IX
Howstill Lincoln became after his nomination for President in 1860! A note of acceptance, just twenty-three lines long, and then unbroken silence till the end of the campaign.
He had thundered throughout the country against the Christless creed of slavery until men forgot his crude manners, preposterous figure and shrill, piping voice in admiration and reverence of his noble qualities.
Now the crooked mouth was set hard. He retired to his modest home in Springfield, Illinois. Nor could threats or persuasions induce him to address a word to the public during that terrific campaign which was the prelude to the horrors of civil war.
In the upward reachings of Lincoln’s life there was a singular mysticism that sometimes startles one who contemplates the imperishable grandeur of his place in history.
He saw omens in dreams; experimented with the ghostly world of spiritualism; half-surrendered to madness, when his personal affections were attacked; predicted a violent death for himself; dreamed of his own assassination, and discussed the matter seriously; and gave evidence many times of a strange, aberrant emotional exaltation, alternated with brooding sadness or hilarious, uncontrollable merriment.
But behind these mere eccentricities were sanity, conscience, strength and far-seeing penetrativeness.
In the midst of his heroic debate on slavery with Douglas in 1858, while the whole nation watched the exciting struggle, he showed his statesmanlike appreciation of the situation when he said: “I am after larger game; the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.”
And when he was nominated in the roaring Chicago Convention, where the foremost politicians of the East actually shed tears over the defeat of William H. Seward,he let his party do the shouting, promising, denouncing and hurrahing, while he—wiser, cooler, abler than all—stood squarely on his record and his party’s platform, without apology, explanation or mitigation.
To his mind the issue was simple. It could not be misunderstood. Slavery was immoral. It must be confined to the slave States, where it had a constitutional sanction, but uncompromisingly kept out of the free territories.
Yet the country rang with threats that the slave States would break up the Union if Lincoln was elected. He had declared that the nation could not endure half slave and half free. That, they insisted, was a declaration of war against the slave States.
Lincoln drew the short gray shawl about his stooped shoulders, and his face grew more sorrowful. But he said nothing.
Not many months before he had written a letter to a Jefferson birthday festival in Boston, in which he flung the name of Jeffersonagainst the Democrats as Douglas hurled the heart of Bruce into the ranks of the heathen:
“The Democracy of to-day holds thelibertyof one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man’s right ofproperty.Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the manbeforethe dollar.I remember being once amused much at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men....The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society, and yetthey are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’...This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and the capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.Your obedient servant,A. Lincoln.”
“The Democracy of to-day holds thelibertyof one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man’s right ofproperty.
Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the manbeforethe dollar.
I remember being once amused much at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men....
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society, and yetthey are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’...
This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and the capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.
Your obedient servant,A. Lincoln.”
After that no man might claim that he had not bared his soul.
Editors, political leaders, personal friends, vainly attempted during the Presidential campaign to draw from him some public expression of opinion, some hint of what was going on in his mind while the national horizon flamed with passion and threats of war were openly made by the slaveholders.
But he knew that it would not pay to say a word that might complicate a question so clear. The American people were sound at heart. If the issue could be confined to the question of whether slavery was morally right or wrong, the common people could be depended upon to vote against spreading it to the free territories.
Lincoln’s confidence in the plain people grew with years. In spite of his shrewd experience in politics he was free from cynicism. There was a childlike simplicity in his character, a central purity and earnestness, that enabled him to see under thebroadcloth and ruffles of the East the same elemental humanity he had known under the deerhide, jeans and coonskins of the West.
Up to the hour of his death he gave no evidence of class consciousness. The rich citizen was no better and no worse than the poor citizen. The college professor was no better and no worse than the field hand. At the bottom of each was the original man, with almost divine possibilities of justice, love and compassion in him.
It was this supreme faith in the better natures of men, and their ability to reach sound conclusions on simple moral issues, that persuaded Lincoln to remain mute throughout the struggle.
How many political leaders are there in the United States to-day who disclose their minds and hearts so unreservedly to the people that they could dare to stand for office with closed lips, relying solely on their record and on the general public intelligence?
Even in his career as a lawyer Lincoln made fun of himself. His small fees were the jest of his companions. It is probable that he did not earn an average of more than three thousand dollars a year, notwithstanding his eloquence and logic. When he went to the White House, all his possessions, including his residence, were worth only about seven thousand dollars.
So he laughed at and made light of his personal appearance. The change from deerhide breeches and coonskin cap to black cloth and a high silk hat simply emphasized the clumsy enormity of his figure. His skin was yellow and his face seamed and puckered. The gray eyes looked out of hollow sockets. The high cheek-bones protruded sharply above sunken cheeks. The mouth was awry and the neck long, lean and scraggy. His immensely long arms swung loosely from stooped shoulders, his trousers were always “hitched up too high,” and his ill-kept hat was set at a grotesque tilt fromhis lugubrious countenance. His great height, the lank, swinging slouchiness of his immense frame, his somber, saggy clothing and sorrowful expression, added to unconventional manners, made him a target for his political opponents.
“Old ape,” “ignorant baboon”—these were the favorite flings of the Southern Democrats. He was pictured as a raw, coarse, brutal and reckless “nigger lover,” filled with hatred of the slave States, eager to rob them of their legitimate property, a half-horse-half-alligator, unfit to enter a polite house or associate with gentlemen, and almost insane with the murderous fanaticism of the New England abolitionists.
If Lincoln felt the sting of this cruel satire he gave no sign of it. So humble was his nature that, after his election, he grew a beard at the suggestion of a little girl, who wrote to say that it might make him look better. He wrote this during the Presidential campaign:
“If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair and gray eyes—No other marks or brands recollected.A. Lincoln.”
“If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair and gray eyes—No other marks or brands recollected.A. Lincoln.”
He was silent in the face of pitiless abuse and carricature, yet he sent many confidential letters, advising, encouraging, admonishing the Republican leaders. While his supporters carried fence-rails in processions and shouted hosannahs, he quietly directed matters from his home.
And, although he would sometimes laugh with a pure humor that bubbled up unconsciously from his blameless nature, as the strain of the political campaign increased, the tragic sadness of his countenance deepened, for his keen eyes began to see the awful significance of the eminence to which he was to be lifted.
A year ago the rebellion of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry had dramatically revealed the irreconcilable temperaments of North and South. While Virginia enthusiastically hanged the man who tried to create an armed negro revolution, the North tolled her bells, lowered her flags to half-mast and glorified him as a holy martyr.