Lincoln, the Politician. T. Aaron Levy
Sensational onslaught on evil has been often tested and its futility proved. Likewise the common politician has made many despair of democratic government. Abraham Lincoln represents the sanest example of wise political action, his political life the best platform for eternal warfare on organized evil.
The artist is measured not alone by his sleepless imagination but also by the technic through which his vision assumes external form. Dante skillfully gave voice to "ten silent centuries." Even so the dreams of prophet and humanitarian await the touch of the political artist to find immortality in visible manifestation. Neither a politician without a luminous idea nor a dreamer without political craft ever develops into a statesman. Democracy can solve its destiny only by an adequate appreciation of the importance of working out its intrinsic mission. The national ideal must become a reality. Dreamer and reformer are needed and likewise the politician, the man of method, the student of matter, the wielder of the tool. A heroic past will not save a nation. "The central idea" of a people cannot be safely relinquished, but must restlessly follow the law of practical evolution in each generation.
Abraham Lincoln was a child of American Democracy. He was trained in the college of republican institutions. The danger to Democracy is the treason of her own children. Lincoln stayed with his teachers—the plain people. He never longed for a place they could not give nor an honor they could not bestow. The aristocracy of externality, of clothes, fashion, wealth, station and descent ever remained shadows to him. He valued them at their real worth, with finer judgment than any man in modern history. The possibility of such a career is in itself a justification of republican government.
He walked the way of the average citizen, labored in the factory of political methods. Living in the common atmosphere, loving the strife of debate, near to the pioneer heart and mind, a student of popularity and party organization, he was from the beginning a champion of the better and broader humanity. He lived his democracy and led his people to a higher realization of the resistless purposes of the republic. Striking the better chords of their being, he led them to make a mere declaration of freedom the possession of a forgotten people. During his political pilgrimage he ever sought to widen in a practical way the Declaration of Independence. Many prate much of Democracy but Lincoln dared to make it the bread of humanity.
Abraham Lincoln used political machinery for the welfare of the people. He was ambitious and loved success but not for its own sake. Station gave him wider opportunity to practice his philosophy of life, his affection for his fellowmen, and sympathy for the downtrodden. He is a guide to the perplexed, to those who have not bartered their idealism in the stifling fight. His life is richly calculated to deepen faith in the ultimate triumph of righteousness, to lead to the conviction that spirit and method are not sundered of necessity, that the vision is not essentially a stranger to the party worker, that policy and compromise have their place in the domain of progress.
He looms up in American History as a politician who glorified his craft, who kept his hands clean in all of the sordidness of material success. Vicarious government in a republic is ruinous. Lincoln is therefore an inspiration for political consecration and the prophet of permanency. He dedicated his talent to the external manifestations of the destiny of the republic. His common sense, his practical sagacity and knowledge of human nature and of its limitations for progress, his prudent recognition of the labored advance of ethical sentiment and of the solidarity of vested interests, as well as his superb idealism and exalted spirit may well become food and life to those who believe in the better politics. As these become the property and the possession of a broader community the republic will know no fear, dissension will little disturb her serenity and she will be equal to every emergency that may threaten her integrity.
Beginning with the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln became and remained a national figure. From that time his life belongs to the history of the United States and has been dwelt upon with ever increasing fullness and eulogy. By contrast his early political life has been almost forgotten. This work covers that neglected period, dealing with Lincoln the politician, showing his development and his training for national leadership. The story is largely told in the words of Lincoln himself, stress being laid on crucial incidents hitherto, in the main, indifferently considered. A unity, dramatic in its simplicity, appears in his recital, giving glimpses of a man who was guided by a supreme political philosophy in seeking to externalize his gospel of the brotherhood of man in statute and decision. Considerable attention is devoted to Lincoln in Indiana and at New Salem, showing the peculiarity of his power, his political popularity, and the rapid maturity of his convictions as to the wisest methods of attacking entrenched evil. An earnest, reverent and impartial study of his political career is an enriching education. There is no need of hiding its humble, rude phases. The more his life is lingered over, the greater the wonder grows at the emerging of Lincoln from the humility and the poverty of his environment with a "message of range and sweep," to the sons of men the world over.
LINCOLN THE POLITICIAN
CHAPTER I
LINCOLN IN KENTUCKY
The forefathers of Abraham Lincoln, like thousands of Western pioneers, were of a sturdy English lineage. His immediate ancestry, however, was less distinguished than that of many whose names are forgotten and whose influence on American history is imperceptible. Every effort to explain his career through an illustrious parentage has proved altogether futile.
Lincoln's grandfather belonged to that band of fearless adventurers in Kentucky, whose ideal was a lonely house in the middle of a vast farm, even though maintained in the presence of skulking redskins.[1] It was in this land that earned the title of "the Dark and Bloody Ground," that a common frontier tragedy made the grandmother of Lincoln a widow. For one day while her husband was in the fields, a short distance from the house, with their youngest son Thomas, a sudden shot from an Indian ambush broke the stillness of the woods and the father fell dead. The oldest son Mordecai looking out of the loop hole in the loft of the house saw an Indian raising his little brother from the ground. Aiming at a silver ornament on the breast of the redman, he brought him down. The boy ran to the cabin and the mother opened the door. She hastened to a more settled community where her son Thomas, the father of the President, grew to a shiftless manhood.[2]
The inhabitants of Kentucky were bred in the school of hardship. The battle with the forest and buffalo abated, but there remained the heroic fight with the soil. Splendid virile qualities were born in the strife with the Indians and the forest. Inventions were yet unknown and a living was drawn from the earth only through grinding labor. Yet frontier life rapidly gave way to the march of civilization, the trail and the path to the highway.
Hunters and warriors became tillers of the field. The merchant and manufacturer, the pioneer preacher, physician, lawyer and politician appeared with the onward tide of events.
The places of learning were few. Now and then a struggling teacher gave all that he had from his humble store to the young confidently entrusted to his care. Still something in the little log cabin school-house, even on unfrequented paths, developed character. Out of the battle with adverse conditions, with few advantages and manifold difficulties, came statesmen, and even scholars, men who laid the foundation of states, who guided the nation through its crises, and were equal to every emergency that endangered its vitality.
The law abiding character of the people was notably evinced by the supreme patience with which they effected their separation from the mother state, Virginia.[3] With wisdom they established courts