Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day. Stowe Harriet Beecher
in the country at the time, was a forgery, devised by a disreputable reporter. Mr. Lincoln never used any disguises, and it would have required more than one "Scotch cap" to bring his six feet four down to an average height.
He was so kind-hearted, so peaceable, so averse, either to cause or to witness controversy or wrath, that only the extremest need would force him to the point of wrath and of fighting. But when the need was real, the wrath and the fight came out. Whether moral or physical courage, upon a real demand for it, it never failed. On his flat boat trip to New Orleans in his youth, he and his mate, armed only with sticks of wood, beat off seven negro marauders who attacked and would have robbed their boat. When clerk in a country store he seized, flung down and subdued a bully who was insolent to some women, and what is more, the beaten bully became his friend. He once, alone, by suddenly dropping from a scuttle down upon the platform, kept off a gang of rowdies who were about to hustle his friend Col. Baker off the stand. He and Baker once, with no others, escorted to the hotel, a speaker who was threatened with violence by a Democratic crowd whom he had offended. When some Irishmen at Springfield once undertook to take possession of the poll and restrict the voting to their friends, Lincoln, hearing of it, stepped into the first store, seized an axe helve, and marched alone through the turbulent crowd up to the poll, opening the road as he went; and alone he kept the ballot-box free and safe until the foolish crowd gave up their plan. His anger sometimes – though very seldom – flamed up at ill usage of himself; but never so hotly as at ill usage to others. When a poor negro citizen of Illinois was imprisoned at New Orleans, simply for being a free negro from outside of Louisiana, and was about to be sold into slavery, to pay jail fees, Mr. Lincoln found that the Governor of Illinois could not help the poor fellow. When the fact became plain, he jumped up and swore, "By the Almighty," he said, "I'll have that negro back, or I'll have a twenty years' agitation in Illinois, until the Governor can do something in the premises!" Somebody sent money and set the man free; or else the twenty years' agitation would have begun, and finished too. An officer, a worthless fellow, after being dismissed and repeatedly trying to get back into the army, at last insolently told President Lincoln, "I see you are fully determined not to do me justice." Now this was just what he was determined to do him; and in righteous anger he arose, laid down his papers, collared the fellow, walked him to the door and flung him out, saying, "Sir, I give you fair warning, never to show yourself in this room again. I can bear censure, but not insult!"
In Mr. Lincoln's administration, the world has seen and wondered at the greatest sign and marvel of our day, to wit, a plain working man of the people, with no more culture, instruction or education than any such working man may obtain for himself, called on to conduct the passage of a great nation through a crisis involving the destinies of the whole world. The eyes of princes, nobles, aristocrats, of dukes, earls, scholars, statesmen, warriors, all turned on the plain backwoodsman, with his simple sense, his imperturbable simplicity, his determined self-reliance, his impracticable and incorruptible honesty, as he sat amid the war of conflicting elements, with unpretending steadiness, striving to guide the national ship through a channel at whose perils the world's oldest statesmen stood aghast. The brilliant courts of Europe levelled their opera glasses at the phenomenon. Fair ladies saw that he had horny hands and disdained white gloves; dapper diplomatists were shocked at his system of etiquette; but old statesmen, who knew the terrors of that passage, were wiser than court ladies and dandy diplomatists, and watched him with a fearful curiosity, simply asking, "Will that awkward old backwoodsman really get that ship through? If he does, it will be time for us to look about us." Sooth to say, our own politicians were somewhat shocked with his State papers at first. "Why not let us make them a little more conventional, and file them to a classical pattern?" "No," was his reply, "I shall write them myself. The people will understand them." "But this or that form of expression is not elegant, nor classical." "The people will understand it," was his invariable reply. And whatever may be said of his State papers, as compared with the diplomatic standards, it has been a fact that they have always been wonderfully well understood by the people, and that since the time of Washington, the State papers of no President have more controlled the popular mind. And one reason for this is, that they have been informal and undiplomatic. They have more resembled a father's talks to his children than a State paper. And they have had that relish and smack of the soil, that appeal to the simple human heart and head, which is a greater power in writing than the most artful clerices of rhetoric. Lincoln might well say with the apostle, "But though I be rude in speech yet not in knowledge, but we have been thoroughly made manifest among you in all things." His rejection of what is called fine writing, was as deliberate as St. Paul's, and for the same reason – because he felt that he was speaking on a subject which must be made clear to the lowest intellect, though it should fail to captivate the highest. But we say of Lincoln's writings, that for all true, manly purposes of writing, there are passages in his State papers that could not be better put – they are absolutely perfect. They are brief, condensed, intense, and with a power of insight and expression which make them worthy to be inscribed in letters of gold. Such are some passages of the celebrated letter to the Springfield convention, especially that masterly one where he compares the conduct of the patriotic and loyal blacks with that of the treacherous and disloyal whites. No one can read this letter and especially the passage mentioned, without feeling the influence of a mind both strong and generous. "Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost. And then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation, while I fear there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart and deceitful speech they have striven to hinder it."
The lesson of Mr. Lincoln's career as President, is a manifold one. He was in a strangely full and close manner the exponent, the representative, the federal head, the voice, the plenary agent, of the people of the United States. As such, his life teaches what the war teaches, to wit; the strength and the magnificent morality of an intelligent people, trained in self-control, in thought, in the doctrines of justice and freedom, and in the fear of God.
As one man's life, the life of Mr. Lincoln after his election is simply the picture over again, on a gigantic scale, in stronger colors, in bolder relief, of the same courage, devotion, strength, industry, energy, sense, decision, kindness, caution, instinctive feeling of what was right and what was practicable, and deliberate execution of it, that had marked his career before, as the political leader in a great state controversy, and as a laborious lawyer at the bar. As he mounted upon a higher plane of action, his views became enlarged and elevated. Especially is it noticeable how as President, he was very much more open and specific in avowing an immediate dependence upon help higher than man's, in doing the work before him. Mr. Lincoln was naturally inclined to religious feelings. His habit of considering all the affairs of life from the religious point of view, at the tribunal of the laws of God, is clearly traceable in his private history and even in his political campaigns. He was not obtrusive nor unreasonable however in avowals of this feeling. It would have been out of place to request the prayers of his fellow citizens during the debates with Douglas, almost as much as to ask the prayers of the jury while arguing a case. But while placed at the head of his nation, during the vastest peril of its existence – while occupying the most prominent, the most powerful, the most responsible, the most difficult, and the most dangerous position upon the whole round world – while at the very front of the very vanguard of humanity in the great battle which was deciding whether good or evil should overcome – in such a position, no avowals of the need of Divine aid, no repetition of the consciousness of that need, no requests for the sympathy and the help of all good men's prayers, could be too frequent or too free. This profound sense of human weakness and of God's strength, and a distinct sentiment of mournful foreboding, give the whole coloring to the brief address in which he bade good bye to his neighbors at Springfield, at setting out for Washington in 1861.
This habit of religious feeling, and the avowal of it, remained a very marked one during all Mr. Lincoln's Presidency. Subordinate to this, the acts of his official life, his written and spoken utterances, and his personal conduct, were mainly marked by solicitous and extreme sense of duty, unfailing