"We owe it to the loving labors of two men who knew him best, John Hay and John Nicholay, that the fragments of his life have been gathered up so that nothing has been lost. The noble volumes that they have given to us are likely to preserve in the midst of the tangle of apocryphal legends of the Civil War, the authentic likeness of the man, and of the times. Within less than half a century, this man, once despised, once derided and maligned, has been lifted up into the light of universal history, so that all men and all generations of men have a chance to see him and make out if they can what manner of man he was.
His life in this world was a very short one, less than three score years, hardly ten of them visable above the level of the earth, yet into that brief space events were crowded so stupendous in their ultimate significance that we can hardly read the record which tries to put them down in writing, without a strange feeling coming over us we are not reading about a man at all, but about some sublime instrument, brought into use by the infinte powers, to bless and to help the human race.
"While he lived the air was full of speculation about his purposes and the plans for their execution, and until this day men are still guessing about his education, his religion, his faculties, and the intellectual account from which he drew the resources which always seemed equal to his task.
"There are some who say that he was a great lawyer. It is probable that he was nothing of the sort. It is true that he had mastered with great difficulty the principles of the common law; and it is certain that his faculties were so normal and complete that he did not need a commentary or a copy of the "Madison Papers", thumbmarked by the doubts and fears of three generations to make him understand that the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States were building for eternity. But he practiced law without a library, and those who used to practice with him, say that in a lawsuit he was of no account unless he knew that right was on his side.
" The old judicial circuit about Springfield where he practiced law, where he knew everybody by their first name, and everybody liked to hear him talk as they sat together in the village tavern ater the day's work was done, undoubtedly did much for him in many ways. But the great lawyers present here today will hear me witness that a man who habitually gives his advice away for nothing; who usually lacks the foresight to exact a retainer, and the energy to collect a fee after he has earned it, whatever other gifts and graces he may have, is surely not cut out by nature for a lawyer.
"I have talked with many of the older members of the bar at which he was accustomed to appear, and from what they say, I think that even then the notion was slowly forming in his mind that he held a brief, with power of attorney from on High for the un-numbered millions of his fellow men, and was only loitering about the county seats of Illinois until the case came on for trial.
"It has been said that he was a great orator. If that is so, the standards of schools, ancient and modern, will have to be thrown away. Perhaps they ought to be, and when they are, this curious circuit-rider of the law, refreshing his companions with wit and wisdom from the well of English, this champion of civil liberty, confuting Douglas with a remarkable logic, cast in phrases rich with the homely wisdom of our proverbial literature; this advocate of the people standing head and shoulders above his brethren, presenting their cause at the bar of history in sentences so simple that a child can follow them; surely such a one cannot be left out of the company of the masters who have added something to the triumphs of the Mother tongue.
"He was dissatisfied with his modest address at Gettysburg, read awkwardly from poorly written manuscript; and thought Edward Everett's oration was the best he had ever heard, but Mr. Everett himself, discerned without a minute for reflection, that the little scrap of crumbled paper which the president held in his unsteady hand that day would be treasured from generation to generation after hi own laborious deliverence had been forgotten. The old school of oratory and the new, met on that rude platform among the graves under the trees, and congratulated each other.
"He has been described as a great statesman. If by that you mean that he was trained in the administrative mechanism of the government, or that he was wiser than his day in the creed of the party in whose fellowship he passed his earlier years, there is little evidence of that at all; the most that can be said is that he clung to the fortunes of the old Whig leadership through evil as well as good report, and that he stumped the county and afterward the state; but the speeches that he made, neither he nor anybody else regarded it important to preserve. His platform from the first was brief and to the point. "I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff." But while for half his life he followed Henry Clay, more like a lover than a disciple, yet when that popular hero died and Lincoln was selected to make a memorial address in the old state house, he dismissed the principles of his party creed without a word, and reserved his tribute for the love of liberty and the devotion of the Union which shone even to the end, in that superb career.
"There are some who have given a study, more or less profound, to the official records of the rebellion who make of Lincoln an exceptional military genius, skillfull in the management of armies and prepared better that even his generals to give direction to their movements. I doubt this very much. He was driven into the war department by the exigency of the times, and if he towered above the ill-fitting uniforms which made their way through one influence and another to positions of brief command during the first campaigns of the civil war, it is not very high praise after all. One thing, however, he must be given credit for; he perceived the size of the undertaking which he had in hand, and he kept looking until his eyes were weary for the man who could grasp the whole field and get out of the army what he knew was in it. It broke his heart to see its efforts scattered and thrown away by quarrels among its officers, endless in number and unintelligible for the most part to the outside world. When he passed the command of the army of the Potomac over to General hooker, he did it in terms of reprimand and admonition which read like a father's last warning to a wayward son.
"The lonely isolation of Lincoln, even among the advisors whom he chose to sit in counsel with him in the administration of the government, has always seemed pathetic; but the letters and papers that have come to light as one by one the actors in those great scenes have passed from the stage, reveals a situation which throws the light of comedy upon the sorrowful experience through which he passed. Our institutions have nurtured few higher types than Willim H Seward, the secretary of state; yet that high official, after pestering the president for a month with contradictory pieces of advice, at last handed him a memorandum, grotesque in its assumption of superior wisdom, which ended with the accommodating proposal to take the responsibilities of the administration off his hands.
"After the battle of Bull Run, even so incorruptible a patriot as Edwin M.Stanton, known in after years as the organizer of victory, wrote to James Buchanan, then living near the capitol in the quiet of his country home at Wheatland, these words of mockery and contempt: "The imbecility of the administration culminated in that catastrophe; and irretrievable misfortune and national disgrace never to be forgotten and to be added to the ruin of peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy is the result of Lincoln's 'running the machine' for five full months.
"From the sanctum of the old Tribune, where for a generation Horace Greeley had dominated the opinions of the people as no American editor has done before or since his day, came a confidential letter, a maudlin mixture of enterprise and despair; a despair which, after seven sleepless nights, had given up the fight; an enterprise which sought for inside information of the inevitable hour of the surrender near at hand. "You are not considered a great man," said Mr. Greeley for the President's eye alone.
"Who is this sitting all night long on a lounge in the public offices of the white house, listening with the comments of a quaint humor, to privates and officers and scared congressmen and citizens, who poured across the Long Bridge from the first battlefield of the rebellion to tell their tale of woe to the only man in Washington who had sense enough left to appreciate it, or patience enought left to listen to it? Is it the log cabin student, learning to read and write by the light of the kitchen fire in the woods of Indiana? It is he. Can it be the adventurous-voyager of the Mississippi, who gets ideas of lifting vessels over riffles while he worked his frail craft clear of obstructions in the stream; and ideas broad as the free skies, of lifting nations out of barbarism as he traced the divine image in the faces of men and women chained together, under the hammer, in the slave-market at New Orleans? It is he. Can it be the awkward farm-hand of the Sangamon who covered his bare feet in the fresh dirt which his plow had turned up to keep them from getting sunburned, while he sat down at the end of his furrow to rest his team and to regale himself with a few more pages of worn volumes, borrowed from the neighbors? It is he. Can it be the country lawyer who rode on horseback from county to county, with nothing in his saddlebags except a clean shirt and the code of Illinois to try his cases and to air his views in the cheerful company which always gathered about the courthouse? It is he. Is it the daring debater, blazing out for the momentous warning, "A house divided against itself cannot stand," then falling back against the defenses of the Constitution, that the cause of liberty hindered already by the folly of its friends, might not make itself an outlaw in the land? It is he. Is it the weary traveler who begged the prayers of anxious neighbors as he sat out for the last time for home, and talked in language sad and mythical of One who could go with him, and remain with them and be everywhere for good? it is he.
"They said he laughed in a weird way that night on the sofa in the public offices of the white house, and they told funny tales about how he looked, and the comic papers of London and New York portrayed him in brutal pictures of his big hands, hands that were about to be streched out to save the civilization of the world; and his overgrown feet; feet that for four torn and bleeding years were not to weary in the services of mankind. They said that his clothes did not fit him; that he streched his long legs in ungainly postures; that he was common and uncouth in his appearance. Some said that this being a backwoodsman was becoming a rather questionable recommendation for a president of the United States; and they recalled with satisfaction the grace of courtly manners brought home from St. James. Little did they dream that the rude cabin yonder on the edge of the hill country of Kentucky was about to be transformed by the tender imagination of the people into a mansion more stately than the white house; more royal than all the palaces of the earth; it did not shelter the childhood of a king, but there is one thing in this world more royal than a king - it is a man.
"They said that he jested and acted unconcerned as he looked at people through eyes that moved slowly from one to another in the crowd. They did not know him or they might have seen that he was not looking at the crowd at all; that his immortal spirit was girding for its ordeal. And if he laughed, it may be that he heard cheerful voices from above; for had he not read somewhere that, He that sitteth in the heavens sometimes looks down with laughter and dirision upon the impotent plans of men to turn aside the everlasting purposes of God.
"It took his countrymen the full four years to find Abraham Lincoln out. By the light of the camp fires of victorious armies they learned to see the outline of his gigantic figure., to assess the integrity of his character, to comprehend the majesty of his conscience; and when at last they looked upon his care-worn face as the nation reverently bore his body to the grave, through their tears they saw him exalted above all thrones in the affection of the human race.
"We have been accustomed to think of the civil war as an affair of armies, for we come of a fighting stock and the military instinct in us needs little cultivation or none at all. But it requires no very deep insight into the hidden things of history to see that the real conflict was not between armed forces, was not on battlefields, nor under the walls of besieged cities; and the fact makes Abraham Lincoln greater than all his generals, greater than all his admirals, greater than all the armies and all the navies that responded to his proclamation. He stands apart because he bore the ark of the covenant. He was making not his own fight; not merely the fight of his own country, or the passing generation. The stars in in their courses had enlisted with him; he had a treaty, never submitted to the senate, which made him the ally of the Lord of Hosts, with reinforcements at his call.
"All his life there had dwelt in his recollection a little sentence from an historic document which had been carelessly passed along from one Fourth of July celebration to another, 'All men are created equal." To him the words sounded like an answer to a question propounded by the oldest of the Hebrew sages, 'If I despise the cause of my servant, or my maid servant when he contendeth with me, what shall I do when God riseth up? Did not He that made me, make him?' - a strategic question that had to be answered aright before democracy of any other form of civil liberty could make headway in the world. With a sublime faith, shared within the limits of their light by millions, he believed that sentence. He had tested the depth of it till his plummet touched the foundation of the earth. From his youth that simple saying had been ringing in his ears: 'All men are created equal.' It was the answer of the eighteenth century of Christ, to all the dim milleniums that were before him: yet he had heard it ridiculed, narrowed down to nothing and explained away. He understood the meaning of the words and came to their defense.
"Brushing away the wretched sophistrics of partisan expediency, he rescued the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson from obloquoy and neglect, 'I think,' he said, 'that the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men. But they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say that all were equal in colr, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined, with tolerable distinctness, in which respects they did consider all men created equal - equal with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all men were then actually enjoying that equality nor that they were about to confer it immediately upon him. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it should follow as fast as circumstances would permit.
"They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the value and happiness of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere." That was the message of Abraham Lincoln to the nation of America. And as if to make it certain that it was no mere flourish of a joint debate, he turned aside on his triumphal journey to the capital, just before he took the oath of office, to repeat the sacred precepts of the declaration in the hall at Philadelphia, where our fathers first spoke them, and to add his pledge to theirs that he would defend them with his life.
"Here is the summit, the spiritual height, from which he was able to forecast the doom of all tyrannies, the end of all slaveries, the unconditional surrender of all the strongholds of injustice and avarice and oppression; this is the mountaintop from which he sent down these inspiring words of good cheer and hope: 'This is essentially a people's contest;on the side of the Union, a struggle to maintain in the world that form and substance of government, the leading object of which is to elevate the condition of men, to life artificial weights from shoulders; to clear the path of laudable pursuit for all, and to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race for life.'
"No American, north or south, regrets that this war for the union ended as it did - That we are not enemies, but friends. Thanks be unto God, we are one nation and even in our partisan traditions we share in the heritage of a common faith in the institutions founded by our fathers. As democrats we repeat the words 'equal rights to all and special privileges to none.' As republicans we answer 'an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.' The doctrine is the same, and if it is not true there is no foundation for institutions such as ours. But the doctrine is forever true, and by the grave of Abraham Lincoln we swear to make it good, and to keep it good for all men and for all time to come."
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