Newell Dwight Hillis

“ It is a strange, wild, chivalrous, divine story of the world's greatest enthusiasm, our fathers' enthusiasm for liberty and democracy! What God thinks of freedom, is written in the price that people paid for it! What God thinks of slavery is in the woe and sorrow and wreckage it has always brought upon those who have sought to live on the sweat of other men's faces!
The Russian would not fight against the Japanese because the Russian peasant owned no lands, had no schoolhouse, no ballot box, no free printing-press, no religious liberty. ”

“ Toombs, the Southern senator, tried sheer bombast, and said he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. Timid men in the North began to cry: "Conciliate, conciliate!" But there can be warfare, and only warfare between darkness and light, between sickness and health, between wrong and right. At length Phillips and Greeley took up the cry: "Let the South go!" But the answer was: "Shall a strong man who has hold of a mad dog let the beast go into a crowd of little children?" Compromise did something for a time, as a safety valve, relieving men's pent-up feelings. ”

“ With all my sense I have come no farther than the poor ignorant negro who has just learned to spell. Poor Tom indeed seems to have seen deeper things in the holy book than I, but I, who used to make citations from Homer, now begin to quote the Bible as Uncle Tom does!" Praise can go no farther than this, that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" has shown how the love of God can support a slave, under the lash, in the hour when he is flogged to death, and fill his heart with pity while he cries, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!" ”

“ To the North He gave short summers, bleak skies, the rocks of New England hills, the thin soil of New York, the sand dunes of Michigan. To the South He gave sunny Virginia, the riches of the Gulf States, the fruitful skies, the abundant rains, the treasures of the cotton, the sugar and the rice. Above all, God sifted all the nations of the Old World to find blood rich enough to people the Southern States. The men who laid the foundations of the great South were people of a heroic type, giants and heroes of fortitude. ”

“ The Southerner fought for local self-government and the right to enslave and govern other men; the Northerner fought for universal self-government and the institutions which had made that possible without injustice to other men. There can be no choice as between the splendid qualities that entered into the contest—of sincerity, earnestness, devotion and fidelity on either side: but the South lost because slavery had eaten out the enduring vigour of its resources; the North won because free labour and the rights of man had given it the greater effective power. ”

“ Among the heroes who helped save the Republic, the last, best hope of earth, in that it gives liberty to the slaves, that it might assure freedom to the free, stands Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator and martyr. Take him all in all, Abraham Lincoln is the greatest thing the Republic has achieved. History tells of no child who passed from a cradle so humble to a grave so illustrious. The institutions of the Republic were founded for the manufacture of a good quality of soul. ”

“ When the war was over, the South was like a crushed egg, impoverished by slavery. The peculiar institution had served well eight thousand slave planters, each of whom owned more than fifty slaves. But slavery had starved the remaining millions.
Now that the new era has come, no statesman, no scholar, no editor, has ever indicted slavery as the costliest possible form of production, with half the skill, eloquence and conviction of Southern writers. What Northern men believe, the Southerner knows. Unconsciously the Southern youth was handicapped in the commercial race. ”

“ For that is the way our ignorant, sinful earth has always rewarded its greatest souls. Ours is a world where we crucify the Saviour in Jerusalem, where we poison Socrates in Athens, where we exile Dante in Italy, and burn Savonarola in Florence, and starve Cervantes in Madrid, and jail Bunyan in Bedford,—for the greatest manhood is always rewarded with martyrdom. And what better thing for Abraham Lincoln than assassination, because he has emancipated three million slaves and saved the Union, as the last, best hope of earth? ”

“ But when the Rhine comes down to the flats and approaches the sea and casts off all restraints, and tries to include everything, it turns into a swamp, a morass, losing its power for commerce, and becoming a source of disease and death. Lincoln's culture was limited to the English, and to a mastery of the Constitution—the principles of fundamental justice, to one country—the Republic, to one topic—the Union, and to one reform—Slavery. ”

“ The politician had a stronger argument in defense of slavery. He held that the nation that was strong, educated, prosperous, with an army and navy, had not only the right but the duty of imposing government upon a colony that was ignorant, poor, and degraded, and that this example of the nation governing a colony by force of arms proved that the white man, as master, should impose government from without upon the slave.
Not until years after the war was over did men fully realize that slavery was weight and free labour wings to the people. ”

“ Webster placed the nation above the union, made the Nation, in its constitutionally specified sphere of action, sovereign and primary, the States secondary and subordinate. He thus made possible a world-wide victory for free institutions, by which, to-day, democracy and self-government are making thrones totter and tyrants tremble, and giving us the assurance that no government is so stable as a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are free and equal. Webster made logical use of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." ”

“ Literary style is the shadow that the soul flings across the page. Style is simply the intellect rushing into exhibition and verbal form. Therefore style is the balance of faculty, symmetry of development. A man is healthy when he does not know that he has a single organ in his body, and a page has style when you do not know where to find the note of distinction. There is a world of difference between "style," and "a style." Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural has style. Carlyle's French Revolution has a style. A perfect Kentucky horse has style. A knee-sprung horse has a style. ”

“ The sun lends heat, the clouds lend rain, the soil its chemical elements, the air its rich dust, and the result is the wheaten loaf. Not otherwise is it with the moral and political treasure named the Union and the Emancipation of slaves. The soldier boys at the front stayed the advancing tide of rebellion, and flung back from Pennsylvania waves all tipped with fire. With not less heroism farmer boys at home toiled in the fields to feed and support the boys in blue. Physicians in the hospitals, nurses at the front, lived also and died, caring for crippled heroes. ”

“ Webster is still here; that he watches with intense interest the spread of democracy; that he now perceives our free institutions extending their influence around the globe, beneficently victorious in many a foreign state; that he rejoices as he beholds "the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, now known and honoured throughout the world, bearing that sentiment dear to every true American heart, liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable." ”

“ Oh, pathetic illustration of men who are big with talent, of women full of latent gifts, of fathers and mothers like Thomas Lincoln and his young wife, who struggle on without opportunity, who are denied their chance, [Pg 303] who are imprisoned by poverty, and fettered by circumstance, who are like birds beating bloody wings against the bars of an iron cage, who die unfulfilled prophecies, and dying, transfer their ambitions to their gifted children, believing that their son shall behold what the father and mother must die without seeing. God worked no miracle in Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ But patriotism is a fire that must be fed with the fuel of ideas. These chapters are written in the belief that the youth of to-day will find in the history of their fathers a storehouse filled with seed for a world sowing, an armoury filled with weapons for to-morrow's battle, a library rich with wisdom for the morrow's emergency, a cathedral, bright with memorials of yesterday's heroes, its soldiers and scholars, its statesmen, and above all, its martyred President. ”

“ Some political leaders even yet talk about the necessity of an occasional war to put boys upon their mettle, as if invention, the building of railways, the founding of cities, the fighting of economic and social wrongs would not put a man upon his mettle! To put a German on one side of a fence and a Frenchman on the other, and have one peasant empty his shotgun into the bowels of the other is about as noble as going out into a yard and shooting a Jersey cow. The best way to protect a nation is to build boys into men, through the processes of productive industry. ”

“ As a reformer, Greeley was an extremist in politics. Whatever he wanted, he wanted on the moment, and had no patience in waiting. He was as uncompromising as Garrison, as insistent as Wendell Phillips, and as bitter in his criticism of Lincoln for postponing emancipation as Theodore Parker himself could have been. When the South seceded Greeley said that we must "let the erring sisters go." He thought that the North could do without the South quite as well as the South could do without the North; that is no true marriage that binds husband and wife together with chains when love has fled away. ”

“ About 1850, as the result of the long agitation of the editors and orators, preachers and poets, the people of this country entered upon a heated mood, when excitement dwelt like fire in the intellect and conscience. For thinking men, it was becoming clear that civil war was inevitable, and that commercial relations between North and South would soon be broken off. But the North had goods to sell, and the South had money with which to buy; so the word was passed that every one must keep silence about slavery, lest discussion bring on a financial panic. It was the era of imprisoned moral sense. ”

“ The era of Fort Sumter and Gettysburg, when liberty and slavery were in their death grapple, was an era so great that the ordinary issues of avarice, self-interest, fame, luxury, became contemptible, and men were exalted to the point where they spake, and suffered, and marched, and died, more like gods than men. ”

“ Our prosperous generation, threatened with effeminacy and softness, needs to re-open the pages of history and to linger long upon the portraits of our heroic leaders. Theirs was the greatest war that ever shook the earth. A million Northern men, and over against them a million Southern men, and a battle line a thousand miles in length! Including the long-term men and the short-term service, 3,000,000 men engaged in the conflict! ”

“ At that very hour England was fighting a war in Japan, and a war in China, and a war in New Zealand for territory. Three wars being quite proper, if England fought them, but oh, the patience of God in permitting the North to exist even for one moment, while fighting for liberty, the Union and the emancipation of slaves! He told them that they thought it was a crime for the North to have a war for emancipation, but quite proper for England to threaten a war over two men named Mason and Slidell! Beecher understood Old England. No nation in history ever conducted so many wars. ”

“ Over the question of the Constitutional power of Congress to resist the further extension of slavery in newly opened territories, the whole land rocked with excitement. Liberty and Slavery, like two giants, grappled for the death struggle. In such an era God raised up Abraham Lincoln, to lead the people out of the wilderness, and into the Promised Land of Union, of Liberty, and of Peace.
Never was a candidate for universal fame born under so unfriendly a sky. His annals are "the short and simple annals of the poor." ”