Putnam
Abraham Lincoln / The People's Leader in the Struggle for National Existence
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The twelfth of February, 1909, was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. In New York, as in other cities and towns throughout the Union, the day was devoted to commemoration exercises, and even in the South, in centres like Atlanta (the capture of which in 1864 had indicated the collapse of the cause of the Confederacy), representative Southerners gave their testimony to the life and character of the great American.
The Committee in charge of the commemoration in New York arranged for a series of addresses to be given to the people of the city and it was my privilege to be selected as one of the speakers. It was an indication of the rapid passing away of the generation which had had to do with the events of the War, that the list of orators, forty-six in all, included only four men who had ever seen the hero whose life and character they were describing.
In writing out later, primarily for the information of children and grandchildren, my own address (which had been delivered without notes), I found myself so far absorbed in the interest of the subject and in the recollections of the War period, that I was impelled to expand the paper so that it should present a more comprehensive study of the career and character of Lincoln than it had been possible to attempt within the compass of an hour's talk, and should include also references, in outline, to the constitutional struggle that had preceded the contest and to the chief events of the War itself with which the great War President had been most directly concerned. The monograph, therefore, while in the form of an essay or historical sketch, retains in certain portions the character of the spoken address with which it originated.
It is now brought into print in the hope that it may be found of interest for certain readers of the younger generation and may serve as an incentive to the reading of the fuller histories of the War period, and particularly of the best of the biographies of the great American whom we honour as the People's leader.
I have been fortunate enough to secure (only, however, after this monograph had been put into type) a copy of the pamphlet printed in September, 1860, by the Young Men's Republican Union of New York, in which is presented the text, as revised by the speaker, of the address given by Lincoln at the Cooper Institute in February, – the address which made him President.
This edition of the speech, prepared for use in the Presidential campaign, contains a series of historical annotations by Cephas Brainerd of the New York Bar and Charles C. Nott, who later rendered further distinguished service to his country as Colonel of the 176th Regiment, N.Y.S. Volunteers, and (after the close of the War) as chief justice of the Court of Claims.
These young lawyers (not yet leaders of the Bar) appear to have realised at once that the speech was to constitute the platform upon which the issues of the Presidential election were to be contested. Not being prophets, they were, of course, not in a position to know that the same statements were to represent the contentions of the North upon which the Civil War was fought out.
I am able to include, with the scholarly notes of the two lawyers, a valuable introduction to the speech, written (as late as February, 1908) by Judge Nott; together with certain letters which in February, 1860, passed between him (as the representative of the Committee) and Mr. Lincoln.
The introduction and the letters have never before been published, and (as is the case also with the material of the notes) are now in print only in the present volume.
I judge, therefore, that I may be doing a service to the survivors of the generation of 1860 and also to the generations that have grown up since the War, by utilising the occasion of the publication of my own little monograph for the reprinting of these notes in a form for permanent preservation and for reference on the part of students of the history of the Republic.
G.H.P.
NEW YORK, April 2, 1909.
I
THE EVOLUTION OF THE MAN
On the twelfth of February, 1909, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Americans gathered together, throughout the entire country, to honour the memory of a great American, one who may come to be accepted as the greatest of Americans. It was in every way fitting that this honour should be rendered to Abraham Lincoln and that, on such commemoration day, his fellow-citizens should not fail to bear also in honoured memory the thousands of other good Americans who like Lincoln gave their lives for their country and without whose loyal devotion Lincoln's leadership would have been in vain.
The chief purpose, however, as I understand, of a memorial service is not so much to glorify the dead as to enlighten and inspire the living. We borrow the thought of his own Gettysburg address (so eloquent in its exquisite simplicity) when we say that no words of ours can add any glory to the name of Abraham Lincoln. His work is accomplished. His fame is secure. It is for us, his fellow-citizens, for the older men who had personal touch with the great struggle in which Lincoln was the nation's leader, for the younger men who have grown up in the generation since the War, and for the children by whom are to be handed down through the new century the great traditions of the Republic, to secure from the life and character of our great leader incentive, illumination, and inspiration to good citizenship, in order that Lincoln and his fellow-martyrs shall not have died in vain.
It is possible within the limits of this paper simply to touch upon the chief events and experiences in Lincoln's life. It has been my endeavour to select those that were the most important in the forming or in the expression of his character. The term "forming" is, however, not adequate to indicate the development of a personality like Lincoln's. We rather think of his sturdy character as having been forged into its final form through the fiery furnace of fierce struggle, as hammered out under the blows of difficulties and disasters, and as pressed beneath the weight of the nation's burdens, until was at last produced the finely tempered nature of the man we know, the Lincoln of history, that exquisite combination of sweetness of nature and strength of character. The type is described in Schiller's Song of the Founding of the Bell:
Denn, wo das strenge mit dem zarten,
Wo mildes sich und starkes paarten,
Da giebt es einen guten Klang.
There is a tendency to apply the term "miraculous" to the career of every hero, and in a sense such description is, of course, true. The life of every man, however restricted its range, is something of a miracle; but the course of a single life, like that of humanity, is assuredly based on a development that proceeds from a series of causations. Holmes says that the education of a man begins two centuries before his birth. We may recall in this connection that Lincoln came of good stock. It is true that his parents belonged to the class of poor whites; but the Lincoln family can be traced from an eastern county of England (we might hope for the purpose of genealogical harmony that the county was Lincolnshire) to Hingham in Massachusetts, and by way of Pennsylvania and Virginia to Kentucky. The grandfather of our Abraham was killed, while working in his field on the Kentucky farm, by predatory Indians shooting from the cover of the dense forest. Abraham's father, Thomas, at that time a boy, was working in the field where his father was murdered. Such an incident in Kentucky simply repeated what had been going on just a century before in Massachusetts, at Deerfield and at dozens of other settlements on the edge of the great forest which was the home of the Indians. During the hundred years, the frontier of the white man's domain had been moved a thousand miles to the south-west and, as ever, there was still friction at the point of contact.
The record of the boyhood of our Lincoln has been told in dozens of forms and in hundreds of monographs. We know of the simplicity, of the penury, of the family life in the little one-roomed log hut that formed the home for the first ten years of Abraham's life. We know of his little group of books collected with toil and self-sacrifice. The series, after some years of strenuous labour, comprised the Bible, Aesop's Fables, a tattered copy of Euclid's Geometry, and Weems's Life of Washington. The Euclid he had secured as a great prize from the son of a neighbouring farmer. Abraham had asked the boy the meaning of the word "demonstrate." His friend said that he did not himself know, but that he knew the word was in a book which he had at school, and he hunted