Lincoln, England

“ There were acts to incorporate banks, turnpikes, bridges, insurance companies, towns, railroads, and female academies. The vigor and enterprise of New England fusing with the illusory prestige of Kentucky and Virginia was fast forming a new civilization to spread over the prairies! At this session Lincoln remained quietly in the background, and contented himself with the introduction of a resolution in favor of securing to the State a part of the proceeds of sales of public lands within its limits. With this brief and modest record he returned to his constituents at New Salem. ”

“ Abraham Lincoln's forefathers were pioneers—men who left their homes to open up the wilderness and make the way plain for others to follow them. For one hundred and seventy years, ever since the first American Lincoln came from England to Massachusetts in 1638, they had been moving slowly westward as new settlements were made in the forest. They faced solitude, privation, and all the dangers and hardships that beset men who take up their homes where only beasts and wild men have had homes before ”

“ By his debates with Douglas and the speeches in Ohio, Kansas, New York and New England, Lincoln had become a national figure in the minds of all the political leaders of the country, and of the thinking men of the North. Never in the history of the United States had a man become prominent in a more logical and intelligent way. ”

“ It is highly probable that an exceptional Quaker among the Massachusetts Puritan family went, with other New Englanders, to Berks County in Pennsylvania, and that the blood which has given to New England a considerable number of most honorable names, has given to the nation one of the noblest that adorn its annals.
Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President, was made, by the early death of his father and the straitened circumstances of his mother, a wandering, laboring, ignorant boy. He grew up without any education. ”

“ We have absolutely no evidence by which to determine them, Thomas Lincoln himself stoutly denied that his progenitors were either Quakers or Puritans; but he furnished nothing except his own word to sustain his denial: on the contrary, some of the family (distant relatives of Thomas Lincoln) who remain in Virginia believe themselves to have sprung from the New-England stock. ”

“ The second election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States was the reward of his courage and genius bestowed upon him by the people of the Union States. General George B. McClellan was his opponent in 1864 upon the platform that “the War is a failure,” and carried but three States—New Jersey, Delaware and Kentucky. The States which did not think the War was a failure were those in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, all the Western commonwealths, West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas and the new State of Nevada, admitted into the Union on October 31st. ”

“ Lincoln itself is thickly strewed with the footsteps of the past. The Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Englishman, and the Norman, have successively been lords of the soil, and each has left his mark, either in material traces or in a nomenclature still less liable to decay. A great historian, our chief authority also in matters of topography, has pronounced the earthworks to the north of the city to be of British origin. ”

“ Except London, York, Bristol, Coventry, and Plymouth, the afflicted towns did not regain the population they enjoyed in the fourteenth century till the Tudor period, and some, notably Sarum and Leicester, not until late in the reign of Elizabeth. The decline of Lincoln, though progressive, in a way appears to have been truly a gradual decay, and more terrible in its imperceptible undermining than any knock-down blow, for it never recovered its old trade prosperity ”

“ To see Lincoln, on such great occasions, on an open prairie, the central figure of ten thousand people, every sound but that of his voice hushed to perfect silence, every eye bent upon him, every ear open, eager to catch each word, his voice clear and powerful, and of a key that could be distinctly heard by all the vast multitude; to hear him on such occasions, speaking on the great themes of liberty and slavery, was to hear Demosthenes thundering against Philip ”

“ The debates and debaters have passed into history, and the world has pronounced Lincoln the victor; but it should be remembered that Lincoln spoke for liberty and a young and enthusiastic party, and that Douglas, while a candidate for the Senate, was looking also to the White House, and that, while he kept one eye on Illinois, he had to keep the other on the slaveholders. Thus he was hampered and embarrassed, but he made a brilliant canvass. ”

“ Back in Pennsylvania and New Jersey some of the Lincolns had been men of wealth and influence. In Kentucky, where the future President was born on February 12, 1809, his parents lived in deep poverty Their home was a small log cabin of the rudest kind, and nothing seemed more unlikely than that their child, coming into the world in such humble surroundings, was destined to be the greatest man of his time. ”

“ The Southern armies fought bravely to the last, but all in vain. Richmond fell. Lincoln himself entered the city on foot, accompanied only by a few officers and a squad of sailors who had rowed him ashore from the flotilla in the James River, a negro picked up on the way serving as a guide. Never had the world seen a more modest conqueror and a more characteristic triumphal procession, no army with banners and drums, only a throng of those who had been slaves, hastily run together, escorting the victorious chief into the capital of the vanquished foe. ”

“ That a regiment of black soldiers assisted in this noble work must have seemed to the white inhabitants of Richmond the final drop in their cup of misery.
Into the capital, thus stricken and laid waste, came President Lincoln on the morning of April 4. Never in the history of the world did the head of a mighty nation and the conqueror of a great rebellion enter the captured chief city of the insurgents in such humbleness and simplicity. ”

“ It would be difficult to find in history three men more unlike physically and mentally, and yet of greater historic interest or more distinguished ability, than the statesman President, and Grant and Sherman. And, although so entirely unlike one another, each was a type of American character, and all had peculiarities not only distinctively American, but Western. Lincoln's towering form had been given dignity and repose by the great deeds and great thoughts to which he had given such eloquent expression. ”

“ Abraham Lincoln was born to a very humble station in life, and his early surroundings were rude and rough, but his ancestors for generations had been of that tough fiber, and vigorous physical organization and mental energy, so often found among the pioneers on the frontier of American civilization. His forefathers removed from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania, in the first half of the seventeenth century; and from Pennsylvania some members of the family moved to Virginia, and settled in the valley of the Shenandoah, in the county of Rockingham, whence his immediate ancestors came to Kentucky. ”

“ The patroness of the city and cathedral is represented treading on a dragon. A long room above the arch with timbered roof is used as a Guildhall; in it are portraits of Queen Anne and Thomas Sutton of Knaith, founder of the Charterhouse. The corporation, to whom they belong, has had a long and distinguished existence, for municipal life in Lincoln began in Roman times; and when they left, and Saxons, Danes or Normans ruled, and the counties and towns had to adopt new names under each successive conqueror, Lincoln retained throughout her Roman name and her right of self-government. ”

“ There is but one other name in American history which can be mentioned with his as that of a peer--the name of Washington. Lincoln was as pure, as just, as patriotic, as the father of his country. He had more faith in the people, and was more hopeful for the future. Both have been so associated with our history that time will only brighten the lustre of their fame. ”

“ Such was the life upon which Lincoln now entered, and there gathered with him, around those pine tables of the frontier court house, a very remarkable combination of men; men who would have been leaders of the bar at Boston or New York, Philadelphia or Washington; men who would have made their mark in Westminster Hall, or upon any English circuit. ”

“ Re-elected to office, he served continuously for eight years. In 1837 he made his famous "Lightning Rod" speech. The same year Lincoln left New Salem and was entered at the bar, "a full fledged lawyer," at Springfield, Illinois. ”

“ Lincoln’s place in the history of civilization is immutably fixed. During the last ten years of his career, he was the greatest of all living men. As statesman and reformer he belongs not alone to America, but to the whole world.
George Washington established this Republic, [Pg 95] but the curse of human slavery adhered to the otherwise splendid Government he was so largely instrumental in creating. ”

“ It was by that policy that here in Illinois the early fathers fought the good fight and gained the victory. In 1824 the free men of our State, led by Governor Coles (who was a native of Maryland and President Madison's private secretary) , determined that those beautiful groves should never re-echo the dirge of one who has no title to himself. By their resolute determination, the winds that sweep across our broad prairies shall never cool the parched brow, nor shall the unfettered streams that bring joy and gladness to our free soil water the tired feet, of a slave ”

“ The repeal of the Missouri Compromise roused Lincoln from retirement, and stimulated him to the utmost exertion of his powers. He now prepared to enter the arena as the great champion of freedom. He had bided his time. He had waited until the harvest was ripe. With unerring sagacity he realized that the day for the triumph of freedom was at hand. He entered upon the conflict with the deepest conviction that the perpetuity of the republic required the extinction of slavery. So adopting as his motto, "A house divided against itself cannot stand," he girded himself for the contest. ”

“ In the morning Lincoln held a Cabinet meeting, at which General Grant was present. The [Pg 114] question of reconstruction, of making one whole out of the divided halves, was discussed. Some of the Cabinet were anxious to wreak vengeance on the South, to execute the leaders of the rebellion. Such was not Lincoln’s view.
“Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.”
His noble patriotism could still say to the South, “We are not enemies, but friends.” His life was now even more precious to the South than to the North. ”

“ No other name has such electric power on every true heart, from Maine to Mexico, as the name of Lincoln. If Washington is the most revered, Lincoln is the best loved man that ever trod this continent. ”

“ One of the strongest groups of men that ever gathered at the capital of a State was to be found in Springfield in those days, and Lincoln was their equal in ability and learning and the superior of many of them in the qualities that make a statesman. They recognized him as their superior on many occasions, and whether or not he was the ablest lawyer on the circuit, there was never any doubt that he was the most popular. ”

“ It is not generally known that Abraham Lincoln sent a substitute to the war against the South, but such is a fact. During the earlier days of the war it seems to have been the desire of all prominent men in Washington to have a representative in the ranks, and Lincoln was no exception to the rule. ”

“ Lincoln hated slavery but not slave-owners. He loved the South as much as the North. It was agony to him to know his country divided against itself. Well might he say, in the speech he made on leaving his old home at Springfield [Pg 81] for ever, “There is a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”
It was very natural that men who had not known Lincoln should fear to have the fate of their country at so critical a time entrusted to a man of so small experience. But any one who knew Lincoln felt absolute confidence in him. ”

“ A new Legislature was to be chosen, and as Lincoln had declared to his comrades in the army he would, and in obedience to the effusive declaration of principles which he had issued over his signature in March, before he went to the war, he presented himself to the people of his newly adopted county as a candidate for the Legislature. It is not necessary to enter into an account of the political conditions in Illinois at that time, or the effect had on the same by those who had in charge the governmental machinery. Lincoln's course is all that interests us. ”

“ Lincoln was the man whom Providence placed at the head of the nation in the supreme hour of its destiny. When he assumed the reins of government he was surrounded by traitors. The government was without army, without navy, without credit. He spoke, and two millions of men sprang, as from the ground. He breathed, and the bosom of the ocean was covered with ships of war. ”

“ There were few acts in the life of Lincoln more characteristic, indicating a higher and firmer courage and independence, together with the exercise of a cool, dispassionate judgment, than the release of Mason and Slidell. No act of the British Government, since the days of the Revolution, ever excited such an intense feeling of hostility, as her haughty demand for the release of these rebels. ”