James Creelman

“ On Sunday Lincoln wrote a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand volunteers to defend the Union.
The same night Douglas called at the White House—Douglas, the Democratic, thundering Douglas, the champion of slavery; Douglas, the antagonist of Lincoln in almost every crisis of his career; Douglas, who in the Senate only a few weeks ago had cried, “War is disunion. War is final, eternal separation”—and Lincoln clasped hands with the brilliant rival from whom he had won his wife and the Presidency, now come to pledge his life to the defence of the Union. ”

“ There is the Lincoln we love—simple, genuine, direct! He seemed to feel to the day of his death that the public was not some distant abstraction, to be approached fearfully and crawlingly; but men like himself, with the same feelings and aspirations. It was because Lincoln hated shams and sneaks, and had the root of kindly honor in his nature, and because he saw, at the very bottom, all men more or less the same, that he reached the average American heart as no one has reached it before or since. ”

“ We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
As Lincoln kissed the open Bible in the hands of Chief Justice Taney—who wrote the Dred Scott opinion supporting slavery—the thunder of artillery announced his vow to defend the Union. ”

“ As he said to General Grant, “If a man can’t skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”
Imagine Lincoln, in his black frock coat and high hat, stealing out of the White House in the morning to kneel in the grass on the Mall and practice at a sheet of note paper with newly-invented rifles till the indignant sentries dash up shouting, to see the long figure unfold itself upward and recognize in the disturber the President of the United States! ”

“ VII We love Lincoln because his life plucks every harp-string in true democracy. Lincoln is the answer to Socialism. He represents individualism, justifying opportunity. Self-government stands vindicated in his name. The thought of him is at once an inspiration and challenge to the poorest and most ignorant boy or man in America.
But we love him most of all because he saved the nation which Washington began, and, in the bloody act of salvation, brought human slavery to an end in the great Republic. ”

“ Yes, Lincoln was a politician who could seize your attention by the very witchery of his grotesque personality, twist his opponent into helplessness by the stinging shrewdness of a humorous story, make you laugh or cry alternately, reach down into your humanity by some frank confession of his poverty and rough beginnings, and then suddenly stir the highest instincts of your nature by a sublime moral appeal. ”

“ It was in this mere wooden hutch, which had an earth floor, one door and one window, that Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, 1809.
What American, however poor, ignorant, unlettered or discouraged, can look upon the rude timbers of the home which sheltered the birth of the greatest man of the Western Hemisphere without a thrill of hope and a new realization of the opportunities that are co-eternal with conscience, courage and persistence? ”

“ But his very spraddling awkwardness, the picturesque vernacular in which he told his countryside parables, coarse and satirical though they sometimes were; the humble spirit in which the lawyer-surveyor-politician would do odd jobs or chores to help a neighbor or earn a dollar, gave him added political strength with a frontier people who loved plain men.
He does not understand Lincoln who thinks of him as a guileless, innocent frontiersman, raised by accident from a log-cabin to direct a mighty war and shape the policy of a nation. ”

“ It was not for love of the negro that he waged war upon slavery, but for the sake of justice and humanity, and to save the nation from increasing degradation and demoralization. True, he had challenged the South when he said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” ”

“ No wonder the countenance of the great Emancipator moved all who beheld it by its deep melancholy. He knew what sorrow was forty-five years before he paced his office in the White House all night, with white face and bowed head, sorrowing over15 the bloody defeat of Chancellorsville, wondering whether he was to be the last President of the United States, and praying for the victory that came at Gettysburg. ”

“ Yet he waited patiently and silently, believing that he could persuade the South that he was not an enemy, and in that time of slow anguish his soul turned to God for help.
The careless, foot-free, waggish woodchopper of New Salem had scoffed at religion, and written a bitter attack on the Bible, which a wiser friend had snatched from his hands and burned. The President-elect with the cares of a mighty nation in its death throes descending upon his shoulders, stretched his hands child-like to a power greater even than the “omnipotent and sovereign people.” ”

“ How hard it is for us now to realize the appalling strain of responsibilities that could persuade a valiant frontiersman like Lincoln—knowing that Fort Sumter was already besieged; that the Florida forts were threatened and that an organized Confederate government, with drilled troops, was actually in possession of many States—to say so softly to the armed and defiant South:
“I trust that this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally maintain and defend itself.” ”

“ The power to recognize is not so far removed from the power to be recognized, and it is thrillingly significant, after all these dreary years of babble about the omnipotence of money, that the same people who raised Lincoln from penniless obscurity to his place of power and martyrdom, still cherish his name and example with a depth of devotion that increases with each year of national growth, confusing and confounding the learned foreign critics of the Republic, who miss the finest thing in American civilization when they fail to learn why we love Lincoln. ”

“ If it be true that the nation has at once become old, that it has grown sinister and corrupt, that it cringes before material success, stands in awe of multi-millionaires and prostrates itself before money, why is it that we love Lincoln? ”

“ It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth. ”

“ Abraham Lincoln,
His hand and pen,
He will be good,
But God knows when.
All this has been told of him many times and in many ways; yet the nation he saved21 loves to dwell on the picture of the tall, tanned, awkward woodchopper and farm drudge; gawky, angular, iron-muscled, with bare feet or moccasins, deerhide breeches and coonskin cap, battling out in the forest against his own ignorance and, by sheer force of will power, conquering knowledge and commanding destiny. ”

“ Sarah Bush Lincoln, the stepmother of Abraham Lincoln, was a woman of thrift and energy, tall, straight, fair, and a kind-hearted motherly Christian. The American people owe a debt to this noble matron who did so much to influence and develop the character of the boy who was yet to save the nation from destruction. ”

“ The average American does not shout when he hears Lincoln’s name. Even the political demagogue, the stock gambler, the captain of industry, aye, the sorriest scarecrow of a yellow journalist, is likely to grow silent and reverential when that word is spoken. ”

“ For Lincoln loved his country with the love that a father has for his child, and the pent-up agony that showed in his lean visage as he watched the attempt to break up the great republic might not yet find utterance. ”

“ It is probable that there is not a youth in all America to-day, however poor, ignorant, and forlorn, that has not a better chance to rise in life than Abraham Lincoln had when he started to climb the ladder of light by courage and persistent application. ”

“ Perhaps the profoundly tender love which the American people have for his memory is to be explained by the fact that in the secret recesses where every man communes with the highest, bravest and most unselfish elements of his own nature, the average American is an Abraham Lincoln to himself. ”

“ On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders.... It is now for them [the people] to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets ”

“ Those who attempt to account for Lincoln’s remarkable rise in life are apt to overlook the terrific mental grind to which he subjected himself for so many years; and, as we value most that which we get through stress and sacrifice and pain, so the things which Lincoln dug out of his books were never forgotten. ”

“ But Fremont, the Free Soil candidate for President, was defeated, and the contending slaveowners73 and abolitionists continued to press the cup of horror and hatred to the trembling lips of the nation. The South threatened to withdraw from the Union.
Again and again Lincoln had expressed his opinion that slavery was a crime against civilization. In the teeth of Senator Douglas, the eloquent and all-powerful Democratic leader of Illinois, who was arousing the West for slavery, he lashed and trampled upon the attempt to make Kansas a slave State. ”

“ Do not mistake that the ballot is stronger than the bullet. Therefore, let the legions of slavery use bullets; but let us wait patiently till November and fire ballots at them in return.... We will be loyal to the Constitution and to the ‘flag of our Union,’ and no matter what our grievance—even though Kansas shall come in as a slave State ”

“ No man in the country could withstand him. It is said that he once lifted half a ton. Yet his temper was cool, his heart gentle and generous, and back of his singsongy, rollicking, spraddling youth, with its swinging axe-blows, forest-prowlings, and coarse humor, there was a gravity, dignity, sanity, fairness, generosity and deep, straightout eloquence that made him a power in that small community. ”

“ As young Lincoln grew taller his skill and strength as a woodchopper and rail-splitter, and his willingness to do any kind of work, however drudging or menial—in spite of a natural meditative indolence—made him widely known. ”

“ It was not chivalry, but patriotism, that inspired Lincoln to put these two Democrats in control of the armed forces of the nation. His own feelings were nothing; the fate of the Union was everything. Stanton had been an honest and masterful member of Buchanan’s Cabinet. McClellan had made a glorious answer to the Bull Run defeat by driving the Confederate troops out of West Virginia.
The life of the nation was more important than party lines. ”

“ There is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.”
There was nothing Oriental about Lincoln. He made much of human wisdom. He listened reverently to the voice of the people. He bowed to the Constitution, in spite of the sanctions it gave to slavery, because it represented the deliberate will of the majority. ”

“ Just when Lincoln became a conscious35 politician no man can say. His endless anecdotes and jokes, his winning honesty and good nature, his readiness to accept or stop a fight, his willingness to do a good turn for man, woman or child, and his open scorn for meanness, cruelty or deceit, were the simple overflowings of his natural character. ”

“ And in 1836 we catch sight of Lincoln, again a candidate for the Legislature, leaping forward, with flashing eyes to answer a taunt of a Mr. Forquer, who had a lightning rod on his new house, and had just left the Whig party for a place in the Land Office: “I desire to live, and I desire place and distinction; but I would rather die now than, like the gentleman, live to see the day that54 I would change my politics for an office worth three thousand dollars a year, and then feel compelled to erect a lightning rod to protect a guilty conscience from an offended God.” ”

“ Did not the two malaria-racked and care-driven mothers who lived in the rough-hewn Lincoln cabin do more to influence the political institutions of mankind than all the speeches and votes of women since voting was first invented? ”

“ For two days the fort withstood the terrific bombardment, and then, with all food gone, his quarters set on fire by red hot cannon balls, and his ammunition almost exhausted, Major Anderson lowered the stars and stripes to native-born Americans and hoisted the white flag. ”