been the most j)ersistent,
of American scholars to recognize the greatness and
the peculiar power of Lincoln. Lowell's own sympa-
thy with the soil quickened his apprehension of sons
of the soil. As a tail-piece, so to speak, it has the
threnody by Walt Whitman, one of the notable bits
of verse called out by Lincoln's death, and so rhyth-
mical, so charged with feeling, that one scarcely ob-
serves the almost random use of rhyme, — it all seems
rhymed ; nor does one resent what on close inspection
might seem an arrogant assumption of the poet's indi-
vidual grief, for every one will feel that he is himself
a solitary mourner for the dead captain.

The body of the pamphlet is occupied with a few of
ihe most striking speeches, messages, and letters of tho

PREFACE. 6

President. It would be easy to increase the number,
but these will be found significant of Lincoln's char-
acter and political policy. Introductions and notes
have been added wherever it seemed desirable to make
the matter clearer. But it is to be hoped that oui
schools will take the opportunity afforded by the great
mass of material easily accessible to acquaint them-
selves in detail with Lincoln's life.

In order to aid teachers and scholars in this work,
we have added to the pamphlet some pages which give
suggestions for the celebration of Lincoln's birthday,
a brief chronology of the leading events in his Tfe,
and a sketch of the material which is at the service of
every one for carrying on a study of this most inter-
esting and important subject. No one can apply him-
self carefully to an inquiry into Lincoln's life in its
whole course without acquainting himself with the
most vital principles of American national life. He
must study the democratic social order, the slavery
conflict, and the war for the Union. It is greatly to be
hoped that the growing interest in American histoiy,
and the increasing attention paid to the investigating
rather than the mere memorizing method of study,
will tend to give a conspicuous place to the biography
of Abraham Lincoln.

CONTENTS.

— • —

PAOB

Graham Lincoln : an Essay by James Russell Lowell . 7

Mr. Lincoln's Speeches, Papers, and Letters

I. The Gettysburg Speech 37

II. The First Inaugural Address ...... 40

III. Letter to Horace Greeley ...... 53

IV. The Emancipation Proclamation . . . . .54
V. Letter to Dissatisfied Friends 58

VI. The Second Inaugural Address 64

VII. Speech in Independence Hall 67

0 Captain ! my Captain. By Walt Whitman . . .69

Lincoln's Birthday

Materials for Sketch of Lincoln's Life 71

Chronological List of Events in the Life of Abraham Lincoln . 75

Programmes 77

ABRAHAM LINCOLN^

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

There have been many painful crises since the im-
patient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosper-
ous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured retri-
bution was to leave them either at the mercy of the
nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had
summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful
American opened his morning paper without dreading
to find that he had no longer a country to love and
honor. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose
first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still
be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room ; but
that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and
hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every
man's heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps
never present to his consciousness, would be gone
from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more.
Men might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal
harvest of priceless associations would be reaped no
longer ; that fine virtue which sent up messages of
courage and security from every sod of it would have
evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably

1 This paper was published by Mr. Lowell originally in the Xorth
American Revieiu for January 1864. When he reprinted it in his vol-
ume, My Study Windows, he added the final paragraph.

8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

cut off from our past, and be forced to splice the
ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new conditions
chance might leave dangling for us.

We confess that we had our doubts at first whether
the patriotism of our people were not too narrowly
provincial to embrace the proportions of national
peril. We felt an only too natural distrust of im-=
mense public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.

That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusi=
asm with which the war was entered-on, that it should
follow soon, and that the slackening of public spirit
should be proportionate to the previous over-tension,
might well be foreseen by all who had studied human
nature or history. Men acting gregariously are al-
ways in extremes ; as they are one moment capable of
higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser
depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether
numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement.
Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust of
men, than self-deception to suspicion of principles.
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in
all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and
set with the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusi-
asm is good material for the orator, but the statesman
needs something more durable to work in, — must be
able to rely on the deliberate reason and consequent
firmness of the people, without which that presence of
mind, no less essential in times of moral than of ma-
terial peril, will be wanting at the critical moment.
Would this fervor of the Free States hold out ? Was
it kindled by a just feeling of the value of constitu-
tional liberty ? Had it body enough to withstand the
inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays?
Had our population intelligence enough to comprehend

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 9

that the choice was between order and anarchy, be-
tween the equilibrium of a government by law and
the tussle of misrule by 'pronunciainrhiento ? Could a
war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of
hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty
of principle ? These w'ere serious questions, and with
no precedent to aid in answering them.

At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, oc-
casion for the most anxious apprehension. A Presi-
dent known to be infected with the political heresies,
and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the
Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins,
we will not say of power, but of chaos, to a successor
known only as the representative of a party whose
leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in
the conduct of affairs ; an empty treasury was called
on to supply resources beyond precedent in the history
of finance ; the trees were yet growing and the iron
unmined with which a navy was to be built and ar-
mored ; officers without discipline were to make a
mob into an army ; and, above all, the public opinion
of Europe, echoed and reinforced with every vague
hint and every specious argument of despondency by
a powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously
sceptical or actively hostile. It woidd be hard to
over-estimate the force of this latter element of disin-
tegration and discouragement among a peoi3le where
3very citizen at home, and every soldier in the fields
is a reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor in
the North were the most effective allies of the rebel-
lion. A nation can be liable to no more insidious
treacherj^ than that of the telegraph, sending hourly
its electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves
of the community, till the excited imagination makes

10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

every real danger loom heightened with its unreal
double.

And even if we look only at more palpable difficul-
ties, the problem to be solved by our civil war was so
vast, both in its immediate relations and its future
consequences ; the conditions of its solution were so
intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and
uncontrollable contingencies ; so many of the data,
whether for hope or fear, were, from their novelty,
incapable of arrangement under any of the categories
of historical precedent, that there were moments of
crisis when the firmest believer in the strength and
sufficiency of the democratic theory of government
might well hold his breath in vague apprehension of
disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy, sol-
emnly arguing from the precedent of some petty Gre-
cian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods of
aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward
parentheses of mob, had always taught us that democ-
racies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of
concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reaching
conceptions ; were absorbed in material interests ; im-
patient of regular, and much more of exceptional re-
straint ; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any
forces but centrifugal ; were always on the verge of
civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse
of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism.
Here was indeed a dreary outlook for j^ersons who
knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it
lifelong, but merely from books, and America only
by the report of some fellow-Briton, who, having
eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had
written to TTie Times demanding redress, and drawing
a mournful inference of democratic instability. Noi

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 11

were men wanting among ourselves who had so
steeped their brains in London literature as to mis-
take Cockneyism for European culture, and contempt
of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view, and
who, owing all they had and all they were to demo-
cracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in
the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which might
affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons
enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence
of hope. A war — which, whether we consider the
expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought
into the field, or the reach of the principles involved,
may fairly be reckoned the most momentous of mod-
ern times — was to be waged by a people divided at
home, unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a chief
magistrate without experience and without reputation,
whose every measure was sure to be cunningly ham-
pered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and
who, while dealing with unheard-of complications at
home, must soothe a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting
only a pretext to become war. All this was to be
done without warning and without preparation, while
at the same time a social revolution was to be accom-
plished in the political condition of four millions of
people, by softening the prejudices, allaying the fears,
and gradually obtaining the co6j)eration, of their un-
willing liberators. Surely, if ever there were an
occasion when the heightened imagination of the his-
torian might see Destiny visible intervening in human
affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears. Never,
perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the
last three years ; never has any shown itself stronger ;

12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

and never could that strength be so directly traced to
the virtue and intelligence of the people, — to that
general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public
opinion possible only under the influence of a political
framework like our own. We find it hard to under-
stand how even a foreigner should be blind to the
grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going
on here, — to the heroic energy, persistency, and self-
reliance of a nation proving that it knows how much
dearer greatness is than mere power ; and we own that
it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and
moral condition of the American who does not feel
his spirit braced and heightened by being even a
spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a
steady purpose and a definite aim have been given to
the jarring forces which, at the beginning of the war,
spent themselves in the discussion of schemes which
could only become operative, if at all, after the war
was over ; that a popular excitement has been slowly
intensified into an earnest national will ; that a some-
what impracticable moral sentiment has been made
the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end ;
that the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of
rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been made not
only useless for mischief, but even useful for good ;
that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the
horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from com-
plicating a domestic with a foreign war ; — all these
results, any one of which might suffice to prove great-
ness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good
sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large-minded-
ness, and the unselfish honesty of the unknown man
whom a blind fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from
the crowd to the most dangerous and difficult eminence

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 13

of modern times. It is by presence of mind in
untried emergencies that tlie native metal of a man is
tested ; it is by the sagacity to see, and the fearless
honesty to admit, whatever of truth there may be in
an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to
expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that a reasoner
at length gains for his mere statement of a fact the
force of argument ; it is by a wise forecast which
allows hostile combinations to go so far as by the in-
evitable reaction to become elements of his own power,
that a politician proves his genius for state-craft ; and
especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment
that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful
points that he can be firm without seeming obstinate
in essential ones, and thus gain the advantages of com-
promise without the weakness of concession ; by so in-
stinctively comprehending the temper and prejudices
of a people as to make them gradually conscious of
the superior wisdom of his freedom from temper and
prejudice, — it is by qualities such as these that a
magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief in a
commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities
such as these that we firmly believe History will rank
Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent of statesmen
and the most successful of rulers. If we wish to
appreciate him, we have only to conceive the inevita-
ble chaos in which we should now be weltering, had
a weak man or an unwise one been chosen in his
stead.

" Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, " without
brother behind it " ; and this is, by analogy, true of
an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any
critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible
resources of prestige^ of sentiment, of superstition, of

14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

dependent interest, while the new man must slowly
and painfully create all these out of the unwilling
material around him, by superiority of character, by
patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presenti-
ment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy
with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was
one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. Long
habit had accustomed the American people to the
notion of a party in power, and of a President as its
creature and organ, while the more vital fact, that the
executive for the time being represents the abstract
idea of government as a permanent principle superior
to all party and all private interest, had gradually
become unfamiliar. They had so long seen the pub-
lic policy more or less directed by views of party, and
often even of personal advantage, as to be ready to sus-
pect the motives of a chief magistrate compelled, for
the first time in our history, to feel himself the head
and hand of a great nation, and to act upon the fun-
damental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that the
first duty of a government is to defend and maintain
its own existence. Accordingly, a powerful weapon
seemed to be put into the hands of the opposition by
the necessity under which the administration found
itself of applying this old truth to new relations. Nor
were the opposition his only nor his most dangerous
opponents.

The Republicans had carried the country upon an
issue in which ethics were more directly and visibly
mingled with politics than usual. Their leaders were
trained to a method of oratory which relied for its ef-
fect rather on the moral sense than the understanding.
Their arguments were drawn, not so much from experi-
ence as from general principles of right and wrong.

LOWELVS ESSAY. 15

When fclie war came, their system continued to be ap-
plicable and effective, for here again the reason of the
people was to be reached and kindled through their
sentiments. It was one of those periods of excitement,
gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they
last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the
mere words country^ human rights^ democracy^ a
meaning and a force beyond that of sober and logical
argument. They were convictions, maintained and de-
fended by the supreme logic of passion. That pene-
trating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts
that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the
mind. What is called the great popular heart was
awakened, tha,t indefinable something which may be,
according to circumstances, the highest reason or the
most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold,
can never be warmed over into anything better than
cant, — and phrases, when once the inspiration that
filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away,
retain only that semblance of meaning which enables
them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the
lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none
sadder or more striking than this, that you may make
everything else out of the passions of men except a
political system that will work, and that there is noth-
ing so pitilessly and imconsciously cruel as sincerity
formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing to
extend the domain of sentiment over questions where
it has no legitimate jurisdiction ; and perhaps the se-
verest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a ten-
dency of his own supporters which chimed with his
own private desires while wholly opposed to his con-
victions of what would be wise policy.

The change which three years have brought about

16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

is too remarkable to be passed over without comment,
too weighty in its lesson not to be laid to heart.
Never did a President enter upon office wdth less
means at his command, outside his own strength of
heart and steadiness of understanding, for inspiring
confidence in the people, and so winning it for himself o
than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was
that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his
availability., — that is, because he had no history, — -
and chosen by a party with whose more extreme opin
ions he was not in sympathy. It might w^eil be feared
that a man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of
hostile partisans could rake up no accusation, must be
lacking in manliness of character, in decision of prin-
ciple, in strength of will ; that a man who w^as at best
only the representative of a party, and w^ho yet did
not fairly represent even that, would fail of political,
much more of popular, support. And certainly no
one ever entered upon office with so few resources of
power in the past, and so many materials of weakness
in the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of
the Union which acknowledged him as President,
there was a large, and at that time dangerous minor-
ity, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and
even in the party that elected him there was also a
large minority that suspected him of being secretly 9.
communicant with the church of Laodicea.-*^ All that
he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by
one side ; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as
proof of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other.
Meanwhile he was to carry on a truly colossal w^ar by
means of both ; he was to disengage the country from
diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril un-

1 See the Booh of Revelation, chapter 3, verse 15.

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 17

disturbed by the lielp or the hmderance of either, and
to win from the crowning dangers of his administra-
tion, in the confidence of the people, the means of his
safety and their own. He has contrived to do it, and
perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has
stood so firm in the confidence of the people as he
does after three years of stormy administration.

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and
rightly so. He laid down no programme which must
compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no
cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be
fitted at they rose, or else be useless to his ends. He
seemed to have chosen Mazarin's motto, Le tem2:)s et
moi} The moi^ to be sure, was not very prominent
at first ; but it has grown more and more so, till the
world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a
character of marked individuality and capacity for af-
fairs. Time was his prime-minister, and, we began to
think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At first
he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no
evidence of progress but in blowing up the engine ;
then he was so fast, that he took the breath away from
those who think there is no getting on safely while
there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the
only being who has time enough ; but a prudent man,
who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make
a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as
it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have
sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has
always waited, as a wise man should, till the right mo-
ment brought up all his reserves. Semper nocuit dif-
fevve paratis? is a sound axiom, but the really effica-

^ Time and I. Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis XIV.
of France. Time, Mazarin said, "was his prime-minister.
2 It is alTvays bad for those "who are ready to put off action.

18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

cious man will also be sure to know when he is not
ready, and be firm against all persuasion and reproach
till he is.

One would be apt to think, from some of the criti-
cisms made on Mr. Lincoln's course by those who
mainly agree with him in principle, that the chief ob-
ject of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their
triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In our
opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a con-
scientiously rigid doctrinaire., nothing more sure to
end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that
admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, thei^e
is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plas-
tic hands the submissive destinies of mankind become
as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the tough-
est facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction ; but
in real life we commonly find that the men who con-
trol circumstances, as it is called, are those who have
learned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and
have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy
instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to carry
a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast
the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and
the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but
cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where
the main current was, and keep steadily to that. He
is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill
and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel,
might be drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the
most striking- figures in modern history, — Henry IV.
of France. The career of the latter may be more pic«

LOWELUS ESSAY. 19,

turesque, as that of a daring captain always is ; but in
all its vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than
that sudden change, as by a rub of Aladdin's lamp,
from the attorney's office in a country town of Illinois
to the helm of a great nation in times like these. The
analogy between the characters and circumstances of
the two men is in many respects singularly closCo
Succeeding to a rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's
chief material dependence was the Huguenot party,
whose doctrines sat upon him with a looseness dis-
tasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the more fanati-
cal among them. King only in name over the greater
part of France, and with his capital barred against
him, it yet gradually became clear to the more far-see-
ing even of the Catholic party that he was the only
centre of order and legitimate authority round which
France could reorganize itself. While preachers who
held the divine right of kings made the churches of
Paris ring with declamations in favor of democracy
rather than submit to the heretic dog of a Bearnois,^
— much as our soi-disant Democrats have lately been
preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing
the heresies of the Declaration of Independence, —
Henry bore both parties in hand till he was convinced
that only one course of action could possibly combine
his own interests and those of France. Meanwhile
the Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that he
was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully
that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned
aside remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a
jest or a proverb (if a little high, he liked them none
the worse), joking continually as his manner was.

^ One of Henry's titles was Prince of Beam, that being the old
province of France from which he came.

20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously compared
to Sancho Panza by persons incapable of appreciating
one of the deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest
romance ever written ; namely, that, while Don Quix-
ote was incomparable in theoretic and ideal statesman-
ship, Sancho, with his stock of proverbs, the ready
money of human experience, made the best possible
practical governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws
and modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all
this was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thor-
oughly earnest man, around whom the fragments of
France were to gather themselves till she took her
place again as a planet of the first magnitude in the
European system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was
more fortunate than Henry. However some may think
him wanting in zeal, the most fanatical can find no
taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor can the
most bitter charge him with being influenced by mo-
tives of personal interest. The leading distinction be-
tween the policies of the two is one of circumstances.
Henry went over to the nation ; Mr. Lincoln has stead-
ily drawn the nation over to him. One left a united
France ; the other, we hope and believe, will leave a
reunited America. We leave our readers to trace the
further points of difference and resemblance for them-
•^elves, merely suggesting a general similarity which
has often occurred to us. One only point of melan-
choly interest we will allow ourselves to touch upon.
That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we
learn from certain English tourists who would consider
similar revelations in regard to Queen Victoria as
thoroughly American in their want of hienseance. It
is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitness for
the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is

LO WELL'S ESSAY. 21

certainly as fortunate as Henry in the matter of good
looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr.
Lincoln lias also been reproached with Americanism
by some not unfriendly British critics ; but, with all
deference, we cannot say that we like him any th^
worse for it, or see in it any reason why he should
govern Americans the less wisely.

People of more sensitive organizations may be
shocked, but v/e are glad that in this our true war of
independence, which is to free us forever from the Old
World, we have had at the head of our affairs a man
whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the
very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to
show us how much truth, how much magnanimity, and
how much statecraft await the call of opportunity in
simple manhood when it believes in the justice of God
and the worth of man. Conventionalities are all ver}''
well in their proper place, but they shrivel at the touch
of nature like stubble in the fire. The genius that
sways a. nation by its arbitrary will seems less august
to us than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in
the instincts and convictions of an entire people. Au-
tocracy may have something in it more melodramatic
than this, but falls far short of it in human value and
interest.

Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust
of improvised statesmanship, even if we did not believe
politics to be a science, which, if it cannot always com-
mand men of special aptitude and great powers, at
least demands the long and steady application of the
best powers of such men as it can command to master
even its first principles. It is curious, that, in a coun-
try v/hich boasts of its intelligence the theory should
be so generally held that the most complicated of

22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

human contrivances, and one which every day he*
comes more complicated, can be worked at sight by
any man able to talk for an hour or two without stop-
ping to think.

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of
a ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in
point ; for, besides that he was a man of such fair-
mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom,
he had in his profession a training precisely the oppo-
site of that to which a partisan is subjected. His ex-
perience as a lawyer compelled him not only to see
that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon
in human affairs, but that there are always two sides
to every question, both of which must be fully under-
stood in order to understand either, and that it is of
greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the
strength than the weakness of his antagonist's position.
Nothing is more remarkable than the unerring tact with
which, in his debate with Mr. Douglas, he went straight
to the reason of the question ; nor have we ever had a
more striking lesson in political tactics than the fact,
that opposed to a man exceptionally adroit in using
popular prejudice and bigotry to his purpose, exception-
ally unscrupulous in appealing to those baser motives
that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of barba-
rians, he should yet have won his case before a jury of
the people. Mr. Lincoln was as far as possible from
an impromptu politician. His wisdom was made up of
a knowledge of things as well as of men ; his sagacity
resulted from a clear perception and honest acknowL
edgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that
the only durable triumph of political opinion is based,
not on any abstract right, but upon so much of justice,
the highest attainable at any given moment in human

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 23

affairs, as may be had in the balance of mutual conces-
sion. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it was the ideal
of a practical statesman, — to aim at the best, and to
take the next best, if he is lucky enough to get even
that. His slow, but singularly masculine, intelligence
taught him that precedent is only another name foi
embodied experience, and that it counts for even more
in the guidance of communities of men than in that of
the individual life. He was not a man who held it
good public economy to pull dovm on the mere chance
of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in God was
qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom
of man. Perhaps it was his want of self-confidence
that more than anything else won him the unlimited
confidence of the people, for they felt that there would
be no need of retreat from any position he had delib-
erately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance of
his policy during the war was like that of a Roman
army. He left behind him a firm road on which pub-
lic confidence could follow ; he took America with him
where he went ; what he gained he occupied, and his
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness
of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was
conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was
ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it ;
for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people,
With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness
touched whoever saw him with something of its own
pathos, there was no trace of sentimentalism in his
speech or action. He seems to have had but one rule
of conduct, always that of practical and successful pol-
itics, to let himself be guided by events, when they
were sure to bring him out where he wished to go,
though by what seemed to unpractical minds, which

24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

let go the possible to grasp at the desirable, a longer
road.

Undoubtedly the highest fiinction of statesmanship
is by degrees to accommodate the conduct of commu-=
nities to ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflict-
ing self-interests of the day to higher and more perma-
nent concerns. But it is on the understandino- and
not on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legisla-
tion must be based. Voltaire's saying, that " a consid-=
eration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great
things," may be true of individual men, but it cer-
tainly is not true of governments. It is by a multi-
tude of such considerations, each in itself trifling, but
all together weighty, that the framers of policy can
alone divine what is practicable and therefore wise.
The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every
sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner
or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead
alone never change their opinion. The course of a
great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers,
avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of con-
cession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which
men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and
marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national
tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always
recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes
bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human com
merce through what seem the eternal barriers of botho
It is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to com-
bine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to
accomplish them ; it is the anchored cling to solid prin-
ciples of duty and action, which knows how to swing
with the tide, but is never carried away by it, — that
we demand in public men, and not sameness of policy,

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 25

or a conscientious persistency in what is impracticable.
For the impracticable, however theoretically enticing,
is always politically unwise, sound statesmanship being
the application of that prudence to the public business
which is the safest guide in that of private men.

No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embar-
rassing question with which Mr. Lincoln was called
on to deal, and it was one which no man in his posi-
tion, whatever his opinions, could evade ; for, though
he might withstand the clamor of partisans, he must
sooner or later yield to the persistent importunacy of
circumstances, which thrust the problem upon him at
every turn and in every shape.

It has been brought against us as an accusation
abroad, and repeated here by people who measure their
country rather by what is thought of it than by what
it is, that our war has not been distinctly and avow-
edly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for
the preservation of our national power and greatness,
in which the emancipation of the negro has been forced
upon us by circumstances and accepted as a necessity.
We are very far from denying this ; nay, w^e admit
that it is so far true that we were slow to renounce our
constitutional obligations even toward those who had
absolved us by their own act from the letter of our
duty. We are speaking of the government which, le-
gally installed for the whole country, was bound, so
long as it was possible, not to overstep the limits of
orderly prescription, and could not, without abnega-
ting its own very nature, take the lead in making re-
bellion an excuse for revolution. There were, no doubt,
many ardent and sincere persons who seemed to think
this as simple a thing to do as to lead off a Virginia
reel. They forgot, what should be forgotten least of

26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

all in a system like ours, that tlie administration for
the time being represents not only the majority which
elects it, but the minority as well, — a minority in this
case powerful, and so little ready for emancipation
that it was opposed even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not
been chosen as general agent of an anti-slavery society.,
but President of the United States, to perform certain
functions exactly defined by law. Whatever were his
wishes, it was no less duty than policy to mark out for
himself a line of action that would not further distract
the country, by raising before their time questions
which plainly would soon enough compel attention,
and for which every day was making the answer more
easy.

Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new
Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy
in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy
those who demand an heroic treatment for even the
most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat
according to their cloth, unless they can borrow the
scissors of Atropos,^ it has been at least not unworthy
of the long-headed king of Ithaca.^ Mr. Lincoln had
the choice of Bassanio ^ offered him. Which of the
three caskets held the prize that was to redeem the
fortunes of the country ? There was the golden one
whose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain
man ; the silver of compromise, which might have de-
cided the choice of a merely acute one ; and the
leaden, — dull and homely-looking, as prudence al-
ways is, — yet with something about it sure to attract
the eye of practical wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied

1 One of the three Fatefe.

^ Odysseus, or Ulysses, the hero of Homer's Odyssey.
-.. ^ 2 See Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 27

with his decision perhaps longer than seemed needful
to those on whom its awful responsibility was not to
rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of his cau-
tious but sure-footed understanding. The moral of
the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in the
childish simplicity of the solution. Those who fail in
guessing it, fail because they are over-ingenious, and
cast about for an answer that shall suit their own no-
tion of the gravity of the occasion and of their own
dignity, rather than the occasion itself.

In a matter which must be finally settled by public
opinion, and in regard to which the ferment of preju-
dice and passion on both sides has not yet subsided to
that equilibrium of compromise from which alone a
sound public opinion can result, it is proper enough
for the private citizen to press his own convictions
with all possible force of argument and persuasion ;
but the popular magistrate, whose judgment must be-
come action, and whose action involves the whole
country, is bound to wait till the sentiment of the
people is so far advanced toward his own point of
view, that what he does shall find support in it, in-
stead of merely confusing it with new elements of di-
vision. It was not unnatural that men earnestly
devoted to the saving of their country, and profoundly
convinced that slavery was its only real enemy, should
demand a decided policy round which all patriots
might rally, — and this might have been the wisest
course for an absolute ruler. But in the then unset-
tled state of the public mind, with a large party de-
crying even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion as
not only unwise, but even unlawful ; with a majority,
perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long accus-
tomed to regard the Constitution as a deed of gift

28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

conveying to the South their own judgment as to pol*
icy and instinct as to right, that they were in doubt at
first whether their loyalty were due to the country or
to slavery ; and with a respectable body of honest and
influential men who still believed in the possibility of
conciliation, — Mr. Lincoln judged wisely, that, in
laying down a policy in deference to one party, he
should be giving to the other the very fulcrum for
which their disloyalty had been waiting.

It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not
to yield so far to an honest indignation against the
brokers of treason in the North as to lose sight of the
materials for misleading which were their stock in
trade, and to forget that it is not the falsehood of
sophistry which is to be feared, but the grain of truth
mingled with it to make it specious, — that it is not
the knavery of the leaders so much as the honesty of
the followers they may seduce, that gives them power
for evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing
which might help the people to forget the true cause
of the war in fruitless disputes about its inevitable
consequences.

The doctrine of State rights can be so handled by
an adroit demagogue as easily to confound the distinc-
tion between liberty and lawlessness in the minds of
ignorant persons, accustomed always to be influenced
by the sound of certain words, rather than to reflect
upon the principles which give them meaning. For,
though Secession involves the manifest absurdity of
denying to a State the right of making war against any
foreign power while permitting it against the United
States ; though it supposes a compact of mutual con-
cessions and guaranties among States without an}^ ar-
biter in case of dissension ; though it contradicts como

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 29

mon-sense in assuming tliat tlie men who framed our
government did not know what they meant when they
substituted Union for Confederation ; though it falsi=
fies history, which shows that the main opposition tc
the adoption of the Constitution was based on the ar°
gimient that it did not allow that independence in the
several States which alone would justify them in seced^^
ing ; — yet, as slavery was universally admitted to be
a reserved right, an inference could be drawn from
any direct attack upon it (though only in self-defence)
to a natural right of resistance, logical enough to sat-
isfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as the majority
of men always are, and now too much disturbed by
the disorder of the times, to consider that the orde?
of events had anv leoitimate bearino- on the argaiment.
Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give the
Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired
and even strove to provoke, yet from the beginning of
the war the most persistent efforts have been made to
confuse the public mind as to its origin and motives,
and to drag the people of the loyal States down from
the national position they had instinctively taken to
the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The
wholly unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaim-
ing negro slavery the corner-stone of free institutions,
and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence ventur-
ing to parade the logical sequence of their leading
dogma, " that slavery is right in principle, and has
nothing to do .with difference of complexion," has
been represented as a legitimate and gallant attempt
to maintain the true principles of democracy. The
rightful endeavor of an established government, the
least onerous that ever existed, to defend itself against
a treacherous attack on its very existence, has been

30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

cunningly made to seem the wicked effort of a fanatic
cal clique to force its doctrines on an oppressed popu-
lation.

Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet con-
vinced of the danger and magnitude of the crisis, was
endeavoring to persuade himself of Union majorities at
the South, and to carry on a war that was half peace
in the hope of a peace that would have been all war, —
while he was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law,
under some theory that Secession, however it might
absolve States from their obligations, could not es-
cheat them of their claims under the Constitution, and
that slaveholders in rebellion had alone among mortals
the privilege of having their cake and eating it at the
same time, — the enemies of free government were
striving to persuade the people that the war was an
Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was pro-
claimed as one of the rights of man, while it was care-
fully kept out of sight that to sup23ress rebellion is the
first duty of government. All the evils that have
come upon the country have been attributed to the
Abolitionists, though it is hard to see how any party
can become permanently powerful except in one of
two ways, — either by the greater truth of its princi-
ples, or the extravagance of the party opposed to it«
To fancy the ship of state, riding safe at her constitu-
tional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge kraken
of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and
grasping it with slimy tentacles, is to look at the nat-
ural history of the matter with the eyes of Pontop-
pidan.i To believe that the leaders in the Southern
treason feared any danger from Abolitionism, would
be to deny them ordinary intelligence, though thei*e

^ A Danish antiquary and theologian

LOWELL'S ESSAY. 31

can be little doubt that they made use of it to stir the
passions and excite the fears of their deluded accom-
plices. They rebelled, not because they thought slav-
ery weak, but because they believed it strong enough,
not to overthrow the government, but to get posses-
sion of it ; for it becomes daily clearer that they used
rebellion only as a means of revolution, and if they
got revolution, though not in the shape they looked
for, is the American people to save them from its con-
sequences at the cost of its own existence ? The elec-
tion of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their
power to prevent had they wished, was the occasion
merely, and not the cause, of their revolt. Abolition-
ism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy
of a few earnest persons, without political weight
enough to carry the election of a parish constable ;
and their cardinal principle was disunion, because
they were con\T.nced that within the Union the posi-
tion of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the
proverb, great effects do not follow from small causes,
— that is, disproportionately small, — but from ade-
quate causes acting under certain required conditions.
To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent
acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its
slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder;
but the real miracle lies in that divine league which
bound all the forces of nature to the service of the
tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has
been at work for the past ten years in the cause of
anti-slavery, but Garrison and Phillips have been far
less successful propagandists than the slaveholders
themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance of
their pretensions and encroachments. They have
forced the question upon the attention of every voter

32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

in ttie Free States, by defiantly putting freedom and
democracy on the defensive. But, even after the
Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on
the j)art of the North to commit aggressions, though
there was a growing determination to resist them^
The popular unanimity in favor of the war three years
ago was but in small measure the result of anti-slavery
sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But
every month of the war, every movement of the allies
of slavery in the Free States, has been making Aboli-
tionists by the thousand. The masses of any peoplcj
however intelligent, are very little moved by abstract
principles of humanity and justice, until those prin-
ciples are interpreted for them by the stinging com-
mentary of some infringement upon their own rights,
and then their instincts and passions, once aroused,
do indeed derive an incalculable reinforcement of
impulse and intensity from those higher ideas, those
sublime traditions, which have no motive political
force till they are allied with a sense of immediate
personal wrong or imminent peril. Then at last the
stars in their courses be^in to fioht ao'ainst Sisera.
Had any one doubted before that the rights of human
nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the
world over, no matter what the color of the oppressed,
— had any one failed to see what the real essence o£
the contest was, — the efforts of the advocates of slav-=
ery among ourselves to throw discredit upon the fun-
damental axioms of the Declaration of Independence
and the radical doctrines of Christianity, could not
fail to sharpen his eyes.

While every day was bringing the people nearer to
the conclusion which all thinkino- men saw to be inev-
itable from the beginning, it was wise in Mr. Lincoln

* LOWELL'S ESSAY. 33

to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this
country, where the rough and ready understanding of
the people is sure at last to be the controlling power,
a profound common-sense is the best genius for states-
manship). Hitherto the wisdom of the President's
measures has been justified by the fact that they have
always resulted in more firmly uniting public opinion.
One of the things particularly admirable in the public
utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of
familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most
difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful
indication of personal character. There must be
something essentially noble in an elective ruler who
can descend to the level of confidential ease without
losing respect, something very manly in one who can
break through the etiquette of his conventional rank
and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of
those who have elected him. No higher compliment
was ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence,
the fireside plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always
addresses himself to the reason of the American people.
This was, indeed, a true democrat, who grounded him-
self on the assumption that a democracy can think.
" Come, let us reason together about this matter," has
been the tone of all his addresses to the people ; and
accordingly we have never had a chief magistrate
who so won to himself the love and at the same time
the judgment of his countrymen. To us, that sim-
ple confidence of his in the right-mindedness of his
fellow-men is very touching, and its success is as strong
an argument as we have ever seen in favor of the
theory that men can govern themselves. He never ap-
peals to any vulgar sentiment, he never alludes to
the humbleness of his origin ; it probably never oc-

34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. *

curred to Mm, indeed, that there was anything higher
to start from than manhood ; and he put himself on a
level with those he addressed, not by going down to
them, but only by taking it for granted that they had
brains and would come up to a common ground of
reason. In an article lately printed in The Nation^
Mr. Bayard Taylor mentions the striking fact, that
in the foulest dens of the Five Points he found the
portrait of Lincoln. The wretched population that
makes its hive there threw all its votes and more
against him, and yet paid this instinctive tribute to
the sweet humanity of his nature. There ignorance
sold its vote and took its money, but all that was left
of manhood in them recognized its saint and martyr.

Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, " This is
my opinion, or mij theory," but " This is the conclu-
sion to which, in my judgment, the time has come,
and to which, accordingly, the sooner we come the
better for us." His policy has been the policy of
public opinion based on adequate discussion and on a
timely recognition of the influence of passing events
in shaping the features of events to come.

One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in
captivating the popular mind is undoubtedly an un-
consciousness of self which enables him, though under
the necessity of constantly using the capital /, to do
it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no
single vowel which men's mouths can pronounce with
such difference of effect. That which one shall hide
away, as it were, behind the substance of his dis-
course, or, if he bring it to the front, shall use merely
to give an agreeable accent of individuality to what
he says, another shall make an offensive challenge to
the self-satisfaction of all his hearers, and an imwar-

LOWELL'S ESSAY, 35

ranted intrusion upon each man's sense of personal
importance, irritating every pore of his vanity, like a
dry northeast wind, to a goose-flesh of opposition and
hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied Quinti-
lian ; ^ but he has, in the earnest simplicity and un-
affected Americanism of his own character, one art
Df oratory worth all the rest. He forgets himself so
entirely in his object as to give his I the sympathetic
and persuasive effect of We with the great body of
his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all
the rough-edged process of his thought as it goes
along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest
kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently our repre-
sentative man, that, w^hen he speaks, it seems as if the
people w^ere listening to their ow^n thinking aloud.
The dignity of his thought ow^es nothing to any cere-
monial garb of words, but to the manly movement
that comes of settled purpose and an energy of reason
that knows not what rhetoric means. There has been
nothing of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades ^ striving to
underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the pub-
lic utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always ad-
dressed the intelligence of men, never their prejudice,
their passion, or their ignorance.

On the day of his death, this simple Western attor-
ney, who according to one party was a vulgar joker,
and whom the doctrinaires among his own supporters
accused of wanting every element of statesmanship,
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this

^ A famous Latin writer on the Art of Oratory.
^ Two Athenian demagog'ues, satirized by the dramatist Aristo-
phanes.

36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

solely by the hold his good-humored sagacity had laid
on the hearts and understandings of his countrymen.
Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had drawn
the great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but
of mankind also, to his side. So strong and so per-
suasive is honest manliness without a single quality of
romance or unreal sentiment to help it ! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military achieve-
ment, awkward, with no skill in the lower technicali-
ties of manners, he left behind him a fame beyond
that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher
than that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness
deeper than mere breeding. Never before that star-
tled April morning did such multitudes of men shed
tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if
with him a friendly presence had been taken away from
their lives, leaving them colder and darker. Never
was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of
sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met
on that day. Their common manhood had lost a
kinsman.

I.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S SPEECH

AT THE DEDICATIOX OF THE XATIOXAL CEMETERY, GETTYS-
BURG, PEXXSYLYANIA, NOVEilBER 19, 1863.

The great battles fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July,
1863, made that spot historic ground. It was early perceived
that the battles were critical, and they are now looked upon by
many as the turning-point of the war for the Union. The
ground where the fiercest conflict raged was taken for a national
cemetery, and the dedication of the place was made an occasion
of great solemnity. The orator of the day was Edward Everett,
who was regarded as the most finished public speaker in the
country. Mr. Everett made a long and eloquent address, and
was followed by the President in a little speech which instan-
taneously affected the country, whether people were educated or
unlettered, as a great speech. The impression created has deep-
ened with time. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay on Elo-
quence says : " I believe it to be true that when any orator at the
bar or the Senate rises in his thought, he descends in his lan-
guage, that is, when he rises to any height of thought or passion,
he comes down to a language level with the ear of all his au-
dience. It is the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln
— one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg — in the two best
specimens of eloquence we have had in this country."

It is worth while to listen to Mr. Lincoln's own account of the
education which prepared him for public speaking. Before he
was nominated for the presidency he had attracted the notice of
people by a remarkable contest in debate with a famous Illinois
statesman, Stephen Arnold Douglas. As a consequence Mr.
Lincoln received a great many invitations to speak in the East-
ern States, and made, among others, a notable speech at the
Cooper L'nion, New York. Shortly after, he spoke also at New
Haven, and the Rev. J. P. Gulliver, in a paper in the New York

38 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Independent, Sept. 1, 1864, thus reports a conversation whieli he
held with him when traveling in the same railroad car : —

*' ' Ah, that reminds me,' he said, ' of a most extraordinary
circumstance, which occurred in New Haven, the other day.
They told me that the Professor of Rhetoric in Yale College —
a very learned man, is n't he ? ' ' Yes, sir, and a very fine critic,
too.' ' Well, I suppose so ; he ought to be, at any rate — They
told me that he came to hear me and took notes of my speech,
and gave a lecture on it to liis class the next day ; and, not satis-
fied with that, he followed me up to Meriden the next evening,
and heard me again for the same purpose. Now, if this is so, it
is to my mind very extraordinary. I have been sufficiently as-
tonished at my success in the West, It has been most unex-
pected. But I had no thought of any marked success at the East,
and least of all that I should draw out such commendations from
literary and learned men ! '

" ' That suggests, Mr. Lincoln, an inquiry which has several
times been upon my lips during this conversation. I want very
much to know how you got this unusual power of " putting
things." It must have been a matter of education. No man
has it by nature alone. What has your education been ? '

" ' Well, as to education, the newspapers are correct. I never
went to school more than six months in my life. But, as you
say, this must be a product of culture in some form. I have
been putting the question you ask me to myself while you have
been talking. I say this, that among my earliest recollections, I
remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when
anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I don't
think I ever got angry at anything else in my life. But that al-
ways 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, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt af-
ter 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

GETTYSBURG SPEECH. 39

south and bounded it east and bounded it west. Perhaps that
accounts for the characteristic you observe in my speeches,
though I never put the two things together before.' " But to the
speech itself.

Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought
forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in lib-
erty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great
civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation
so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We
are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final rest-
ing-place for those who here gave their lives that that
nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper
that we should do this. But in a larger sense we can-
not dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow
this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor
power to add or detract. The world will little note,
nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us, the living,
rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly ad-
vanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to
the great task remaining before us, — that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause
for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,
=-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
have died in vain, — that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom, — and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.

40 ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

II.

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

On the 4th of March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln took the oath o!
office as President of the United States, and then from the east
portico of the Capitol delivered to an immense throng his in-=
augural address. He had written it before coming to Washing-
ton, and had asked criticism upon it from a few prominent men,
among them William H. Seward, who was looked upon by most
as the great Republican statesman of the day. The criticism of
these men was considered by Mr. Lincoln, and in some instances
used to modify his address. The most interesting change was
due to Mr. Seward's advice that " some words of affection, some
of calm and cheerful confidence should be added." To make his
meaning clear, Mr, Seward drew up a paragraph for Mr. Lin-
coln's use if he chose to take it. Mr. Lincoln liked the thought,
but his style differed from Mr. Seward's, and he rewrote the
paragraph in his own words. For the sake of comparison, Mr.
Seward's paragraph is given in a foot-note at the proper place.
He wrote full, sonorous English, Mr. Lincoln terse, nervous, di-
rect speech, and the contrast between the two is very striking.

Fellow-citizens of the United States : In
compliance with a custom as old as tlie Government it-
self, I appear before you to address you briefly, and to
take in your presence the oath prescribed by the Con-
stitution of the United States to be taken by the Presi-^
dent "before he enters on the execution of his office."

I do not consider it necessary at present for me tc
discuss those matters of administration about which
there is no special anxiety or excitement.

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of
the Southern States that by the accession of a Kepub-
lican Administration their property and their peace
and personal security are to be endangered. There

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 41

has never been any reasonable cause for such appre-
hension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the con-
trary has all the while existed and been open to their
inspection. It is found in nearly all the published
speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but
quote from one of those speeches when I declare that
" I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere
with the institution of slavery in the States where it
exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I
have no inclination to do so." Those who nominated
and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had
made this and many similar declarations, and had
never recanted them. And, m,ore than this, they
placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a
law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic
resolution which I now read :

" Resolved, that the maintenance inviolate of the
rights of the States, and especially the right of each
State to order and control its own domestic institu-
tions according to its own judgment exclusively, is es-
sential to that balance of power on which the perfec-
tion and endurance of our political fabric depend, and
we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of
the soil of any State or Territory, no matter under
what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes."

I now reiterate these sentiments ; and, in doing so,
I only press upon the public attention the most con-
clusive evidence of which the case is susceptible, that
the property, peace, and security of no section are to
be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Ad-
ministration. I add, too, that all the protection which,
consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can
be given, will be cheerfully given to all the States
when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause — as
cheerfully to one section, as to another.

42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

There is much controversy about the delivering up
of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now
read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any
other of its provisions :

" No person held to service or labor in one State,
under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in
consequence of any law or regulation therein, be dis-
charged from such service or labor, but shall be deliv-
ered up on claim of the party to whom such service or
labor may be due."

It is scarcely questioned that this provision was in-
tended b}^ those who made it for the reclaiming of
what we call fugitive slaves ; and the intention of the
lawgiver is the law. All members of Congress swear
their support to the whole Constitution — to this pro-
vision as much as to any other. To the proposition,
then, that slaves, whose cases come within the terms
of this clause, " shall be delivered up " their oaths are
unanimous. Now, if they would make the effort in
good temper, could they not, with nearly equal unanim-
ity, frame and pass a law by means of which to keep
good that unanimous oath?

There is some difference of opinion whether this
clause should be enforced by national or by State au-
thority ; but surely that difference is not a very mate-
rial one. If the slave is to be surrendered, it can be
of but little consequence to him, or to others, by which
authority it is done. And should any one, in any
case, be content that his oath shall go unkept, on a
merely unsubstantial controversy as to liow it shall be
kept?

Again, in any law upon this subject, ought not all
the safeguards of liberty known in civilized and hu-
mane jurisprudence to be introduced so that a free

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 43

man be not, in any case, surrendered as a slave ? And
might it not be well at the same time to provide by
law for the enforcement of that clause in the Consti-
tution which guarantees that " the citizen of each
State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities
of citizens in the several States" ?

I take the official oath to-day with no mentai reser-
vations and with no purpose to construe the Constitu=
tion or laws by any hypercritical rules. And while I
do not choose now to specify j^articular acts of Con-
gress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it
will be much safer for all, both in official and private
stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts
which stand unrepealed, than to violate any of them
trusting to find impunity in having them held to be
unconstitutional.

It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration
of a President under our National Constitution. Dur-
ing that period fifteen different and greatly distin-
guished citizens have, in succession, administered the
Executive branch of the Government. They have
conducted it through many perils, and generally with
great success. Yet, with all this scope of precedent,
I now enter upon the same task for the brief constitu-
tional term of four years, under great and peculiar
difficulty. A disruption of the Federal Union, hereto-
fore only menaced, is now formidably attempted.

I hold that, in contemplation of universal law, and
of the Constitution, the union of these States is per=
petual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the
fundamental law of all national governments. It is
safe to assert that no government proper ever had a
provision in its organic law for its own termination.
Continue to execute all the express provisions of our

44 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

National Constitution, and the Union will endure for.
ever — it being impossible to destroy it except by some
action not provided for in the instrument itself.

Again, if the United States be not a government
proper, but an association of States in the nature of
contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peaceably un=
made by less than all the parties who made it ? One
party to a contract may violate it — break it, so to
speak, but does it not require all to lawfully rescind
it?

Descending from these general principles, we find
the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union
is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union
itself. The Union is much older than the Constitu-
tion. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Asso-
ciation in 1774. It was matured and continued by
the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was
further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen
States expressly plighted and engaged that it should
be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778.
And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for
ordaining and establishing the Constitution was, " to
form a more ijerfect Unions

But if destruction of the Union by one, or by a part
only, of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is
less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost
the vital element of perpetuity.

It follows from these views, that no State, upon its
own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union ;
that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally
void ; and that acts of violence, within any State or
States, against the authority of the United States, are
insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circum
stances.

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 45

I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitu-
tion and the laws, the Union is unbroken ; and to the
extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitu-
tion itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of
the Union be faithfully executed in all the States o
Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my
part ; and I shall 23erform it, so far as practicable, un-
less my rightful masters, the American people, shall
withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative
manner direct the contrary. I trust this will not be
regarded as a menace, but only as the declared pur-
pose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend
and maintain itself.

In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or vio-
lence ; and there shall be none, unless it be forced
upon the national authority. The power confided to
me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the prop-
erty and places belonging to the Government, and to
collect the duties and imposts : but beyond what may
be necessary for these objects, there will be no inva-
sion, no using of force against or among the people
anywhere. Where hostility to the United States, in
any interior locality, shall be so great and universal
as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding
the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force
obnoxious strangers among the people for that object.
While the strict legal right may exist in the Govern-
ment to enforce the exercise of these offices, the at-
tempt to do so would be so irritating, and so nearly
impracticable withal, that I deem it better to forego
for the time the uses of such offices.

The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be fur-
nished in all parts of the Union. So far as possible,
the people everywhere shall have that sense of perfect

46 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

security whicli is most favorable to calm thought and
reflection. The course here indicated will be followed
unless current events and experience shall show a mod-
ification or change to be proper, and in every case ancj
exigency my best discretion will be exercised accord-
ing to circumstances actually existing, and with a vievs
and a hope of a peaceful solution of the nationa.
troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies
and affections.

That there are persons in one section or another who
seek to destroy the Union at all events, and are glad
of any pretext to do it, I will neither affirm nor deny ;
but if there be such, I need address no word to them.
To those, however, who really love the Union, may I
not speak ?

Before entering upon so grave a matter as the de-
struction of our national fabric, with all its benefits,
its memories, and its hopes, would it not be wise to as-
certain precisely why we do it ? Will you hazard so
desperate a step while there is any possibility that any
portion of the ills you fly from have no real exist-
ence ? Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are
greater than all the real ones you fly from — will you
risk the commission of so fearful a mistake ?

All profess to be content in the Union, if all consti=
tutional rights can be maintained. Is it true, then,
that any right, plainly written in the Constitution,
has been denied ? I think not. Happily the human
mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the
audacity of doing this. Think, if you can, of a single
instance in which a plainly written provision of the
Constitution has ever been denied. If, by the mere
force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minor-
ity of any clearly written constitutional right, it might,

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 47

in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly
would, if such right were a vital one. But such is not
our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of in-
dividuals are so plainly assured to them by affirma-
tions and negations, guarantees and prohibitions, in the
Constitution, that controversies never arise concerning
them. But no organic law can ever be framed with
a provision specifically applicable to every question
which may occur in practical administration. No fore-
sight can anticipate, nor any document of reasonable
length contain, express ]3rovisions for all possible
questions. Shall fugitives from labor be surrendered
by national or by State authority ? The Constitution
does not exjDressly say. 3Iay Congress prohibit slav-
ery in the Territories ? The Constitution does not ex-
pressly say. Must Congress protect slavery in the
Territories ? The Constitution does not expressly say.

From questions of this class spring all our constitu-
tional controversies, and we divide upon them into ma-
jorities and minorities. If the minority will not acqui-
esce, the majority must, or the Government must cease.
There is no other alternative ; for continuing the Gov-
ernment is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a
minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce,
they make a precedent which in turn will divide and
ruin them ; for a minority of their own will secede
from them whenever a majority refuses to be con=
trolled by such minority. For instance, why may not
any portion of a new confederacy, a year or two hence,
arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the
present Union now claim to secede from it ? All who
cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to
the exact temper of doing this.

Is there such perfect identity of interests among the

48 ABRAHAM LINCOLIS.

States to compose a new Union as to produce harmony
only, and prevent renewed secession ?

Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence
of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitu-
tional checks and limitations, and always changing
easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and
sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.
Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or
to despotism. Unanimity is impossible ; the rule of a
minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly in-
admissible ; so that, rejecting the majority principle,
anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

I do not forget the position, assumed by some, that
constitutional questions are to be decided by the Su-
preme Court ; nor do I deny that such decisions must
be binding, in any case, upon the parties to a suit, as
to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled
to very high respect and consideration in all parallel
cases by all other dej)artments of the Government.
And while it is obviously possible that such decision
may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect
following it, being limited to that particular case, with
the chance that it may be overruled, and never be-
come a precedent for other cases, can better be borne
than could the evils of a different practice. At the
same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the
policy of the Government, upon vital questions affect-
ing the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by de-
cisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are
made in ordinary litigation between parties in per-
sonal actions, the people will have ceased to be their
own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned
their government into the hands of that eminent tribu-
nal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 49

court or the judges. It is a duty from whicli they
may not shrink to decide cases properly brought be-
fore them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to
turn their decisions to political purposes.

One section of our country believes Slavery is rights
and ought to be extended, while the other believes it
is wrong., and ought not to be extended. This is the
only substantial dispute. , The fugitive-slave clause of
the Constitution, and the law for the suppression of the
foreign slave-trade, are each as well enforced, perhaps,
as any law can ever be in a community where the moral
sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself.
The great body of the people abide by the dry legal
obligation in both cases, and a few break over in each.
This, I think, cannot be perfectly cured ; and it would
be worse in both cases after the separation of the sec-
tions, than before. The foreign slave-trade, now im-
perfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived with-
out restriction in one section ; while fugitive slaves,
now only partially surrendered, would not be surren-
dered at all by the other.

Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We can-
not remove our respective sections from each other,
nor build an impassable wall between them. A hus-
band and wife may be divorced, and go out of the
presence and beyond the reach of each other ; but the
different parts of our country cannot do this. They
cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either
amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is
it possible, then, to make that intercourse more ad-
vantageous or more satisfactory after separation than
hefore ? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends
can make laws ? Can treaties be more faithfully en-
forced between aliens than laws can among friends ?

50 ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always ; and
when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on
either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions
as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the
people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow
weary of the existing Government they can exercise
their constitutional right of amending it, or their rev-
olutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. I
cannot be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and
patriotic citizens are desirous of having the National
Constitution amended. While I make no recommenda-
tion of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful au-
thority of the people over the whole subject, to be ex-
ercised in either of the modes prescribed in the instru-
ment itself ; and I should, under existing circumstan-
ces, favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity being
afforded the people to act upon it. I will venture to
add, that to me the convention mode seems preferable,
in that it allows amendments to originate with the
people themselves, instead of only permitting them to
take or reject propositions originated by others, not
especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not
be precisely such as they would wish to either accept
or refuse. I understand a proposed amendment to
the Constitution — which amendment, however, I have
not seen — has passed Congress, to the effect that the
Federal Government shall never interfere with the do-
mestic institutions of the States, including that of per-
sons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of
what I have said, I depart^ from my purpose, not to
speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that,
holding such a provision to now be implied constitu-
tional law, I have no objections to its being made ex-
press and irrevocable.

THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 51

The Chief Maoistrate derives all his authority from
the people, and they have conferred none upon him to
fix terms for the separation of the States. The people
themselves can do this also if they choose ; but the
Executive, as such, has nothing to do vdth it. His duty
is to administer the present Government, as it came to
his hands, and to transmit it, unimj^aired by him, to
his successor.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the
ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or
equal hope in the world ? In our present differences
is either party without faith of being in the right ? If
the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with his eternal truth
and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours
of the South, that truth and that justice will surely
prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the
American people.

By the frame of the Government under which we
live, this same people have wisely given their public
servants but little power for mischief : and have, with
equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to
their own hands at very short intervals. While the
people retain their virtue and vigilance, no adminis-
tration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can
very seriously injure the Government in the short
space of four years.

My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well
upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be
lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry
any of you, in hot haste, to a step which you would
never take cleliherately^ that object will be frustrated
by taking time ; but no good object can be frustrated
by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied, still have
the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive

62 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

point, the laws of your own framing under it ; while
the new Administration will have no immediate power,
if it would, to change either. If it were admitted that
you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dis°
pute, there still is no single good reason for precipi-
tate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and
a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken
this favored land, are still comjjetent to adjust, in the
best way, all our present difficulty.

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,
and not in mi?ie, is the momentous issue of civil war.
The Government 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 /shall have the most solemn one
to " preserve, protect, and defend it." ^

I am loth 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 af-
fection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching
from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every liv-
ing heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land,

1 The orig-inal draft, after the words " preserve, protect, and de-
fend it," concluded as follows, addressing itself to " my dissatisfied
fellow-countrymen " : " You can forbear the assault upon it, I cannot
shrink from the defense of it. With you, and not with me, is the sol-
emn question of ' Shall it be peace or a sword ? '"

Mr. Seward submitted two separate drafts for a closing paragraph.
The second of these, containing the thought adopted by Mr. Lincoln,
was as follows : —

' I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fel-
low-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our
bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not,
be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many bat-
tlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and
all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in
their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the
nation."

LETTER TO HORACE GREELEY. 53

will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of
our nature.

III.

LETTER TO HORACE GREELEY.

The Administration, during the early months of the War for
the Union, was greatly perplexed as to the proper mode of
dealing with slavery, especially in the districts occupied by the
Union forces. In the summer of 1862, when Mr. Lincoln
was earnestly contemplating his Proclamation of Emancipation,
Horace Greeley, the leading Republican editor, published in his
paper, the New York Tribune, a severe article in the form of a
letter addressed to the President, taking him to task for failing
to meet the just expectations of twenty millions of loyal people.
Thereupon Mr. Lincoln sent him the following letter : —

ExEcuTiYE Mansion, Washington,

August 22, 1862.

Hon. Hoeace Greeley. — Dear Sir : I have just
read yours of the 19th, addressed to myself through
the New Yorlc Tribune. If there be in it any state-
ments or assumptions of fact which I may know to be
erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them. If
there be in it any inferences which I may believe to be
falsely drawn, I do not now and here argue against
them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and
dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old
friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.

As to the policy I " seem to be pursuing," as you
say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt.

I would save the Union. I would save it in the
shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the
National authority can be restored, the nearer the

54 ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

Union will be " The Union as it was." If there be
those who would not save the Union unless they could
at the same time destroy Slavery, I do not agree with
them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save
the Union and is ?iot either to save or destroy Slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I
would do it ; and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves, I would do it ; and if I could do it by freeing
some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
What I do about Slavery and the colored race, I do
because I believe it helps to save this Union ; and
what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it
would help to save the Union. I shall do less, when-
ever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause ;
and I shall do more, whenever I shall believe doing
more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors
when shown to be errors ; and I shall adopt new views
so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have
here stated my purpose according to my view of offi-
cial duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-ex-
pressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could
be free. Yours, A. Lincoln.

IV.

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAIVIATION.

Some time before the letter to Mr. Greeley was written, Lin-
coln had drawn up a Proclamation of Emancipation, and was only
waiting for a suitable hour when to publish it. He waited until
after the battle of Antietam, and then, on the 22d of Septem-
ber, 1862, issued his provisional proclamation in which he sol-
emnly declared that on the first day of January following " all

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 55

persons held as slaves within any State, or any designated part
of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against
the United States, shall he then, thenceforward and forever free.''''
The aunonncement drew forth only bitter response from the
Confederacy, and on the first day of January, 1863, the Presi-
dent issued the final proclamation which is here given. The
parts of the South excepted in the proclamation were those which
were loyal or were occupied by Union troops.

Whekeas, on the twenty-second day of September,
in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred
and., sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the Presi-
dent of the United States, containing, among other
things, the following, to wit : —

" That on the first day of January, in the year of
our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three,
all persons held as slaves within any State, or desig-
nated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be
in rebellion against the United States, shall be then,
thenceforward and forever free, and the Executive
Government of the United States, including the mil-
itary and naval authority thereof, will recognize and
maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no
act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in
any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

" That the Executive will, on the first day of Janu-
ary aforesaid, by proclamation, designate the States
and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof
respectively shall then be in rebellion against the
United States ; and the fact that any State, or the peo=
pie thereof, shall on that day be in good faith repre-
sented in the Congress of the United States by mem-
bers chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of
the qualified voters of such State shall have partici-
pated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing

56 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such
State and the people thereof are not then in rebellion
against the United States ; " —

JVow, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of
the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested
as Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the
United States, in time of actual armed rebellion
against the authority of, and government of the
United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure
for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this first day of
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my
purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full pe-
riod of one hundred days from the day first above-
mentioned, order, and designate, as the States and
parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively
are this day in rebellion against the United States, the
following, to wit : Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana except
the parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson,
St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assump-
tion, Terre Bonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin,
and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans, Mis-
sissippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina,
North Carolina, and Virginia, except the forty-eight
counties designated as West Virginia, and also the
counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northampton, Eliza-
beth City, York, Princess Ann and Norfolk, including
the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, and which ex-
cepted parts are, for the present, left precisely as it
this proclamation were not issued.

And by virtue of the power and for the purpose
aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held
as slaves within said designated States and parts of
States are, and henceforward shall be free ; and that

THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. 57

the Executive Government of the United States, in-
ckiding the military and naval authorities thereof, will
recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to
be free, to abstain from all violence, unless in neceS'
sary self-defense, and I recommend to them, that in
all cases, when allowed, they labor faithfully for rea-
sonable wages.

And I further declare and make known that such
persons of suitable condition will be received into the
armed service of the United States to garrison forts,
positions, stations, and other places, and to man ves-
sels of all sorts in said service.

And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act
of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon mil-
itary necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of
mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

Ir Testimony •whereof., I have hereunto set my name
and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this first day of
January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of
the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

Abraham Lincoln.

By the President :
"William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

68 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

V.

LETTER TO DISSATISFIED FRIENDS.

The Proclamation of Emancipation was received with great
satisfaction by some, with discontent by others. The people of
the North were by no means unanimous as yet upon the subject
of the abolition of Slavery, and the criticism made upon the Pres-
ident's course indicates his wide acquaintance with public senti-
ment, by which he was enabled to act in crises, neither too soon
nor too late. In the early fall of 1863 he was invited to meet
his old neighbors at Springfield, Illinois, and the following letter
was addressed to the chairman of the Committee of Invitation : —

Executive Mansion, Washington,
August 26, 1863.

My Dear Sir, — Your letter inviting me to attend
a mass meeting of unconditional Union men, to be held
at the capital of Illinois on the 3d day of September,
has been received. It would be very agreeable to me
thus to meet my old friends at my own home ; but I
cannot just now be absent from this city so long as a
visit there would require.

The meeting is to be of all those who maintain un-
conditional devotion to the Union ; and I am sure that
my old political friends will thank me for tendering,
as I do, the nation's gratitude to those other noble
men whom no i^artisan malice or partisan hope can
make false to the nation's life. There are those who
are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say : You
desire peace, and you blame me that we do not have
it. But how can we attain it ? There are but three
conceivable ways : First, to suppress the rebellion by
force of arms. This I am trying to do. Are you for

LETTER TO DISSATISFIED FRIENDS. 59

it ? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not
for it, a second way is to give up the UnioUo I am
against this. If you are, you should say so, plainly.
If you are not for force, nor yet for dissolution, there
only remains some imaginable compromise.

I do not believe that any compromise embracing
the maintenance of the Union is now possible. All
that I learn leads to a directly opposite belief. The
strength of the rebellion is its military — its army.
That army dominates all the country and all the peo-
ple within its range. Any offer of any terms made
by any man or men within that range in opposition to
that army, is simply nothing for the present, because
such man or men have no power whatever to enforce
their side of a compromise, if one were made with
them. To illustrate : Suppose refugees from the
South and peace men of the North get together in con-
vention, and frame and proclaim a compromise em-
bracing the restoration of the Union. In what way
can that compromise be used to keep Gen. Lee's army
out of Pennsylvania ? Gen. Meade's army can keep
Lee's army out of Pennsylvania, and I think can ulti-
mately drive it out of existence. But no paper com-
promise to which the controllers of Gen. Lee's army
are not agreed, can at all affect that army. In an ef-
fort at such compromise we would Waste time, which
the enemy would improve to our disadvantage, and
that would be all. A compromise, to be effective,
must be made either with those who control the Rebel
army, or with the people, first liberated from the dom-
ination of that army by the success of our army. Now,
allow me to assure you that no word or intimation
from the Eebel army, or from any of the men control-
ling it, in relation to any peace compromises, has ever

60 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

come to my knowledge or belief. All charges and in-
timations to the contrary are deceptive and ground-
less. And I promise you that if any such proposition
shall hereafter come, it shall not be rejected and kept
secret from you. I freely acknowledge myself to be
the servant of the people, according to the bond of
service, the United States Constitution ; and that, as
such, I am responsible to them.

But, to be plain. You are dissatisfied w^ith me
about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of
opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I
certainly wish that all men could be free, while you, I
suppose^ do not. Yet I have neither adopted nor pro-
posed any measure which is not consistent with even
your view, provided you are for the Union. I sug-
gested compensated emancipation, to which you re-
plied that you wished not to be taxed to buy negroes.
But I have not asked you to be taxed to buy negroes,
except in such way as to save you from greater taxa-
tion, to save the Union exclusively by other means.

You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, and
perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is uncon-
stitutional. I think differently. I think that the
Constitution invests its Commander-in-chief with the
laws of war in the time of war. The most that can be
said, if so much, is, that the slaves are property. Is
there, has there ever been, any question that by the
law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may
be taken when needed ? And is it not needed when-
ever taking it helps us or hurts the enemy ? Armies,
the world over, destroy enemies' property when they
cannot use it ; and even destroy their own to keep it
from the enemy. Civilized belligerents do all in their
power to help themselves or hurt the enemy, except a

LETTER TO DISSATISFIED FRIENDS. 61

few tilings regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among
the exceptions are tbe massacre of vanquished foes
and non-combatants, male and female. But the proo-
lamation, as law, is valid or is not valid. If it is not
valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it cannot
be retracted, any more than the dead can be brought
to life. Some of you profess to think that its retrac-
tion would operate favorably for the Union. Why
better after the retraction than before the issue?
There was more than a year and a half of trial to sup-
press the rebellion before the proclamation was issued,
the last one hundred days of which passed under an
explicit notice, that it was coming unless averted by
those in revolt returning to their allegiance. The
war has certainly progressed as favorably for us since
the issue of the proclamation as before. I know as
fully as one can know the opinions of others, that some
of the commanders of our armies in the field, who have
given us our most important victories, believe the
emancipation policy and the aid of colored troops con-
stitute the hea^dest blows yet dealt to the rebellion,
and that at least one of those important successes
could not have been achieved when it was but for the
aid of black soldiers. Among the commanders hold-
ing these views are some who have never had any
affinity with what is called abolitionism, or with " re-
publican party politics," but who hold them purely
as military opinions. I submit their opinions as being
entitled to some weight against the objections often
urged that emancipation and arming the blacks are
unwise as military measures, and were not adopted as
such in good faith.

You say that you will not fight to free negroes.
Some of them seem to be willing to fight for you — =

62 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save
the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to
aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall
have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall
urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time
then for you to declare that you will not fight to free
negroes. I thought that, in your struggle for the
Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease
helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the
enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differ-
ently ? I thought that whatever negroes can be got
to do as soldiers leaves just so much less for white
soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear
otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people,
act upon motives. Why should they do anything for
us if we will do nothing for them ? If they stake their
lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest
motive, even the promise of freedom. And the prom-
ise, being made, must be kept.

The signs look better. The Father of Waters again
goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great North-
west for it. Nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred
miles up they met New England, Empire, Keystone,
and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The
sunny South, too, in more colors than one, also lent a
hand. On the spot, their part of the history was jotted
down in black and white. The job was a great Na=
tional one, and let none be banned who bore an honor-
able part in it ; and while those who have cleared the
great river may well be proud, even that is not all.
It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely
and better done than at Antietam, Murfreesboro,
Gettysburg, and on many fields of less note. Nor
must Uncle Sam's web-feet be forgotten. At all the

LETTER TO DISSATISFIED FRIENDS. 63

waters' margins they have been present : not only on
the deep sea, the broad bay and the rapid river, but
also up the narrow, muddy bayou ; and wherever the
ground was a little damp, they have been and made
their tracks. Thanks to all. For the great Republic

— for the princij)les by which it lives and keeps alive

— for man's vast future — thanks to all. Peace does
not appear so far 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 w^ell-jDoised
bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great
consummation ; while I fear that there will be some
white men unable to forget that, with malignant heart
and deceitful speech, they have striven to hinder it.

Still, let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final
triumj)h. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently
apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in
His own good time, will give us the rightful result.
Yours, very truly, A. Lincoln^

James C. Conkung, Esq.

64 ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

VI.

THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

Lincoln was reelected President, and delivered his second
inaugural on the 4th of March, 1865, only a few weeks before
he was assassinated. The words in the closing paragraph were,
so to speak, his legacy to his countrymen. By a natural im-
pulse, they were hung out on banners and on the signs of mourn-
ing which throughout the Union marked the grief of the people
at the loss of their great leader.

Fellow-Counteymen : At this second appearing
to take the oath of the Presidential office, there is
less occasion for an extended address than there was
at the first. Then, a statement, somewhat in detail,
of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper.
Now, at the expiration of four years, during which
public declarations have been constantly called forth
on every point and phase of the great contest which
still absorbs the attention and enOTosses the eners^ies
of the nation, little that is new could be presented.
The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly
depends, is as well known to the public as to myself ;
and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encour-
aging to all. With high hope for the future, no pre-
diction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years
ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impend-
ing civil war. All dreaded it ; all sought to avert it.
While the inaugural address was being delivered from
this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union

THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 65

without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking
to destroy it without war — seeking to dissolve the
Union, and divide effects, by negotiation. Both par-
ties deprecated war ; but one of them woukl make war
rather than let the nation survive ; and the other
would accept war rather than let it perish. And the
war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored
slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but
localized in the southern part of it. These slaves con-
stituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.
To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest
was the object for which the insurgents would rend the
Union, even by war ; while the Government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial en-
largement of it. Neither party expected for the war
the magnitude or the duration which it has already at-
tained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the con-
flict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself
should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and
a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read
the same Bible, and pray to the same God ; and each
invokes His aid against the other. It may seem
strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of
other men's faces : but let us judge not, that we be
not judged. The prayers of both could not be an-
swered : that of neither has been answered fully. The
Almighty has His own purposes. " Woe unto the
world because of offenses I for it must needs be that
offenses come ; but woe to that man by whom the of-
fense Cometh." If we shall suppose American Slav-
ery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of

QQ ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

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 terri-
ble war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense
came, shall we discern therein any departure from
those divine attributes which the believers in a living
God always ascribe to Him ? Fondly do we hope, fer-
vently 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 bondman's
two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be
sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must
be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and
righteous altogether."

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 or-
phan ; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just
and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations.

SPEECH IN INDEPENDENCE HALL. 67

VII.

SPEECH IN INDEPENDENCE HALL.

On Washington's birthday, 1861, when Lincoln was on his way
to Washington to be inaugurated as the great successor to the
great first President, it was arranged that he should raise a new
flag at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He did so, and on
the occasion made the following speech. It was in this hall that
his body lay when it was on its way to Springfield after his as-
sassination.

I AM filled with deep emotion at finding myself
standing in this place, where were collected together
the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle
from which sprang the institutions under which we
live. You have kindly suggested to me that in my
hands is the task of restoring peace to our distracted
country. I can say in return, sirs, that all the politi-
cal sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as
I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments
which originated in and were given to the world from
this hall. I have never had a feeling, politically, that
did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the
Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered
over the dangers which were incurred by the men who
assembled here and framed and adopted that Declara-
tion. I have pondered over the toils that were en-
dured by the officers and soldiers of the army who
achieved that independence. I have often inquired of
myself what great principle or idea it was that kept
this Confederacy so long together. It was not the

68 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

mere matter of separation of the colonies from the
motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of
Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the
people of this country, but hope to all the world, for
all future time. It was that which gave promise that
in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoul-
ders of all men and that all should have an equal
chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the De-
claration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this
country be saved on that basis ? If it can, I will con-
sider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I
can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that
principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country
cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I
was about to say I would rather be assassinated on
this spot than surrender it. Now, in my view of the
present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed
and war. There is no necessity for it. I am not in
favor of such a course ; and I may say in advance
that there will be no bloodshed unless it be forced
upon the Government. The Government will not use
force, unless force is used against it.

My friends, this is wholly an unprepared speech.
I did not expect to be called on to say a word when I
came here. I supposed it was merely to do something
towards raising a flag — I ma}^, therefore, have said
something indiscreet. [Cries of " No, No."] But I
have said nothing but what I am willing to live by,
and, if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.

0 CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!

BY WALT WHITilAIf.

I.

0 Captaix ! my Captain ! our fearful trip is done ;
The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is wc«n ;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring :
But 0 heart ! heart ! heart !

0 the bleeding drops of red,

"Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

n.

0 Captain I 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-crowd'

ing;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning j
Here Captain ! dear father I

This arm beneath your head ;

It is some dream that on the deck
You 've fallen cold and dead.

m.

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 ;
Flrult. 0 shores I and ring, 0 bells I
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies
Fallen cold and dead.

LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY.

MATERIALS FOR SKETCH OF LINCOLN'S LIFE.

The fuUest life of Lincoln, and the one whicli makes
the strongest claim for authority, is that written by the
President's private secretaries John George Nicolay
and John Hay. At this writing (January, 1888) the
biography is appearing in The Century Magazine^
but after its completion serially it will be issued as an
independent work, and will be accompanied by a full
publication of Lincoln's speeches and papers.

Meanwhile, importance should be attached to those
lives and sketches which have been written by men
who personallv knew Lincoln, and who, writing often
in close proximity to the events narrated, were likely
to write with vividness if not always with impartiality.
The incompleted life by Ward H. Lamon, who was
long associated with Lincoln, covers the period up to
the date of his inauguration in 1861. It is, however,
we believe, now out of print. Reminiscences by dis-
tinguished men who were contemporaries and in many
cases near associates of Lincoln were prepared at the
instance of Allen Thorndike Rice, editor of the North
American Review^ and afterward collected by him
into a volume of 656 pages, and published in 1886.
A talk with Mr. Herndon, who was Lincoln's law
partner and long intimate with him, was reported by
George Alfred Townsend and published in 1867, A

72 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

life by Dr. J. G. Holland, published in Springfield in
1866 and lately reissued by Dodd, Mead & Co., deals
with the personality of the subject and has a popular
aim. Six months at the White House^ or The Inner
Life of Abraham Lincoln is an exceedingly interest-
ing volume of memoranda made by Frank B. Carpen-
ter, when engaged on a painting of Lincoln and his
Cabinet.

The Life by Henry J. Raymond, then the editor of
the Neiv York Times, published in New York in 1864,
was in intention a campaign life, but it is especially
valuable since it allows Lincoln to be his own biog-
rapher by means of speeches, letters, messages and the
like. The Life by Isaac N. Arnold (Jansen, McClurg
& Co., Chicago, 1866) is chiefly devoted to the exec-
utive and legislative doings of Lincoln's administra-
tion. A campaign life was published by Thayer &
Eldridge, Boston, 1860, pp. 128. Among other me-
moirs, mostly written for political purposes, are those
by Joseph H. Barrett (Moore, Wilsbach, Keys & Co.,
Cincinnati, 1865, pp. 842), A. A. Abbott (Dawley,
New r^.rk, 1865, pp. 104), David N. Bartlett (Derby
& Jacl son, New York, 1860, pp. 354), Linus P.
Bracke .t (Philadelphia, 1865), Phoebe Ann Hanaford
(B. B. Russell & Co., Boston, 1865, pp. 216), John C.
Power ("Wilson & Co., Springfield, 111., 1875, pp. 352).

A popular life for young people is W. M. Thayer's
Abraham Lincoln, the Pioneer Boy, and recently a
volume has been written by W. O. Stoddard called
Abraham Lincoln : the True Story of a Great Life,
and published by Fords, Howard & Hulbert, New
York, pp. 508.

After Lincoln's death there appeared numberless
eulogies, addresses, sermons, poems, and magazine ar-

LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY. 73

tides, concerning his life, character, and public ser-
vices. A zealous bibliographer and antiquarian, Mr,
Charles Henry Hart, collected a list of these under the
title BihliograpMa Lincolniana ; an Account of the
Publications occasioned hy the death of Abraham Lim
col 71, Siditeenth President of the United States ; vnth
Notes and an Introduction. It was published by Joel
Munsell, Albany, X. Y., in 1870, and contains a valua-
ble biographical introduction. Among preachers and
public men who delivered addresses afterward printed
were Henry Ward Beecher, James Freeman Clarke,
Richard Salter Storrs, Phillips Brooks, Octavius
Brooks Frothingham, George Bancroft, James Abram
Garfield, Alexander H. Bullock, Richard Stockton
Field.

Ralph AValdo Emerson delivered a commemorative
address at funeral services held in Concord, April 19,
1865, which is contained in the eleventh volume of his
works. Riverside Edition. James Russell Lowell,
besides the paper given in this book, introduced a
striking portrait of Lincoln in the lines beginning

" Such was be our Martyr-Chief,"
in his Commemoration Ode. Hawthorne has an in-
teresting paragrapk in his article Chiefly about War
Matters contributed to the Atlantic 2Ionthly^ July^
1862, and reprinted in volume xii. of the Piverside
Edition of his works. Bryant wrote a noble threnody.
Dr. Holmes a memorial hymn, Stoddard a stately ode,
and Stedman a sonnet as also a poem on the cast of
Lincoln's hand.

An investigation into the Lincoln genealogy was
made by Samuel Shackf ord and published in the New
England Historic Genealogical Pegister^ Boston,
1887. There are in the Boston Public Library more

74 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

than two thousand copies of American and English
newspapers containing accounts of the assassination
with editorial comments. Full accounts of the trial of
the conspirators were published by Peterson & Bros.,
Philadelphia, 1865, pp. 310, and by Barclay & Co.,
Philadelphia, 1865, pp. 102. Benjamin Pitman's ac-
count was published by Moore, Wilsbach, Keys & Co.,
Cincinnati, 1865, pp. 421. The obsequies in New
York were described by D. T. Valentine in a book of
254 pages, published by E. Jones & Co., New York,
1866. For lists of works concerning Lincoln, besides
the bibliography by Hart, one may consult the Boston
Public Library Catalogue, and Monthly Reference
Lists of Providence Public Library, vol. i. p. 21
(1881).

Portraits of Lincoln serve as frontispieces to most
of the volumes devoted to him, and there are several
which can be had separately. The most considerable
is the large engraving by Marshall, published by
Bradley & Co., Philadelphia. Mr. J. C. Buttre, 7
Barclay St., New York, publishes six small engrav-
ings, and there is a good plaster bust to be obtained of
Garey & Co., 10 Province House Court, Boston. It
is not impossible that photographs can be procured of
the Statue of Lincoln by St. Gaudens in Chicago.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EVENTS IN
THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

Age

Born in a log-cabin near Hodg-ensville, now Larue County,

Kentucky February 12, 1809

7 His father moves with his family into the wilderness near

Gentryville, Indiana ....... 1816

9 His mother dies, at the age of 35 . . . . . . 1818

10 His father's second marriage ...... 1819

17 Walks nine miles a day, going and returning to school . 1826

19 Makes a trip to New Orleans and back, at work on a flat-boat 1828

20 Drives in an ox-cart with his father and stepmother to a

clearing on the Sangamon River, near Decatur, Illinois, 1829
20 Splits rails, to surround the clearing with a fence . . 1829

20 Makes another flat-boat trip to New Orleans and back, on
which trip he first sees negroes shackled together in
chains, and forms his opinions concerning slavery . May, 18.31

22 Begins work in a store at New Salem, Illinois • Augiist, 1831

23 Enlists in the Black Hawk War ; elected a captain of vol-

unteers ......... 1832

23 Announces himself a Whig candidate for the Legislature,

and is defeated ........ 1832

24 Storekeeper, Postmaster, and Surveyor .... 1833

2.5 Elected to the Illinois Legislature ..... 1834

26-33 Reelected to the Legislature .... 1835 to 1842

28 Studies law at Springfield ...... 1837

31 Is a Presidential elector on the Whig national ticket . . 1840

33 Marries Mary Todd November 4, 1842

35 Canvasses Illinois for Henry Clay ..... 1844

37 Elected to Congress 1846

39 Supports General Taylor for President .... 1848

40-45 Engages in law practice ..... 1849-1854

46 Debates with Douglas at Peoria and Springfield . . . 1855
46-47 Aids in organizing the Republican party . . 1855-1856

49 Joint debates in Illinois with Stephen A. Douglas . . 1858

76

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

50 Makes political speeches in Ohio ...... 1859

51 Visits New York, and speaks at Cooper Union . February, 1860
51 Attends Republican State Convention at Decatur ; declared

to be the choice of Illinois for the Presidency . May, 186Q

51 Nominated at Chicago as the Republican candidate for

President May 16, 1860

51 Elected President over J. C. Breckenridge, Stephen A.

Douglas, and John Bell . . . . November, 1860

52 Inaugurated President ...... March 4, 1861

52 Issues first order for troops to put down the Rebellion,

AprU 15, 1861

53 Urges McClellan to advance ..... April, 1862
53 Appeals for the support of border States to the Union

cause, .
53 Calls for 300,000 more troops

53 Issues Emancipation Proclamation

54 Thanks Grant for capture of Vicksburg

54 His address at Gettysburg

55 Calls for 500,000 volunteers .

55 Renominated and Reelected President

55 Thanks Sherman for capture of Atlanta

56 His second inauguration

56 Assassinated .....

March to July, 1862

July, 1862

. January 1, 1863

July, 1863

November 19, 1863

July, 1864

. 1864

September, 1864

. March 4, 1865

April 14, 1865

PKOGRAMMES.

[These programmes are merely in the way of suggestion.
Teachers may find it more convenient to combine numbers
from different programmes into a new one.]

No. I.

1. Essay : Describing the scenes which take place at the
inauguration of the President.

2. Recitation : Lincoln's second Inaugural.

3. Song : America.

4. A list of the Presidents of the United States, with the
age of each upon inauguration.

5. Anecdotes : Descriptive of Lincoln in connection with
his cabinet.

6. Reading : That portion of Lowell's Commemoration
Ode descriptive of Lincoln.

No. II.

1. Description of the interior of Independence Hall, Phil-
adelphia.

2. Account of the signing of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence.

3. Declamation : Lincoln's speech in Independence Hall.

4. Recitation: The Battle Hymn of the Repuhlic.

5. Comparison of Washington and Lincoln.

6. Opinions by distinguished men of Lincoln's character
and power given in brief by several pupils.

7. Recitatio7i : 0 Cajytain, my Cajjtain.

78 ABRAHAM LINCOLN,

No. III.

1. £Jssa7/ : Descriptive of the battle of Gettysburg.

2. Declamation : Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg.

3. Estimates of the speech by eminent men.

4. Anecdotes about Lincoln, chosen by six pupils.

5. Account of the eagle, Old Abe.

6. Heading : Selections from Emerson's address.

No. IV.

1. Historical essay on the rise of the conflict with slavery.

2. Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.

3. Recitation of Whittier's The Jubilee Singers.

4. Reading of Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley.

5. Essay on the constitutional amendment abolishing
slavery, giving a history of its passage.

6. Recitation of Bryant's Threnody.

No. V.

THE MAN.

1. Essay: Lincoln's Parentage and Childhood, drawn
from Chapter I. of Holland's Life of Lincoln.

2. Essay : Lincoln's Early Life and Marriage, selected
from Ward H. Lamon's Life of Lincoln.

3. Essay : Lincoln's Manhood, as drawn from Lamon's
Life, to his election to the Presidency.

4. Heading : From Lincoln's Speech on accepting nom-
ination to the U. S. Senate, Springfield, 111., June 17,
1858. Found in Raymond's Life of Lincoln, p. 52 et seq.

5. Essay : Descriptive of Lincoln's Famous Debate with
S. A. Douglas, drawn from Chapter 11. Raymond's Life
of Lincoln.

6. Heading : Selections from Lincoln's Speech in Cooper
Institute, New York, February 27, 1860. In Ray-
mond's Life, p- 85.

PROGRAMMES. 79

7. Reading : Selections from R. W. Emerson's Lecture
on Abraham Lincoln.

8. Reading : Estimate of Lincoln's Character, Chapter
XIII. Charles G. Leland's Life of Lincoln in the New
Plutarch Series.

No. VI.

TETE PRESIDENT.

1. Reading : From first Inaugural, March 4, 1861.

2. Essay : A Sketch of Mr. Lincoln's Presidential Life,
drawn from any standard Life.

3. Reading : Descriptive of Lincoln's Tastes, from
Six Months at the White House, Section XYI.

4. Reading : Herndon's Analysis of Lincoln's Charac-
ter. Six Months at the White House, Section LXXIX.

5. Essay: Lincoln's Home Life as drawn from Six
Months at the White House.

6. Reading: Anecdotes about Lincoln; The last forty
pages of Raymond's Life are devoted to Anecdotes and
Reminiscences.

7. Declamation: Exordium to Edward Everett's -4 c?o?re55
at Gettysburg.

8. RecitaMon : Selections from Bayard Taylor's Gettys-
burg Ode.

9. Declamation : Lincoln's Address at Gettysburg.

10. Reading : Selections from Lincoln's second Inaugu-
ral.

No. VII.

THE EMANCEPATOR.

1. An Essay descriptive of the progress of the War to the
Autumn of 1862.

2. Reading from Holland's Life of Lincoln, descriptive
of the President's prejDaration and presentation of the
Proclamation of Emancipation, reduced from pp. 390-395.

3. Reading : The Proclamation itself,

80 ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

4. Heading: From Whittier, The Proclmnation.

5. Singi7ig : America.

6. Readings selected from R. W. Emerson's The Emam
cipation Proclamation.

7. Heading: The Emancipation Proclamation, W. S.
Robinson, " Warrington," from Pen Portraits.

8. Reading : The Death of Slavery, Bryant.

9. Reading : The Proclamation, as culled from • the
first part of Chapter XII. of Frederick Douglass' Life
and Times.

10. Reading : Laus Deo, John G. Whittier.

11. Singing : Hymn, after the Emancipation Proclama-
tion, Dr. 0. W. Holmes.

No. VIII.

THE MARTYR.

1. Essay : Descriptive of the Assassination.

2. Recitation : Death of Lincoln, Bryant.

3. Reading : From Recollections of Ahraham Lincoln.
Noah Brooks, Harper's Monthly, vol. xxxi., p. 222, July,
1865.

4. Recitation : Abraham Lincoln, Alice Gary.

5. Reading : Easy Chair, Harper's Monthly, Vol.
xxxi. p. 126, June, 1865.

6. Declamation : From Abraham Lincoln ; an Hora-
tia7i Ode, R. H. Stoddard.

7. Reading: Mr. Lowell's Essay.

8. Recitation : Our Good President, Phoebe Cary.

9. Recitation : Second Review of the Gramd Army,
Bret Harte.

10. Reading : From Commemoration Ode, J. R. Lowell.

11. Song : For the Services in Memory of Abraham
Lincoln, Dr. 0. W. Holmes.

r/ aoo9. os^/. oisi:

sEl)z IKibemtie literature ^ertesf*

[^A list of the first fifty -four niimhns is given on the next page.]

55. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Thurbek.** *

56. Webster's First Bunker Hill Oration, and the Oration

on Adams and Jefferson.

57. Dickens's Christmas Carol. With Notes and a Biojrraphy.

58. Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth. [Xos. 57 and 58 also in one

volu)ite, linen. 40 cents.]

59. Verse and Prose for Beginners in Reading.**

GO, 61. The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. In two parts.J
G2. John Fiske's War of Independence. "With ]Maps and a Bio-
graphical Sketch. {Doub'e Number, 30 rents ; linen, 40 cents.)

C^. Longfellow's Paul Reveres Ride, and Other Poems.*
64, 65, 66. Tales from Shakespeare. Edited by Chakles and Mary

Lamb. In three parts. [Also in one Tolume, linen, 50 cents.]

67. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.** *

68. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, The Traveller, etc.

69. Hawthorne's Old Manse, and A Few Mosses.*

70. A Selection from Whittier's Child-Life in Poetry.*

71. A Selection from Whittier's Child-Life in Prose.*

72. Milton's L' Allegro, II Penseroso. Comus, Lycidas, etc=

73. Tennyson's Enoch Arden, and Other Poems.

74. Gray's Elegy, etc. ; Cowper's John Gilpin, etc.

75. Scudder's George Washington. {Double dumber, 30 cents ;

linen, 40 cents.)

76. Wordsworth's On the Intimations of Immortality, etc.

77. Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night, and Other Poems.

78. Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. [Double 2sumbtr, 30 cents;

linen, 40 cents.)

79. Lamb's Old China, and Other Essays of Elia.

80. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Other

Poems; Campbell's Lochiel's Warning, and Other Poems

81. Holmes's Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. [Triple Number,

45 cents ; linen, 50 cents.)

82. Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. [Quadruple Number, 50 cents ;

linen, 60 cents.)

83. George Eliot's Silas Marner. [Double number, 30 cents; linen,

40 cents. )

84. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. [Quadruple Number,

50 cents ; linen, 60 cents.
Also, bound in linen : ** 25 cents. * 11 and 63 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 40
and 69, 55 and 67, 70 and 71. X Also in one vol., 40 cents.

EXTRA NUMBERS.
A American Authors and their Birthdays. Programmes and

Suggestions for the Celebration of the Birthdays of Authors. By A. S. RoE-

' /? Portraits and Biographies of 20 American Authors.

C A Longfellovr Night. For Catholic Schools and Societies.

/> Literature in School. Essays by Horace E. Scudder.

E Harriet Beecher Stowe. Dialogues and Scenes.

F Longfellow Leaflets. (Each 2i Double Number, 30 cents ; linen,

0 Whittier Leaflets. 40 cents.) Poems and Prose Passages
FT Holmes Leaflets. for Pending and Pecitation.

1 The Riverside Manual for Teachers, containing Suggestions

and Illustrative Lessons leading up to Primary Reading. By I. F. Hall.

K. The Riverside Primer and Reader. [Special Number.) In

paper covers, -with cloth back, 25 cents. In strong linen binding, 30 cents.

L The Riverside Song Book. Containing Classic American

Poems set to Standard Music. {Double Number, 30 cents; boards, 40 cents.)

Jf Lowell's Fable for Critics. [Double Number, 30 cents.)

■€\)t asibcrjiitie Hiteratuire Series!.

With Introductions, Notes, Historical Sketches, and Biographical Sketches.
Each regular single number, paper, 15 cents.

1. Longfellow's Evangeline.** tt

2. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish ; Elizabeth.**

3. Longfellow's Courtship of Miles Standish. Dramatized.

4. Whittier's Snow-Bcund, and Other Poems.** JJ *

5. "Whittier's Mabel Martin, and Other Poems.*

6. Holmes's Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle, etc.

7. 8, 9. Hawthorne's True Stories from New England His-

tory. 1620-1803. In three parts.!

10. Hawthorne's Biographical Stories. With Questions.*

11. Longfellow's Children's Hour, and Other Selections.*

12. Studies in Longfellow. Thiity-Two Topics for Study.

13. 14. Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha. In two parts.|:

15. Lowell's Under the Old Elm, and Other Poems.*

16. Bayard Taylor's Lars; a Pastoral of Norway.

17. 18. Hawthorne's Wonder-Book. In two parts.J

19, 20. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. In two parts.

21. Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac, etc.

22, 23. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales. In two parts.J

24. Washington's Rules of Conduct, Letters and Addresses.**

25, 26. Longfellow's Golden Legend. In two parts.J

27. Thoreaus Succession of Forest Trees, Sounds, and Wild

Apples. With a Biographical Sketch by R. W. EmersoNo

28. John Burroughs's Birds and Bees.*

29. Hawthorne's Little DafFydowndilly, and Other Stories.*

30. Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal, and Other Pieces.^ *

31. Holmes's My Hunt after the Captain, and Other Papers.

32. Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech, and Other Papers.
33, 34, 35. Longfellow's Tales of a "Wayside Inn. In three parts.fj:

36. John Burroughs's Sharp Eyes, and Other Papers.*

37. Charles Dudley "Warner's A-Hunting of the Deer, etc.**

38. Longfellow's Building of the Ship, and Other Poems.

39. Lowell's Books and Libraries, and Other Papers.

40. Hawthorne's Tales of the ^A^hite Hills, and Sketches.*

41. Whittier's Tent on the Beach.

42. Emerson's Fortune of the Republic, and Other Essays,

including the American Scholar.

43. Ulysses among the Phseacians. From W. C. Bryant's Trans-

lation of Homer's Odyssey.

44. Edgeworth's "Waste Not,"Want Not, and The Barring Out.

45. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome.

46. Old Testament Stories in Scripture Language.

47. 48. Fables and Folk Stories. In two parts.J
49, 50. Hans Andersen's Stories. In two parts.J

51, 52. "Washington Irving: Essays from the Sketch Book.

rSl.l Rip Van Winkle, and other American Essays. [52.] The Voyage, and other
English Essavs. In two parts.J

53. Scott's Lady of the Lake. Edited by W. J. Rolfe. With

copious notes and numerous illustrations. {Double Number, 30 cents. Also, in
Rolfe^s Students^ Series, cloth, to Teachers, 53 cents.)

54. Bryant's Sella, Thanatopsis, and Other Poems.

Also, bound in linen : ** 25 cents. * 29 and 10 in one vol., 40 cents ; likewise 28
and 36, 4 and 5, 15 and 30, 40 and 69, 11 and 63. t Also in one vol., 40 cents ; t ditto,
45 cents, tt 1, 4, and 30 also in one vol., 50 cents ; likewise 33, 34, and 35.

Continued on the inside of this cover.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.