Title: The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln — Volume 1: 1832-1843
Author: Lincoln, Abraham
Language: English
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN — VOLUME 1: 1832-1843 ***



THE PAPERS AND WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

VOLUME ONE

CONSTITUTIONAL EDITION


By Abraham Lincoln


Edited by Arthur Brooks Lapsley

With an Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt

The Essay on Lincoln by Carl Schurz

The Address on Lincoln by Joseph Choate



VOLUME 1.



INTRODUCTORY


Immediately after Lincoln’s re-election to the Presidency, in an
off-hand speech, delivered in response to a serenade by some of his
admirers on the evening of November 10, 1864, he spoke as follows:

“It has long been a grave question whether any government not too strong
for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to maintain its
existence in great emergencies. On this point, the present rebellion
brought our republic to a severe test, and the Presidential election,
occurring in regular course during the rebellion, added not a little
to the strain.... The strife of the election is but human nature
practically applied to the facts in the case. What has occurred in this
case must ever occur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In
any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall
have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.
Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn
wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.... Now that the
election is over, may not all having a common interest reunite in a
common fort to save our common country? For my own part, I have striven
and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I
have been here, I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.
While I am deeply sensible to the high compliment of a re-election
and duly grateful, as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my
countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think for their own good, it adds
nothing to my satisfaction that any other man may be disappointed or
pained by the result.”

This speech has not attracted much general attention, yet it is in a
peculiar degree both illustrative and typical of the great statesman who
made it, alike in its strong common-sense and in its lofty standard of
morality. Lincoln’s life, Lincoln’s deeds and words, are not only of
consuming interest to the historian, but should be intimately known to
every man engaged in the hard practical work of American political life.
It is difficult to overstate how much it means to a nation to have as
the two foremost figures in its history men like Washington and Lincoln.
It is good for every man in any way concerned in public life to feel
that the highest ambition any American can possibly have will be
gratified just in proportion as he raises himself toward the standards
set by these two men.

It is a very poor thing, whether for nations or individuals, to advance
the history of great deeds done in the past as an excuse for doing
poorly in the present; but it is an excellent thing to study the history
of the great deeds of the past, and of the great men who did them, with
an earnest desire to profit thereby so as to render better service in
the present. In their essentials, the men of the present day are much
like the men of the past, and the live issues of the present can be
faced to better advantage by men who have in good faith studied how the
leaders of the nation faced the dead issues of the past. Such a study of
Lincoln’s life will enable us to avoid the twin gulfs of immorality and
inefficiency—the gulfs which always lie one on each side of the careers
alike of man and of nation. It helps nothing to have avoided one if
shipwreck is encountered in the other. The fanatic, the well-meaning
moralist of unbalanced mind, the parlor critic who condemns others but
has no power himself to do good and but little power to do ill—all
these were as alien to Lincoln as the vicious and unpatriotic
themselves. His life teaches our people that they must act with wisdom,
because otherwise adherence to right will be mere sound and fury without
substance; and that they must also act high-mindedly, or else what seems
to be wisdom will in the end turn out to be the most destructive kind of
folly.

Throughout his entire life, and especially after he rose to leadership
in his party, Lincoln was stirred to his depths by the sense of fealty
to a lofty ideal; but throughout his entire life, he also accepted human
nature as it is, and worked with keen, practical good sense to achieve
results with the instruments at hand. It is impossible to conceive of a
man farther removed from baseness, farther removed from corruption, from
mere self-seeking; but it is also impossible to conceive of a man of
more sane and healthy mind—a man less under the influence of that
fantastic and diseased morality (so fantastic and diseased as to be in
reality profoundly immoral) which makes a man in this work-a-day
world refuse to do what is possible because he cannot accomplish the
impossible.

In the fifth volume of Lecky’s History of England, the historian draws
an interesting distinction between the qualities needed for a successful
political career in modern society and those which lead to eminence in
the spheres of pure intellect or pure moral effort. He says:

“....the moral qualities that are required in the higher spheres
of statesmanship [are not] those of a hero or a saint. Passionate
earnestness and self-devotion, complete concentration of every faculty
on an unselfish aim, uncalculating daring, a delicacy of conscience and
a loftiness of aim far exceeding those of the average of men, are here
likely to prove rather a hindrance than an assistance. The politician
deals very largely with the superficial and the commonplace; his art is
in a great measure that of skilful compromise, and in the conditions
of modern life, the statesman is likely to succeed best who possesses
secondary qualities to an unusual degree, who is in the closest
intellectual and moral sympathy with the average of the intelligent
men of his time, and who pursues common ideals with more than common
ability.... Tact, business talent, knowledge of men, resolution,
promptitude and sagacity in dealing with immediate emergencies, a
character which lends itself easily to conciliation, diminishes friction
and inspires confidence, are especially needed, and they are more likely
to be found among shrewd and enlightened men of the world than among men
of great original genius or of an heroic type of character.”

The American people should feel profoundly grateful that the greatest
American statesman since Washington, the statesman who in this
absolutely democratic republic succeeded best, was the very man who
actually combined the two sets of qualities which the historian thus
puts in antithesis. Abraham Lincoln, the rail-splitter, the Western
country lawyer, was one of the shrewdest and most enlightened men of the
world, and he had all the practical qualities which enable such a man to
guide his countrymen; and yet he was also a genius of the heroic type,
a leader who rose level to the greatest crisis through which this nation
or any other nation had to pass in the nineteenth century.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

SAGAMORE HILL, OYSTER BAY, N. Y., September 22, 1905.



INTRODUCTORY NOTE


“I have endured,” wrote Lincoln not long before his death, “a great
deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a great deal of
kindness not quite free from ridicule.” On Easter Day, 1865, the world
knew how little this ridicule, how much this kindness, had really
signified. Thereafter, Lincoln the man became Lincoln the hero, year by
year more heroic, until to-day, with the swift passing of those who knew
him, his figure grows ever dimmer, less real. This should not be. For
Lincoln the man, patient, wise, set in a high resolve, is worth far more
than Lincoln the hero, vaguely glorious. Invaluable is the example of
the man, intangible that of the hero.

And, though it is not for us, as for those who in awed stillness
listened at Gettysburg with inspired perception, to know Abraham
Lincoln, yet there is for us another way whereby we may attain such
knowledge—through his words—uttered in all sincerity to those who
loved or hated him. Cold, unsatisfying they may seem, these printed
words, while we can yet speak with those who knew him, and look into
eyes that once looked into his. But in truth it is here that we find his
simple greatness, his great simplicity, and though no man tried less so
to show his power, no man has so shown it more clearly.

Thus these writings of Abraham Lincoln are associated with those of
Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and of the other “Founders of the
Republic,” not that Lincoln should become still more of the past, but,
rather, that he with them should become still more of the present.
However faint and mythical may grow the story of that Great Struggle,
the leader, Lincoln, at least should remain a real, living American.
No matter how clearly, how directly, Lincoln has shown himself in his
writings, we yet should not forget those men whose minds, from their
various view-points, have illumined for us his character. As this nation
owes a great debt to Lincoln, so, also, Lincoln’s memory owes a great
debt to a nation which, as no other nation could have done, has been
able to appreciate his full worth. Among the many who have brought about
this appreciation, those only whose estimates have been placed in these
volumes may be mentioned here. To President Roosevelt, to Mr. Schurz
and to Mr. Choate, the editor, for himself, for the publishers, and on
behalf of the readers, wishes to offer his sincere acknowledgments.

Thanks are also due, for valuable and sympathetic assistance rendered in
the preparation of this work, to Mr. Gilbert A. Tracy, of Putnam, Conn.,
Major William H. Lambert, of Philadelphia, and Mr. C. F. Gunther, of
Chicago, to the Chicago Historical Association and personally to
its capable Secretary, Miss McIlvaine, to Major Henry S. Burrage, of
Portland, Me., and to General Thomas J. Henderson, of Illinois.

For various courtesies received, the editor is furthermore indebted to
the Librarian of the Library of Congress; to Messrs. McClure, Phillips
& Co., D. Appleton & Co., Macmillan & Co., Dodd, Mead & Co., and Harper
Brothers, of New York; to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Dana, Estes & Co.,
and L. C. Page & Co., of Boston; to A. C. McClure & Co., of Chicago; to
The Robert Clarke Co., of Cincinnati, and to the J. B. Lippincott Co.,
of Philadelphia.

It is hardly necessary to add that every effort has been made by the
editor to bring into these volumes whatever material may there properly
belong, material much of which is widely scattered in public libraries
and in private collections. He has been fortunate in securing certain
interesting correspondence and papers which had not before come into
print in book form. Information concerning some of these papers had
reached him too late to enable the papers to find place in their proper
chronological order in the set. Rather, however, than not to present
these papers to the readers they have been included in the seventh
volume of the set, which concludes the “Writings.”

   [These later papers are, in this etext, re-arranged into chronologic
    order. D.W.]

October, 1905, A. B. L.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN: AN ESSAY BY CARL SHURZ


No American can study the character and career of Abraham Lincoln
without being carried away by sentimental emotions. We are always
inclined to idealize that which we love,—a state of mind very
unfavorable to the exercise of sober critical judgment. It is therefore
not surprising that most of those who have written or spoken on that
extraordinary man, even while conscientiously endeavoring to draw a
lifelike portraiture of his being, and to form a just estimate of his
public conduct, should have drifted into more or less indiscriminating
eulogy, painting his great features in the most glowing colors, and
covering with tender shadings whatever might look like a blemish.

But his standing before posterity will not be exalted by mere praise of
his virtues and abilities, nor by any concealment of his limitations
and faults. The stature of the great man, one of whose peculiar charms
consisted in his being so unlike all other great men, will rather lose
than gain by the idealization which so easily runs into the commonplace.
For it was distinctly the weird mixture of qualities and forces in him,
of the lofty with the common, the ideal with the uncouth, of that which
he had become with that which he had not ceased to be, that made him
so fascinating a character among his fellow-men, gave him his singular
power over their minds and hearts, and fitted him to be the greatest
leader in the greatest crisis of our national life.

His was indeed a marvellous growth. The statesman or the military hero
born and reared in a log cabin is a familiar figure in American history;
but we may search in vain among our celebrities for one whose origin and
early life equalled Abraham Lincoln’s in wretchedness. He first saw the
light in a miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a
few barren acres in a dreary neighborhood; his father a typical “poor
Southern white,” shiftless and without ambition for himself or his
children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might
make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and
bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily
toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void
of elevating inspirations.... Only when the family had “moved” into the
malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother,
a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the
shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old,
“began to feel like a human being.” Hard work was his early lot. When a
mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, either on his father’s
clearing, or hired out to other farmers to plough, or dig ditches, or
chop wood, or drive ox teams; occasionally also to “tend the baby,”
when the farmer’s wife was otherwise engaged. He could regard it as an
advancement to a higher sphere of activity when he obtained work in a
“crossroads store,” where he amused the customers by his talk over the
counter; for he soon distinguished himself among the backwoods folk
as one who had something to say worth listening to. To win that
distinction, he had to draw mainly upon his wits; for, while his thirst
for knowledge was great, his opportunities for satisfying that thirst
were wofully slender.

In the log schoolhouse, which he could visit but little, he was taught
only reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. Among the people
of the settlement, bush farmers and small tradesmen, he found none of
uncommon intelligence or education; but some of them had a few books,
which he borrowed eagerly. Thus he read and reread, AEsop’s Fables,
learning to tell stories with a point and to argue by parables; he read
Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a short history of the United
States, and Weems’s Life of Washington. To the town constable’s he went
to read the Revised Statutes of Indiana. Every printed page that fell
into his hands he would greedily devour, and his family and friends
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after his daily work,
crouched in a corner of the log cabin or outside under a tree, absorbed
in a book while munching his supper of corn bread. In this manner he
began to gather some knowledge, and sometimes he would astonish the
girls with such startling remarks as that the earth was moving around
the sun, and not the sun around the earth, and they marvelled where
“Abe” could have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt the impulse
to write; not only making extracts from books he wished to remember, but
also composing little essays of his own. First he sketched these with
charcoal on a wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on
basswood shingles. Then he transferred them to paper, which was a scarce
commodity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut his expressions
close, so that they might not cover too much space,—a style-forming
method greatly to be commended. Seeing boys put a burning coal on the
back of a wood turtle, he was moved to write on cruelty to animals.
Seeing men intoxicated with whiskey, he wrote on temperance. In
verse-making, too, he tried himself, and in satire on persons offensive
to him or others,—satire the rustic wit of which was not always fit for
ears polite. Also political thoughts he put upon paper, and some of
his pieces were even deemed good enough for publication in the county
weekly.

Thus he won a neighborhood reputation as a clever young man, which he
increased by his performances as a speaker, not seldom drawing upon
himself the dissatisfaction of his employers by mounting a stump in the
field, and keeping the farm hands from their work by little speeches in
a jocose and sometimes also a serious vein. At the rude social frolics
of the settlement he became an important person, telling funny, stories,
mimicking the itinerant preachers who had happened to pass by, and
making his mark at wrestling matches, too; for at the age of seventeen
he had attained his full height, six feet four inches in his stockings,
if he had any, and a terribly muscular clodhopper he was. But he
was known never to use his extraordinary strength to the injury or
humiliation of others; rather to do them a kindly turn, or to enforce
justice and fair dealing between them. All this made him a favorite in
backwoods society, although in some things he appeared a little odd,
to his friends. Far more than any of them, he was given not only to
reading, but to fits of abstraction, to quiet musing with himself, and
also to strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in
a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor. But on the whole he
was one of the people among whom he lived; in appearance perhaps even
a little more uncouth than most of them,—a very tall, rawboned youth,
with large features, dark, shrivelled skin, and rebellious hair; his
arms and legs long, out of proportion; clad in deerskin trousers, which
from frequent exposure to the rain had shrunk so as to sit tightly on
his limbs, leaving several inches of bluish shin exposed between their
lower end and the heavy tan-colored shoes; the nether garment held
usually by only one suspender, that was strung over a coarse homemade
shirt; the head covered in winter with a coonskin cap, in summer with a
rough straw hat of uncertain shape, without a band.

It is doubtful whether he felt himself much superior to his
surroundings, although he confessed to a yearning for some knowledge
of the world outside of the circle in which he lived. This wish was
gratified; but how? At the age of nineteen he went down the Mississippi
to New Orleans as a flatboat hand, temporarily joining a trade many
members of which at that time still took pride in being called “half
horse and half alligator.” After his return he worked and lived in the
old way until the spring of 1830, when his father “moved again,” this
time to Illinois; and on the journey of fifteen days “Abe” had to drive
the ox wagon which carried the household goods. Another log cabin was
built, and then, fencing a field, Abraham Lincoln split those historic
rails which were destined to play so picturesque a part in the
Presidential campaign twenty-eight years later.

Having come of age, Lincoln left the family, and “struck out for
himself.” He had to “take jobs whenever he could get them.” The first
of these carried him again as a flatboat hand to New Orleans. There
something happened that made a lasting impression upon his soul:
he witnessed a slave auction. “His heart bled,” wrote one of his
companions; “said nothing much; was silent; looked bad. I can say,
knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion on
slavery. It run its iron in him then and there, May, 1831. I have
heard him say so often.” Then he lived several years at New Salem,
in Illinois, a small mushroom village, with a mill, some “stores” and
whiskey shops, that rose quickly, and soon disappeared again. It was a
desolate, disjointed, half-working and half-loitering life, without any
other aim than to gain food and shelter from day to day. He served as
pilot on a steamboat trip, then as clerk in a store and a mill; business
failing, he was adrift for some time. Being compelled to measure his
strength with the chief bully of the neighborhood, and overcoming him,
he became a noted person in that muscular community, and won the esteem
and friendship of the ruling gang of ruffians to such a degree that,
when the Black Hawk war broke out, they elected him, a young man of
twenty-three, captain of a volunteer company, composed mainly of roughs
of their kind. He took the field, and his most noteworthy deed of valor
consisted, not in killing an Indian, but in protecting against his own
men, at the peril of his own life, the life of an old savage who had
strayed into his camp.

The Black Hawk war over, he turned to politics. The step from the
captaincy of a volunteer company to a candidacy for a seat in the
Legislature seemed a natural one. But his popularity, although great
in New Salem, had not spread far enough over the district, and he was
defeated. Then the wretched hand-to-mouth struggle began again. He “set
up in store-business” with a dissolute partner, who drank whiskey while
Lincoln was reading books. The result was a disastrous failure and a
load of debt. Thereupon he became a deputy surveyor, and was appointed
postmaster of New Salem, the business of the post-office being so small
that he could carry the incoming and outgoing mail in his hat. All this
could not lift him from poverty, and his surveying instruments and horse
and saddle were sold by the sheriff for debt.

But while all this misery was upon him his ambition rose to higher aims.
He walked many miles to borrow from a schoolmaster a grammar with which
to improve his language. A lawyer lent him a copy of Blackstone, and he
began to study law.

People would look wonderingly at the grotesque figure lying in the
grass, “with his feet up a tree,” or sitting on a fence, as, absorbed
in a book, he learned to construct correct sentences and made himself
a jurist. At once he gained a little practice, pettifogging before a
justice of the peace for friends, without expecting a fee. Judicial
functions, too, were thrust upon him, but only at horse-races or
wrestling matches, where his acknowledged honesty and fairness gave his
verdicts undisputed authority. His popularity grew apace, and soon
he could be a candidate for the Legislature again. Although he called
himself a Whig, an ardent admirer of Henry Clay, his clever stump
speeches won him the election in the strongly Democratic district.
Then for the first time, perhaps, he thought seriously of his outward
appearance. So far he had been content with a garb of “Kentucky jeans,”
not seldom ragged, usually patched, and always shabby. Now, he borrowed
some money from a friend to buy a new suit of clothes—“store clothes”
fit for a Sangamon County statesman; and thus adorned he set out for the
state capital, Vandalia, to take his seat among the lawmakers.

His legislative career, which stretched over several sessions—for
he was thrice re-elected, in 1836, 1838, and 1840—was not remarkably
brilliant. He did, indeed, not lack ambition. He dreamed even of making
himself “the De Witt Clinton of Illinois,” and he actually distinguished
himself by zealous and effective work in those “log-rolling” operations
by which the young State received “a general system of internal
improvements” in the shape of railroads, canals, and banks,—a reckless
policy, burdening the State with debt, and producing the usual crop of
political demoralization, but a policy characteristic of the time and
the impatiently enterprising spirit of the Western people. Lincoln,
no doubt with the best intentions, but with little knowledge of the
subject, simply followed the popular current. The achievement in which,
perhaps, he gloried most was the removal of the State government from
Vandalia to Springfield; one of those triumphs of political management
which are apt to be the pride of the small politician’s statesmanship.
One thing, however, he did in which his true nature asserted itself, and
which gave distinct promise of the future pursuit of high aims. Against
an overwhelming preponderance of sentiment in the Legislature, followed
by only one other member, he recorded his protest against a proslavery
resolution,—that protest declaring “the institution of slavery to
be founded on both injustice and bad policy.” This was not only the
irrepressible voice of his conscience; it was true moral valor, too; for
at that time, in many parts of the West, an abolitionist was regarded
as little better than a horse-thief, and even “Abe Lincoln” would hardly
have been forgiven his antislavery principles, had he not been known
as such an “uncommon good fellow.” But here, in obedience to the great
conviction of his life, he manifested his courage to stand alone, that
courage which is the first requisite of leadership in a great cause.

Together with his reputation and influence as a politician grew his law
practice, especially after he had removed from New Salem to Springfield,
and associated himself with a practitioner of good standing. He had now
at last won a fixed position in society. He became a successful lawyer,
less, indeed, by his learning as a jurist than by his effectiveness as
an advocate and by the striking uprightness of his character; and it may
truly be said that his vivid sense of truth and justice had much to do
with his effectiveness as an advocate. He would refuse to act as the
attorney even of personal friends when he saw the right on the other
side. He would abandon cases, even during trial, when the testimony
convinced him that his client was in the wrong. He would dissuade those
who sought his service from pursuing an obtainable advantage when their
claims seemed to him unfair. Presenting his very first case in the
United States Circuit Court, the only question being one of authority,
he declared that, upon careful examination, he found all the authorities
on the other side, and none on his. Persons accused of crime, when he
thought them guilty, he would not defend at all, or, attempting their
defence, he was unable to put forth his powers. One notable exception is
on record, when his personal sympathies had been strongly aroused. But
when he felt himself to be the protector of innocence, the defender
of justice, or the prosecutor of wrong, he frequently disclosed such
unexpected resources of reasoning, such depth of feeling, and rose to
such fervor of appeal as to astonish and overwhelm his hearers, and make
him fairly irresistible. Even an ordinary law argument, coming from him,
seldom failed to produce the impression that he was profoundly convinced
of the soundness of his position. It is not surprising that the mere
appearance of so conscientious an attorney in any case should have
carried, not only to juries, but even to judges, almost a presumption
of right on his side, and that the people began to call him, sincerely
meaning it, “honest Abe Lincoln.”

In the meantime he had private sorrows and trials of a painfully
afflicting nature. He had loved and been loved by a fair and estimable
girl, Ann Rutledge, who died in the flower of her youth and beauty, and
he mourned her loss with such intensity of grief that his friends feared
for his reason. Recovering from his morbid depression, he bestowed
what he thought a new affection upon another lady, who refused him.
And finally, moderately prosperous in his worldly affairs, and having
prospects of political distinction before him, he paid his addresses to
Mary Todd, of Kentucky, and was accepted. But then tormenting doubts of
the genuineness of his own affection for her, of the compatibility
of their characters, and of their future happiness came upon him. His
distress was so great that he felt himself in danger of suicide, and
feared to carry a pocket-knife with him; and he gave mortal offence
to his bride by not appearing on the appointed wedding day. Now the
torturing consciousness of the wrong he had done her grew unendurable.
He won back her affection, ended the agony by marrying her, and became a
faithful and patient husband and a good father. But it was no secret
to those who knew the family well that his domestic life was full of
trials. The erratic temper of his wife not seldom put the gentleness
of his nature to the severest tests; and these troubles and struggles,
which accompanied him through all the vicissitudes of his life from
the modest home in Springfield to the White House at Washington,
adding untold private heart-burnings to his public cares, and sometimes
precipitating upon him incredible embarrassments in the discharge of his
public duties, form one of the most pathetic features of his career.

He continued to “ride the circuit,” read books while travelling in his
buggy, told funny stories to his fellow-lawyers in the tavern, chatted
familiarly with his neighbors around the stove in the store and at the
post-office, had his hours of melancholy brooding as of old, and became
more and more widely known and trusted and beloved among the people
of his State for his ability as a lawyer and politician, for the
uprightness of his character and the overflowing spring of sympathetic
kindness in his heart. His main ambition was confessedly that of
political distinction; but hardly any one would at that time have seen
in him the man destined to lead the nation through the greatest crisis
of the century.

His time had not yet come when, in 1846, he was elected to Congress. In
a clever speech in the House of Representatives he denounced President
Polk for having unjustly forced war upon Mexico, and he amused the
Committee of the Whole by a witty attack upon General Cass. More
important was the expression he gave to his antislavery impulses
by offering a bill looking to the emancipation of the slaves in the
District of Columbia, and by his repeated votes for the famous Wilmot
Proviso, intended to exclude slavery from the Territories acquired from
Mexico. But when, at the expiration of his term, in March, 1849, he left
his seat, he gloomily despaired of ever seeing the day when the cause
nearest to his heart would be rightly grasped by the people, and when he
would be able to render any service to his country in solving the great
problem. Nor had his career as a member of Congress in any sense been
such as to gratify his ambition. Indeed, if he ever had any belief in a
great destiny for himself, it must have been weak at that period; for he
actually sought to obtain from the new Whig President, General Taylor,
the place of Commissioner of the General Land Office; willing to
bury himself in one of the administrative bureaus of the government.
Fortunately for the country, he failed; and no less fortunately, when,
later, the territorial governorship of Oregon was offered to him, Mrs.
Lincoln’s protest induced him to decline it. Returning to Springfield,
he gave himself with renewed zest to his law practice, acquiesced in the
Compromise of 1850 with reluctance and a mental reservation, supported
in the Presidential campaign of 1852 the Whig candidate in some
spiritless speeches, and took but a languid interest in the politics of
the day. But just then his time was drawing near.

The peace promised, and apparently inaugurated, by the Compromise of
1850 was rudely broken by the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill
in 1854. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, opening the Territories
of the United States, the heritage of coming generations, to the
invasion of slavery, suddenly revealed the whole significance of the
slavery question to the people of the free States, and thrust itself
into the politics of the country as the paramount issue. Something like
an electric shock flashed through the North. Men who but a short time
before had been absorbed by their business pursuits, and deprecated all
political agitation, were startled out of their security by a sudden
alarm, and excitedly took sides. That restless trouble of conscience
about slavery, which even in times of apparent repose had secretly
disturbed the souls of Northern people, broke forth in an utterance
louder than ever. The bonds of accustomed party allegiance gave way.
Antislavery Democrats and antislavery Whigs felt themselves drawn
together by a common overpowering sentiment, and soon they began to
rally in a new organization. The Republican party sprang into being to
meet the overruling call of the hour. Then Abraham Lincoln’s time was
come. He rapidly advanced to a position of conspicuous championship in
the struggle. This, however, was not owing to his virtues and abilities
alone. Indeed, the slavery question stirred his soul in its profoundest
depths; it was, as one of his intimate friends said, “the only one on
which he would become excited”; it called forth all his faculties and
energies. Yet there were many others who, having long and arduously
fought the antislavery battle in the popular assembly, or in the press,
or in the halls of Congress, far surpassed him in prestige, and compared
with whom he was still an obscure and untried man. His reputation,
although highly honorable and well earned, had so far been essentially
local. As a stump-speaker in Whig canvasses outside of his State he had
attracted comparatively little attention; but in Illinois he had been
recognized as one of the foremost men of the Whig party. Among the
opponents of the Nebraska Bill he occupied in his State so important
a position, that in 1856 he was the choice of a large majority of the
“Anti-Nebraska men” in the Legislature for a seat in the Senate of the
United States which then became vacant; and when he, an old Whig, could
not obtain the votes of the Anti-Nebraska Democrats necessary to make
a majority, he generously urged his friends to transfer their votes
to Lyman Trumbull, who was then elected. Two years later, in the
first national convention of the Republican party, the delegation from
Illinois brought him forward as a candidate for the vice-presidency, and
he received respectable support. Still, the name of Abraham Lincoln was
not widely known beyond the boundaries of his own State. But now it was
this local prominence in Illinois that put him in a position of peculiar
advantage on the battlefield of national politics. In the assault on the
Missouri Compromise which broke down all legal barriers to the spread
of slavery Stephen Arnold Douglas was the ostensible leader and central
figure; and Douglas was a Senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s State.
Douglas’s national theatre of action was the Senate, but in his
constituency in Illinois were the roots of his official position and
power. What he did in the Senate he had to justify before the people
of Illinois, in order to maintain himself in place; and in Illinois all
eyes turned to Lincoln as Douglas’s natural antagonist.

As very young men they had come to Illinois, Lincoln from Indiana,
Douglas from Vermont, and had grown up together in public life, Douglas
as a Democrat, Lincoln as a Whig. They had met first in Vandalia, in
1834, when Lincoln was in the Legislature and Douglas in the lobby; and
again in 1836, both as members of the Legislature. Douglas, a very able
politician, of the agile, combative, audacious, “pushing” sort, rose in
political distinction with remarkable rapidity. In quick succession he
became a member of the Legislature, a State’s attorney, secretary
of state, a judge on the supreme bench of Illinois, three times a
Representative in Congress, and a Senator of the United States when only
thirty-nine years old. In the National Democratic convention of 1852 he
appeared even as an aspirant to the nomination for the Presidency, as
the favorite of “young America,” and received a respectable vote. He had
far outstripped Lincoln in what is commonly called political success
and in reputation. But it had frequently happened that in political
campaigns Lincoln felt himself impelled, or was selected by his Whig
friends, to answer Douglas’s speeches; and thus the two were looked
upon, in a large part of the State at least, as the representative
combatants of their respective parties in the debates before
popular meetings. As soon, therefore, as, after the passage of his
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Douglas returned to Illinois to defend his cause
before his constituents, Lincoln, obeying not only his own impulse, but
also general expectation, stepped forward as his principal opponent.
Thus the struggle about the principles involved in the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill, or, in a broader sense, the struggle between freedom and slavery,
assumed in Illinois the outward form of a personal contest between
Lincoln and Douglas; and, as it continued and became more animated,
that personal contest in Illinois was watched with constantly increasing
interest by the whole country. When, in 1858, Douglas’s senatorial term
being about to expire, Lincoln was formally designated by the Republican
convention of Illinois as their candidate for the Senate, to take
Douglas’s place, and the two contestants agreed to debate the questions
at issue face to face in a series of public meetings, the eyes of the
whole American people were turned eagerly to that one point: and the
spectacle reminded one of those lays of ancient times telling of two
armies, in battle array, standing still to see their two principal
champions fight out the contested cause between the lines in single
combat.

Lincoln had then reached the full maturity of his powers. His equipment
as a statesman did not embrace a comprehensive knowledge of public
affairs. What he had studied he had indeed made his own, with the eager
craving and that zealous tenacity characteristic of superior minds
learning under difficulties. But his narrow opportunities and the
unsteady life he had led during his younger years had not permitted
the accumulation of large stores in his mind. It is true, in political
campaigns he had occasionally spoken on the ostensible issues between
the Whigs and the Democrats, the tariff, internal improvements, banks,
and so on, but only in a perfunctory manner. Had he ever given much
serious thought and study to these subjects, it is safe to assume that
a mind so prolific of original conceits as his would certainly have
produced some utterance upon them worth remembering. His soul had
evidently never been deeply stirred by such topics. But when his moral
nature was aroused, his brain developed an untiring activity until it
had mastered all the knowledge within reach. As soon as the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise had thrust the slavery question into politics
as the paramount issue, Lincoln plunged into an arduous study of all
its legal, historical, and moral aspects, and then his mind became a
complete arsenal of argument. His rich natural gifts, trained by long
and varied practice, had made him an orator of rare persuasiveness. In
his immature days, he had pleased himself for a short period with that
inflated, high-flown style which, among the uncultivated, passes for
“beautiful speaking.” His inborn truthfulness and his artistic instinct
soon overcame that aberration and revealed to him the noble beauty and
strength of simplicity. He possessed an uncommon power of clear and
compact statement, which might have reminded those who knew the story
of his early youth of the efforts of the poor boy, when he copied his
compositions from the scraped wooden shovel, carefully to trim his
expressions in order to save paper. His language had the energy of
honest directness and he was a master of logical lucidity. He loved
to point and enliven his reasoning by humorous illustrations, usually
anecdotes of Western life, of which he had an inexhaustible store at his
command. These anecdotes had not seldom a flavor of rustic robustness
about them, but he used them with great effect, while amusing the
audience, to give life to an abstraction, to explode an absurdity, to
clinch an argument, to drive home an admonition. The natural kindliness
of his tone, softening prejudice and disarming partisan rancor, would
often open to his reasoning a way into minds most unwilling to receive
it.

Yet his greatest power consisted in the charm of his individuality. That
charm did not, in the ordinary way, appeal to the ear or to the eye. His
voice was not melodious; rather shrill and piercing, especially when it
rose to its high treble in moments of great animation. His figure was
unhandsome, and the action of his unwieldy limbs awkward. He commanded
none of the outward graces of oratory as they are commonly understood.
His charm was of a different kind. It flowed from the rare depth and
genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings. Sympathy
was the strongest element in his nature. One of his biographers, who
knew him before he became President, says: “Lincoln’s compassion might
be stirred deeply by an object present, but never by an object absent
and unseen. In the former case he would most likely extend relief, with
little inquiry into the merits of the case, because, as he expressed it
himself, it ‘took a pain out of his own heart.’” Only half of this is
correct. It is certainly true that he could not witness any individual
distress or oppression, or any kind of suffering, without feeling a pang
of pain himself, and that by relieving as much as he could the suffering
of others he put an end to his own. This compassionate impulse to help
he felt not only for human beings, but for every living creature. As in
his boyhood he angrily reproved the boys who tormented a wood turtle by
putting a burning coal on its back, so, we are told, he would, when a
mature man, on a journey, dismount from his buggy and wade waist-deep
in mire to rescue a pig struggling in a swamp. Indeed, appeals to his
compassion were so irresistible to him, and he felt it so difficult
to refuse anything when his refusal could give pain, that he himself
sometimes spoke of his inability to say “no” as a positive weakness.
But that certainly does not prove that his compassionate feeling was
confined to individual cases of suffering witnessed with his own eyes.
As the boy was moved by the aspect of the tortured wood turtle to
compose an essay against cruelty to animals in general, so the aspect of
other cases of suffering and wrong wrought up his moral nature, and set
his mind to work against cruelty, injustice, and oppression in general.

As his sympathy went forth to others, it attracted others to him.
Especially those whom he called the “plain people” felt themselves drawn
to him by the instinctive feeling that he understood, esteemed, and
appreciated them. He had grown up among the poor, the lowly, the
ignorant. He never ceased to remember the good souls he had met among
them, and the many kindnesses they had done him. Although in his mental
development he had risen far above them, he never looked down upon them.
How they felt and how they reasoned he knew, for so he had once felt and
reasoned himself. How they could be moved he knew, for so he had once
been moved himself and practised moving others. His mind was much larger
than theirs, but it thoroughly comprehended theirs; and while he thought
much farther than they, their thoughts were ever present to him. Nor had
the visible distance between them grown as wide as his rise in the world
would seem to have warranted. Much of his backwoods speech and manners
still clung to him. Although he had become “Mr. Lincoln” to his later
acquaintances, he was still “Abe” to the “Nats” and “Billys” and “Daves”
of his youth; and their familiarity neither appeared unnatural to
them, nor was it in the least awkward to him. He still told and
enjoyed stories similar to those he had told and enjoyed in the Indiana
settlement and at New Salem. His wants remained as modest as they had
ever been; his domestic habits had by no means completely accommodated
themselves to those of his more highborn wife; and though the “Kentucky
jeans” apparel had long been dropped, his clothes of better material
and better make would sit ill sorted on his gigantic limbs. His cotton
umbrella, without a handle, and tied together with a coarse string to
keep it from flapping, which he carried on his circuit rides, is said to
be remembered still by some of his surviving neighbors. This rusticity
of habit was utterly free from that affected contempt of refinement and
comfort which self-made men sometimes carry into their more affluent
circumstances. To Abraham Lincoln it was entirely natural, and all those
who came into contact with him knew it to be so. In his ways of thinking
and feeling he had become a gentleman in the highest sense, but the
refining process had polished but little the outward form. The plain
people, therefore, still considered “honest Abe Lincoln” one of
themselves; and when they felt, which they no doubt frequently did, that
his thoughts and aspirations moved in a sphere above their own,
they were all the more proud of him, without any diminution
of fellow-feeling. It was this relation of mutual sympathy and
understanding between Lincoln and the plain people that gave him his
peculiar power as a public man, and singularly fitted him, as we shall
see, for that leadership which was preeminently required in the great
crisis then coming on,—the leadership which indeed thinks and moves
ahead of the masses, but always remains within sight and sympathetic
touch of them.

He entered upon the campaign of 1858 better equipped than he had ever
been before. He not only instinctively felt, but he had convinced
himself by arduous study, that in this struggle against the spread of
slavery he had right, justice, philosophy, the enlightened opinion of
mankind, history, the Constitution, and good policy on his side. It
was observed that after he began to discuss the slavery question his
speeches were pitched in a much loftier key than his former oratorical
efforts. While he remained fond of telling funny stories in private
conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse.
He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of
inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty
irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine
solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his
wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment,
disclosed in language of rare precision, strength, and beauty, not
seldom astonished his old friends.

Neither of the two champions could have found a more formidable
antagonist than each now met in the other. Douglas was by far the most
conspicuous member of his party. His admirers had dubbed him “the Little
Giant,” contrasting in that nickname the greatness of his mind with the
smallness of his body. But though of low stature, his broad-shouldered
figure appeared uncommonly sturdy, and there was something lion-like in
the squareness of his brow and jaw, and in the defiant shake of his long
hair. His loud and persistent advocacy of territorial expansion, in the
name of patriotism and “manifest destiny,” had given him an enthusiastic
following among the young and ardent. Great natural parts, a highly
combative temperament, and long training had made him a debater
unsurpassed in a Senate filled with able men. He could be as forceful in
his appeals to patriotic feelings as he was fierce in denunciation and
thoroughly skilled in all the baser tricks of parliamentary pugilism.
While genial and rollicking in his social intercourse—the idol of the
“boys” he felt himself one of the most renowned statesmen of his time,
and would frequently meet his opponents with an overbearing haughtiness,
as persons more to be pitied than to be feared. In his speech opening
the campaign of 1858, he spoke of Lincoln, whom the Republicans had
dared to advance as their candidate for “his” place in the Senate, with
an air of patronizing if not contemptuous condescension, as “a kind,
amiable, and intelligent gentleman and a good citizen.” The Little Giant
would have been pleased to pass off his antagonist as a tall dwarf. He
knew Lincoln too well, however, to indulge himself seriously in such a
delusion. But the political situation was at that moment in a curious
tangle, and Douglas could expect to derive from the confusion great
advantage over his opponent.

By the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, opening the Territories to the
ingress of slavery, Douglas had pleased the South, but greatly alarmed
the North. He had sought to conciliate Northern sentiment by appending
to his Kansas-Nebraska Bill the declaration that its intent was “not
to legislate slavery into any State or Territory, nor to exclude it
therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form
and regulate their institutions in their own way, subject only to the
Constitution of the United States.” This he called “the great principle
of popular sovereignty.” When asked whether, under this act, the people
of a Territory, before its admission as a State, would have the right
to exclude slavery, he answered, “That is a question for the courts
to decide.” Then came the famous “Dred Scott decision,” in which the
Supreme Court held substantially that the right to hold slaves
as property existed in the Territories by virtue of the Federal
Constitution, and that this right could not be denied by any act of a
territorial government. This, of course, denied the right of the people
of any Territory to exclude slavery while they were in a territorial
condition, and it alarmed the Northern people still more. Douglas
recognized the binding force of the decision of the Supreme Court, at
the same time maintaining, most illogically, that his great principle
of popular sovereignty remained in force nevertheless. Meanwhile, the
proslavery people of western Missouri, the so-called “border ruffians,”
had invaded Kansas, set up a constitutional convention, made
a constitution of an extreme pro-slavery type, the “Lecompton
Constitution,” refused to submit it fairly to a vote of the people of
Kansas, and then referred it to Congress for acceptance,—seeking thus
to accomplish the admission of Kansas as a slave State. Had Douglas
supported such a scheme, he would have lost all foothold in the North.
In the name of popular sovereignty he loudly declared his opposition to
the acceptance of any constitution not sanctioned by a formal popular
vote. He “did not care,” he said, “whether slavery be voted up or down,”
but there must be a fair vote of the people. Thus he drew upon himself
the hostility of the Buchanan administration, which was controlled by
the proslavery interest, but he saved his Northern following. More
than this, not only did his Democratic admirers now call him “the true
champion of freedom,” but even some Republicans of large influence,
prominent among them Horace Greeley, sympathizing with Douglas in his
fight against the Lecompton Constitution, and hoping to detach him
permanently from the proslavery interest and to force a lasting breach
in the Democratic party, seriously advised the Republicans of Illinois
to give up their opposition to Douglas, and to help re-elect him to the
Senate. Lincoln was not of that opinion. He believed that great popular
movements can succeed only when guided by their faithful friends, and
that the antislavery cause could not safely be entrusted to the keeping
of one who “did not care whether slavery be voted up or down.” This
opinion prevailed in Illinois; but the influences within the Republican
party over which it prevailed yielded only a reluctant acquiescence, if
they acquiesced at all, after having materially strengthened Douglas’s
position. Such was the situation of things when the campaign of 1858
between Lincoln and Douglas began.

Lincoln opened the campaign on his side at the convention which
nominated him as the Republican candidate for the senatorship, with
a memorable saying which sounded like a shout from the watchtower of
history: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not
expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but
I expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or
all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates
will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the
States,—old as well as new, North as well as South.” Then he proceeded
to point out that the Nebraska doctrine combined with the Dred Scott
decision worked in the direction of making the nation “all slave.” Here
was the “irrepressible conflict” spoken of by Seward a short time later,
in a speech made famous mainly by that phrase. If there was any new
discovery in it, the right of priority was Lincoln’s. This utterance
proved not only his statesmanlike conception of the issue, but also,
in his situation as a candidate, the firmness of his moral courage.
The friends to whom he had read the draught of this speech before he
delivered it warned him anxiously that its delivery might be fatal to
his success in the election. This was shrewd advice, in the ordinary
sense. While a slaveholder could threaten disunion with impunity, the
mere suggestion that the existence of slavery was incompatible with
freedom in the Union would hazard the political chances of any public
man in the North. But Lincoln was inflexible. “It is true,” said he,
“and I will deliver it as written.... I would rather be defeated with
these expressions in my speech held up and discussed before the people
than be victorious without them.” The statesman was right in his
far-seeing judgment and his conscientious statement of the truth, but
the practical politicians were also right in their prediction of the
immediate effect. Douglas instantly seized upon the declaration that a
house divided against itself cannot stand as the main objective point of
his attack, interpreting it as an incitement to a “relentless sectional
war,” and there is no doubt that the persistent reiteration of this
charge served to frighten not a few timid souls.

Lincoln constantly endeavored to bring the moral and philosophical side
of the subject to the foreground. “Slavery is wrong” was the keynote of
all his speeches. To Douglas’s glittering sophism that the right of the
people of a Territory to have slavery or not, as they might desire, was
in accordance with the principle of true popular sovereignty, he made
the pointed answer: “Then true popular sovereignty, according to Senator
Douglas, means that, when one man makes another man his slave, no
third man shall be allowed to object.” To Douglas’s argument that
the principle which demanded that the people of a Territory should be
permitted to choose whether they would have slavery or not “originated
when God made man, and placed good and evil before him, allowing him
to choose upon his own responsibility,” Lincoln solemnly replied: “No;
God—did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his
choice. On the contrary, God did tell him there was one tree of the
fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of death.” He did not,
however, place himself on the most advanced ground taken by the radical
anti-slavery men. He admitted that, under the Constitution, “the
Southern people were entitled to a Congressional fugitive slave law,”
although he did not approve the fugitive slave law then existing. He
declared also that, if slavery were kept out of the Territories during
their territorial existence, as it should be, and if then the people of
any Territory, having a fair chance and a clear field, should do such
an extraordinary thing as to adopt a slave constitution, uninfluenced by
the actual presence of the institution among them, he saw no alternative
but to admit such a Territory into the Union. He declared further that,
while he should be exceedingly glad to see slavery abolished in the
District of Columbia, he would, as a member of Congress, with his
present views, not endeavor to bring on that abolition except on
condition that emancipation be gradual, that it be approved by the
decision of a majority of voters in the District, and that compensation
be made to unwilling owners. On every available occasion, he pronounced
himself in favor of the deportation and colonization of the blacks, of
course with their consent. He repeatedly disavowed any wish on his part
to have social and political equality established between whites and
blacks. On this point he summed up his views in a reply to Douglas’s
assertion that the Declaration of Independence, in speaking of all men
as being created equal, did not include the negroes, saying: “I do not
understand the Declaration of Independence to mean that all men were
created equal in all respects. They are not equal in color. But I
believe that it does mean to declare that all men are equal in some
respects; they are equal in their right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.”

With regard to some of these subjects Lincoln modified his position at
a later period, and it has been suggested that he would have professed
more advanced principles in his debates with Douglas, had he not feared
thereby to lose votes. This view can hardly be sustained. Lincoln had
the courage of his opinions, but he was not a radical. The man who
risked his election by delivering, against the urgent protest of his
friends, the speech about “the house divided against itself” would not
have shrunk from the expression of more extreme views, had he really
entertained them. It is only fair to assume that he said what at the
time he really thought, and that if, subsequently, his opinions changed,
it was owing to new conceptions of good policy and of duty brought
forth by an entirely new set of circumstances and exigencies. It
is characteristic that he continued to adhere to the impracticable
colonization plan even after the Emancipation Proclamation had already
been issued.

But in this contest Lincoln proved himself not only a debater, but
also a political strategist of the first order. The “kind, amiable, and
intelligent gentleman,” as Douglas had been pleased to call him, was by
no means as harmless as a dove. He possessed an uncommon share of that
worldly shrewdness which not seldom goes with genuine simplicity of
character; and the political experience gathered in the Legislature
and in Congress, and in many election campaigns, added to his keen
intuitions, had made him as far-sighted a judge of the probable effects
of a public man’s sayings or doings upon the popular mind, and as
accurate a calculator in estimating political chances and forecasting
results, as could be found among the party managers in Illinois. And
now he perceived keenly the ugly dilemma in which Douglas found himself,
between the Dred Scott decision, which declared the right to hold slaves
to exist in the Territories by virtue of the Federal Constitution, and
his “great principle of popular sovereignty,” according to which the
people of a Territory, if they saw fit, were to have the right to
exclude slavery therefrom. Douglas was twisting and squirming to
the best of his ability to avoid the admission that the two were
incompatible. The question then presented itself if it would be good
policy for Lincoln to force Douglas to a clear expression of his opinion
as to whether, the Dred Scott decision notwithstanding, “the people of a
Territory could in any lawful way exclude slavery from its limits prior
to the formation of a State constitution.” Lincoln foresaw and predicted
what Douglas would answer: that slavery could not exist in a Territory
unless the people desired it and gave it protection by territorial
legislation. In an improvised caucus the policy of pressing the
interrogatory on Douglas was discussed. Lincoln’s friends unanimously
advised against it, because the answer foreseen would sufficiently
commend Douglas to the people of Illinois to insure his re-election to
the Senate. But Lincoln persisted. “I am after larger game,” said he.
“If Douglas so answers, he can never be President, and the battle of
1860 is worth a hundred of this.” The interrogatory was pressed upon
Douglas, and Douglas did answer that, no matter what the decision of
the Supreme Court might be on the abstract question, the people of
a Territory had the lawful means to introduce or exclude slavery by
territorial legislation friendly or unfriendly to the institution.
Lincoln found it easy to show the absurdity of the proposition that, if
slavery were admitted to exist of right in the Territories by virtue
of the supreme law, the Federal Constitution, it could be kept out or
expelled by an inferior law, one made by a territorial Legislature.
Again the judgment of the politicians, having only the nearest object in
view, proved correct: Douglas was reelected to the Senate. But Lincoln’s
judgment proved correct also: Douglas, by resorting to the expedient
of his “unfriendly legislation doctrine,” forfeited his last chance of
becoming President of the United States. He might have hoped to win, by
sufficient atonement, his pardon from the South for his opposition
to the Lecompton Constitution; but that he taught the people of the
Territories a trick by which they could defeat what the proslavery men
considered a constitutional right, and that he called that trick
lawful, this the slave power would never forgive. The breach between
the Southern and the Northern Democracy was thenceforth irremediable and
fatal.

The Presidential election of 1860 approached. The struggle in Kansas,
and the debates in Congress which accompanied it, and which not
unfrequently provoked violent outbursts, continually stirred the popular
excitement. Within the Democratic party raged the war of factions. The
national Democratic convention met at Charleston on the 23d of April,
1860. After a struggle of ten days between the adherents and the
opponents of Douglas, during which the delegates from the cotton States
had withdrawn, the convention adjourned without having nominated any
candidates, to meet again in Baltimore on the 18th of June. There was no
prospect, however, of reconciling the hostile elements. It appeared very
probable that the Baltimore convention would nominate Douglas, while
the seceding Southern Democrats would set up a candidate of their own,
representing extreme proslavery principles.

Meanwhile, the national Republican convention assembled at Chicago on
the 16th of May, full of enthusiasm and hope. The situation was easily
understood. The Democrats would have the South. In order to succeed
in the election, the Republicans had to win, in addition to the States
carried by Fremont in 1856, those that were classed as “doubtful,”—New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, or Illinois in the place of either
New Jersey or Indiana. The most eminent Republican statesmen and leaders
of the time thought of for the Presidency were Seward and Chase, both
regarded as belonging to the more advanced order of antislavery men.
Of the two, Seward had the largest following, mainly from New York,
New England, and the Northwest. Cautious politicians doubted seriously
whether Seward, to whom some phrases in his speeches had undeservedly
given the reputation of a reckless radical, would be able to command the
whole Republican vote in the doubtful States. Besides, during his long
public career he had made enemies. It was evident that those who thought
Seward’s nomination too hazardous an experiment would consider Chase
unavailable for the same reason. They would then look round for an
“available” man; and among the “available” men Abraham Lincoln was
easily discovered to stand foremost. His great debate with Douglas had
given him a national reputation. The people of the East being eager
to see the hero of so dramatic a contest, he had been induced to visit
several Eastern cities, and had astonished and delighted large and
distinguished audiences with speeches of singular power and originality.
An address delivered by him in the Cooper Institute in New York, before
an audience containing a large number of important persons, was then,
and has ever since been, especially praised as one of the most logical
and convincing political speeches ever made in this country. The people
of the West had grown proud of him as a distinctively Western great man,
and his popularity at home had some peculiar features which could be
expected to exercise a potent charm. Nor was Lincoln’s name as that of
an available candidate left to the chance of accidental discovery. It
is indeed not probable that he thought of himself as a Presidential
possibility, during his contest with Douglas for the senatorship. As
late as April, 1859, he had written to a friend who had approached him
on the subject that he did not think himself fit for the Presidency.
The Vice-Presidency was then the limit of his ambition. But some of
his friends in Illinois took the matter seriously in hand, and Lincoln,
after some hesitation, then formally authorized “the use of his name.”
The matter was managed with such energy and excellent judgment that,
in the convention, he had not only the whole vote of Illinois to start
with, but won votes on all sides without offending any rival. A large
majority of the opponents of Seward went over to Abraham Lincoln, and
gave him the nomination on the third ballot. As had been foreseen,
Douglas was nominated by one wing of the Democratic party at Baltimore,
while the extreme proslavery wing put Breckinridge into the field as
its candidate. After a campaign conducted with the energy of genuine
enthusiasm on the antislavery side the united Republicans defeated the
divided Democrats, and Lincoln was elected President by a majority of
fifty-seven votes in the electoral colleges.

The result of the election had hardly been declared when the disunion
movement in the South, long threatened and carefully planned and
prepared, broke out in the shape of open revolt, and nearly a month
before Lincoln could be inaugurated as President of the United States
seven Southern States had adopted ordinances of secession, formed an
independent confederacy, framed a constitution for it, and elected
Jefferson Davis its president, expecting the other slaveholding
States soon to join them. On the 11th of February, 1861, Lincoln left
Springfield for Washington; having, with characteristic simplicity,
asked his law partner not to change the sign of the firm “Lincoln
and Herndon” during the four years unavoidable absence of the senior
partner, and having taken an affectionate and touching leave of his
neighbors.

The situation which confronted the new President was appalling: the
larger part of the South in open rebellion, the rest of the slaveholding
States wavering preparing to follow; the revolt guided by determined,
daring, and skillful leaders; the Southern people, apparently full of
enthusiasm and military spirit, rushing to arms, some of the forts
and arsenals already in their possession; the government of the Union,
before the accession of the new President, in the hands of men some of
whom actively sympathized with the revolt, while others were hampered by
their traditional doctrines in dealing with it, and really gave it aid
and comfort by their irresolute attitude; all the departments full of
“Southern sympathizers” and honeycombed with disloyalty; the treasury
empty, and the public credit at the lowest ebb; the arsenals ill
supplied with arms, if not emptied by treacherous practices; the regular
army of insignificant strength, dispersed over an immense surface, and
deprived of some of its best officers by defection; the navy small and
antiquated. But that was not all. The threat of disunion had so often
been resorted to by the slave power in years gone by that most Northern
people had ceased to believe in its seriousness. But, when disunion
actually appeared as a stern reality, something like a chill swept
through the whole Northern country. A cry for union and peace at any
price rose on all sides. Democratic partisanship reiterated this cry
with vociferous vehemence, and even many Republicans grew afraid of
the victory they had just achieved at the ballot-box, and spoke of
compromise. The country fairly resounded with the noise of “anticoercion
meetings.” Expressions of firm resolution from determined antislavery
men were indeed not wanting, but they were for a while almost drowned
by a bewildering confusion of discordant voices. Even this was not
all. Potent influences in Europe, with an ill-concealed desire for the
permanent disruption of the American Union, eagerly espoused the cause
of the Southern seceders, and the two principal maritime powers of the
Old World seemed only to be waiting for a favorable opportunity to lend
them a helping hand.

This was the state of things to be mastered by “honest Abe Lincoln” when
he took his seat in the Presidential chair,—“honest Abe Lincoln,” who
was so good-natured that he could not say “no”; the greatest achievement
in whose life had been a debate on the slavery question; who had never
been in any position of power; who was without the slightest experience
of high executive duties, and who had only a speaking acquaintance with
the men upon whose counsel and cooperation he was to depend. Nor was
his accession to power under such circumstances greeted with general
confidence even by the members of his party. While he had indeed won
much popularity, many Republicans, especially among those who had
advocated Seward’s nomination for the Presidency, saw the simple
“Illinois lawyer” take the reins of government with a feeling little
short of dismay. The orators and journals of the opposition were
ridiculing and lampooning him without measure. Many people actually
wondered how such a man could dare to undertake a task which, as he
himself had said to his neighbors in his parting speech, was “more
difficult than that of Washington himself had been.”

But Lincoln brought to that task, aside from other uncommon qualities,
the first requisite,—an intuitive comprehension of its nature. While
he did not indulge in the delusion that the Union could be maintained or
restored without a conflict of arms, he could indeed not foresee all the
problems he would have to solve. He instinctively understood, however,
by what means that conflict would have to be conducted by the government
of a democracy. He knew that the impending war, whether great or small,
would not be like a foreign war, exciting a united national enthusiasm,
but a civil war, likely to fan to uncommon heat the animosities of party
even in the localities controlled by the government; that this war would
have to be carried on not by means of a ready-made machinery, ruled
by an undisputed, absolute will, but by means to be furnished by the
voluntary action of the people:—armies to be formed by voluntary
enlistments; large sums of money to be raised by the people, through
representatives, voluntarily taxing themselves; trust of extraordinary
power to be voluntarily granted; and war measures, not seldom
restricting the rights and liberties to which the citizen was
accustomed, to be voluntarily accepted and submitted to by the people,
or at least a large majority of them; and that this would have to be
kept up not merely during a short period of enthusiastic excitement; but
possibly through weary years of alternating success and disaster, hope
and despondency. He knew that in order to steer this government by
public opinion successfully through all the confusion created by the
prejudices and doubts and differences of sentiment distracting the
popular mind, and so to propitiate, inspire, mould, organize, unite, and
guide the popular will that it might give forth all the means required
for the performance of his great task, he would have to take into
account all the influences strongly affecting the current of popular
thought and feeling, and to direct while appearing to obey.

This was the kind of leadership he intuitively conceived to be needed
when a free people were to be led forward en masse to overcome a
great common danger under circumstances of appalling difficulty, the
leadership which does not dash ahead with brilliant daring, no matter
who follows, but which is intent upon rallying all the available forces,
gathering in the stragglers, closing up the column, so that the front
may advance well supported. For this leadership Abraham Lincoln was
admirably fitted, better than any other American statesman of his day;
for he understood the plain people, with all their loves and hates,
their prejudices and their noble impulses, their weaknesses and their
strength, as he understood himself, and his sympathetic nature was apt
to draw their sympathy to him.

His inaugural address foreshadowed his official course in characteristic
manner. Although yielding nothing in point of principle, it was by no
means a flaming antislavery manifesto, such as would have pleased the
more ardent Republicans. It was rather the entreaty of a sorrowing
father speaking to his wayward children. In the kindliest language
he pointed out to the secessionists how ill advised their attempt at
disunion was, and why, for their own sakes, they should desist. Almost
plaintively, he told them that, while it was not their duty to destroy
the Union, it was his sworn duty to preserve it; that the least he
could do, under the obligations of his oath, was to possess and hold the
property of the United States; that he hoped to do this peaceably; that
he abhorred war for any purpose, and that they would have none
unless they themselves were the aggressors. It was a masterpiece of
persuasiveness, and while Lincoln had accepted many valuable amendments
suggested by Seward, it was essentially his own. Probably Lincoln
himself did not expect his inaugural address to have any effect upon the
secessionists, for he must have known them to be resolved upon disunion
at any cost. But it was an appeal to the wavering minds in the North,
and upon them it made a profound impression. Every candid man, however
timid and halting, had to admit that the President was bound by his oath
to do his duty; that under that oath he could do no less than he said
he would do; that if the secessionists resisted such an appeal as
the President had made, they were bent upon mischief, and that the
government must be supported against them. The partisan sympathy with
the Southern insurrection which still existed in the North did indeed
not disappear, but it diminished perceptibly under the influence of such
reasoning. Those who still resisted it did so at the risk of appearing
unpatriotic.

It must not be supposed, however, that Lincoln at once succeeded in
pleasing everybody, even among his friends,—even among those nearest to
him. In selecting his cabinet, which he did substantially before he left
Springfield for Washington, he thought it wise to call to his assistance
the strong men of his party, especially those who had given evidence of
the support they commanded as his competitors in the Chicago convention.
In them he found at the same time representatives of the
different shades of opinion within the party, and of the different
elements—former Whigs and former Democrats—from which the party had
recruited itself. This was sound policy under the circumstances. It
might indeed have been foreseen that among the members of a cabinet so
composed, troublesome disagreements and rivalries would break out. But
it was better for the President to have these strong and ambitious
men near him as his co-operators than to have them as his critics in
Congress, where their differences might have been composed in a common
opposition to him. As members of his cabinet he could hope to control
them, and to keep them busily employed in the service of a common
purpose, if he had the strength to do so. Whether he did possess this
strength was soon tested by a singularly rude trial.

There can be no doubt that the foremost members of his cabinet, Seward
and Chase, the most eminent Republican statesmen, had felt themselves
wronged by their party when in its national convention it preferred
to them for the Presidency a man whom, not unnaturally, they thought
greatly their inferior in ability and experience as well as in service.
The soreness of that disappointment was intensified when they saw this
Western man in the White House, with so much of rustic manner and speech
as still clung to him, meeting his fellow-citizens, high and low, on a
footing of equality, with the simplicity of his good nature unburdened
by any conventional dignity of deportment, and dealing with the great
business of state in an easy-going, unmethodical, and apparently
somewhat irreverent way. They did not understand such a man. Especially
Seward, who, as Secretary of State, considered himself next to the
Chief Executive, and who quickly accustomed himself to giving orders and
making arrangements upon his own motion, thought it necessary that he
should rescue the direction of public affairs from hands so unskilled,
and take full charge of them himself. At the end of the first month of
the administration he submitted a “memorandum” to President Lincoln,
which has been first brought to light by Nicolay and Hay, and is one of
their most valuable contributions to the history of those days. In that
paper Seward actually told the President that at the end of a month’s
administration the government was still without a policy, either
domestic or foreign; that the slavery question should be eliminated from
the struggle about the Union; that the matter of the maintenance of the
forts and other possessions in the South should be decided with that
view; that explanations should be demanded categorically from the
governments of Spain and France, which were then preparing, one for the
annexation of San Domingo, and both for the invasion of Mexico; that
if no satisfactory explanations were received war should be declared
against Spain and France by the United States; that explanations should
also be sought from Russia and Great Britain, and a vigorous continental
spirit of independence against European intervention be aroused all over
the American continent; that this policy should be incessantly pursued
and directed by somebody; that either the President should devote
himself entirely to it, or devolve the direction on some member of his
cabinet, whereupon all debate on this policy must end.

This could be understood only as a formal demand that the President
should acknowledge his own incompetency to perform his duties, content
himself with the amusement of distributing post-offices, and resign his
power as to all important affairs into the hands of his Secretary of
State. It seems to-day incomprehensible how a statesman of Seward’s
calibre could at that period conceive a plan of policy in which the
slavery question had no place; a policy which rested upon the utterly
delusive assumption that the secessionists, who had already formed their
Southern Confederacy and were with stern resolution preparing to fight
for its independence, could be hoodwinked back into the Union by some
sentimental demonstration against European interference; a policy which,
at that critical moment, would have involved the Union in a foreign war,
thus inviting foreign intervention in favor of the Southern Confederacy,
and increasing tenfold its chances in the struggle for independence. But
it is equally incomprehensible how Seward could fail to see that this
demand of an unconditional surrender was a mortal insult to the head
of the government, and that by putting his proposition on paper he
delivered himself into the hands of the very man he had insulted; for,
had Lincoln, as most Presidents would have done, instantly dismissed
Seward, and published the true reason for that dismissal, it would
inevitably have been the end of Seward’s career. But Lincoln did what
not many of the noblest and greatest men in history would have been
noble and great enough to do. He considered that Seward was still
capable of rendering great service to his country in the place in
which he was, if rightly controlled. He ignored the insult, but
firmly established his superiority. In his reply, which he forthwith
despatched, he told Seward that the administration had a domestic policy
as laid down in the inaugural address with Seward’s approval; that
it had a foreign policy as traced in Seward’s despatches with the
President’s approval; that if any policy was to be maintained or
changed, he, the President, was to direct that on his responsibility;
and that in performing that duty the President had a right to the
advice of his secretaries. Seward’s fantastic schemes of foreign war
and continental policies Lincoln brushed aside by passing them over in
silence. Nothing more was said. Seward must have felt that he was at
the mercy of a superior man; that his offensive proposition had been
generously pardoned as a temporary aberration of a great mind, and that
he could atone for it only by devoted personal loyalty. This he did.
He was thoroughly subdued, and thenceforth submitted to Lincoln his
despatches for revision and amendment without a murmur. The war with
European nations was no longer thought of; the slavery question found in
due time its proper place in the struggle for the Union; and when, at
a later period, the dismissal of Seward was demanded by dissatisfied
senators, who attributed to him the shortcomings of the administration,
Lincoln stood stoutly by his faithful Secretary of State.

Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, a man of superb presence, of
eminent ability and ardent patriotism, of great natural dignity and a
certain outward coldness of manner, which made him appear more difficult
of approach than he really was, did not permit his disappointment to
burst out in such extravagant demonstrations. But Lincoln’s ways were
so essentially different from his that they never became quite
intelligible, and certainly not congenial to him. It might, perhaps,
have been better had there been, at the beginning of the administration,
some decided clash between Lincoln and Chase, as there was between
Lincoln and Seward, to bring on a full mutual explanation, and to make
Chase appreciate the real seriousness of Lincoln’s nature. But, as it
was, their relations always remained somewhat formal, and Chase never
felt quite at ease under a chief whom he could not understand, and whose
character and powers he never learned to esteem at their true value.
At the same time, he devoted himself zealously to the duties of his
department, and did the country arduous service under circumstances of
extreme difficulty. Nobody recognized this more heartily than Lincoln
himself, and they managed to work together until near the end of
Lincoln’s first Presidential term, when Chase, after some disagreements
concerning appointments to office, resigned from the treasury; and,
after Taney’s death, the President made him Chief Justice.

The rest of the cabinet consisted of men of less eminence, who
subordinated themselves more easily. In January, 1862, Lincoln found it
necessary to bow Cameron out of the war office, and to put in his place
Edwin M. Stanton, a man of intensely practical mind, vehement impulses,
fierce positiveness, ruthless energy, immense working power, lofty
patriotism, and severest devotion to duty. He accepted the war office
not as a partisan, for he had never been a Republican, but only to
do all he could in “helping to save the country.” The manner in
which Lincoln succeeded in taming this lion to his will, by frankly
recognizing his great qualities, by giving him the most generous
confidence, by aiding him in his work to the full of his power, by
kindly concession or affectionate persuasiveness in cases of differing
opinions, or, when it was necessary, by firm assertions of superior
authority, bears the highest testimony to his skill in the management of
men. Stanton, who had entered the service with rather a mean opinion
of Lincoln’s character and capacity, became one of his warmest, most
devoted, and most admiring friends, and with none of his secretaries
was Lincoln’s intercourse more intimate. To take advice with candid
readiness, and to weigh it without any pride of his own opinion, was one
of Lincoln’s preeminent virtues; but he had not long presided over his
cabinet council when his was felt by all its members to be the ruling
mind.

The cautious policy foreshadowed in his inaugural address, and pursued
during the first period of the civil war, was far from satisfying all
his party friends. The ardent spirits among the Union men thought that
the whole North should at once be called to arms, to crush the rebellion
by one powerful blow. The ardent spirits among the antislavery men
insisted that, slavery having brought forth the rebellion, this powerful
blow should at once be aimed at slavery. Both complained that the
administration was spiritless, undecided, and lamentably slow in its
proceedings. Lincoln reasoned otherwise. The ways of thinking and
feeling of the masses, of the plain people, were constantly present to
his mind. The masses, the plain people, had to furnish the men for the
fighting, if fighting was to be done. He believed that the plain people
would be ready to fight when it clearly appeared necessary, and that
they would feel that necessity when they felt themselves attacked. He
therefore waited until the enemies of the Union struck the first blow.
As soon as, on the 12th of April, 1861, the first gun was fired in
Charleston harbor on the Union flag upon Fort Sumter, the call was
sounded, and the Northern people rushed to arms.

Lincoln knew that the plain people were now indeed ready to fight in
defence of the Union, but not yet ready to fight for the destruction of
slavery. He declared openly that he had a right to summon the people to
fight for the Union, but not to summon them to fight for the abolition
of slavery as a primary object; and this declaration gave him numberless
soldiers for the Union who at that period would have hesitated to do
battle against the institution of slavery. For a time he succeeded
in rendering harmless the cry of the partisan opposition that the
Republican administration were perverting the war for the Union into an
“abolition war.” But when he went so far as to countermand the acts of
some generals in the field, looking to the emancipation of the slaves
in the districts covered by their commands, loud complaints arose from
earnest antislavery men, who accused the President of turning his back
upon the antislavery cause. Many of these antislavery men will now,
after a calm retrospect, be willing to admit that it would have been
a hazardous policy to endanger, by precipitating a demonstrative fight
against slavery, the success of the struggle for the Union.

Lincoln’s views and feelings concerning slavery had not changed. Those
who conversed with him intimately upon the subject at that period know
that he did not expect slavery long to survive the triumph of the Union,
even if it were not immediately destroyed by the war. In this he was
right. Had the Union armies achieved a decisive victory in an early
period of the conflict, and had the seceded States been received back
with slavery, the “slave power” would then have been a defeated power,
defeated in an attempt to carry out its most effective threat. It would
have lost its prestige. Its menaces would have been hollow sound, and
ceased to make any one afraid. It could no longer have hoped to expand,
to maintain an equilibrium in any branch of Congress, and to control the
government. The victorious free States would have largely overbalanced
it. It would no longer have been able to withstand the onset of a
hostile age. It could no longer have ruled,—and slavery had to rule in
order to live. It would have lingered for a while, but it would surely
have been “in the course of ultimate extinction.” A prolonged war
precipitated the destruction of slavery; a short war might only have
prolonged its death struggle. Lincoln saw this clearly; but he saw also
that, in a protracted death struggle, it might still have kept disloyal
sentiments alive, bred distracting commotions, and caused great mischief
to the country. He therefore hoped that slavery would not survive the
war.

But the question how he could rightfully employ his power to bring on
its speedy destruction was to him not a question of mere sentiment. He
himself set forth his reasoning upon it, at a later period, in one
of his inimitable letters. “I am naturally antislavery,” said he. “If
slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember the time when
I did not so think and feel. And yet I have never understood that the
Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act upon that
judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the
best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of
the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath.
Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break
the oath in using that power. I understood, too, that, in ordinary civil
administration, this oath even forbade me practically to indulge my
private abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I did
understand, however, also, that my oath imposed upon me the duty of
preserving, to the best of my ability, by every indispensable means,
that government, that nation, of which the Constitution was the organic
law. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tied
to preserve the Constitution—if, to save slavery, or any minor matter,
I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution
all together.” In other words, if the salvation of the government, the
Constitution, and the Union demanded the destruction of slavery, he
felt it to be not only his right, but his sworn duty to destroy it. Its
destruction became a necessity of the war for the Union.

As the war dragged on and disaster followed disaster, the sense of that
necessity steadily grew upon him. Early in 1862, as some of his friends
well remember, he saw, what Seward seemed not to see, that to give
the war for the Union an antislavery character was the surest means to
prevent the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent
nation by European powers; that, slavery being abhorred by the moral
sense of civilized mankind, no European government would dare to offer
so gross an insult to the public opinion of its people as openly to
favor the creation of a state founded upon slavery to the prejudice of
an existing nation fighting against slavery. He saw also that slavery
untouched was to the rebellion an element of power, and that in order
to overcome that power it was necessary to turn it into an element
of weakness. Still, he felt no assurance that the plain people were
prepared for so radical a measure as the emancipation of the slaves by
act of the government, and he anxiously considered that, if they were
not, this great step might, by exciting dissension at the North, injure
the cause of the Union in one quarter more than it would help it in
another. He heartily welcomed an effort made in New York to mould and
stimulate public sentiment on the slavery question by public meetings
boldly pronouncing for emancipation. At the same time he himself
cautiously advanced with a recommendation, expressed in a special
message to Congress, that the United States should co-operate with any
State which might adopt the gradual abolishment of slavery, giving
such State pecuniary aid to compensate the former owners of emancipated
slaves. The discussion was started, and spread rapidly. Congress adopted
the resolution recommended, and soon went a step farther in passing a
bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The plain people
began to look at emancipation on a larger scale as a thing to be
considered seriously by patriotic citizens; and soon Lincoln thought
that the time was ripe, and that the edict of freedom could be ventured
upon without danger of serious confusion in the Union ranks.

The failure of McClellan’s movement upon Richmond increased immensely
the prestige of the enemy. The need of some great act to stimulate the
vitality of the Union cause seemed to grow daily more pressing. On
July 21, 1862, Lincoln surprised his cabinet with the draught of a
proclamation declaring free the slaves in all the States that should be
still in rebellion against the United States on the 1st of January, 1863.
As to the matter itself he announced that he had fully made up his mind;
he invited advice only concerning the form and the time of publication.
Seward suggested that the proclamation, if then brought out, amidst
disaster and distress, would sound like the last shriek of a perishing
cause. Lincoln accepted the suggestion, and the proclamation was
postponed. Another defeat followed, the second at Bull Run. But when,
after that battle, the Confederate army, under Lee, crossed the Potomac
and invaded Maryland, Lincoln vowed in his heart that, if the Union army
were now blessed with success, the decree of freedom should surely
be issued. The victory of Antietam was won on September 17, and the
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation came forth on the a 22d. It was
Lincoln’s own resolution and act; but practically it bound the nation,
and permitted no step backward. In spite of its limitations, it was the
actual abolition of slavery. Thus he wrote his name upon the books of
history with the title dearest to his heart, the liberator of the slave.

It is true, the great proclamation, which stamped the war as one for
“union and freedom,” did not at once mark the turning of the tide on the
field of military operations. There were more disasters, Fredericksburg
and Chancellorsville. But with Gettysburg and Vicksburg the whole aspect
of the war changed. Step by step, now more slowly, then more rapidly,
but with increasing steadiness, the flag of the Union advanced from
field to field toward the final consummation. The decree of emancipation
was naturally followed by the enlistment of emancipated negroes in the
Union armies. This measure had a anther reaching effect than merely
giving the Union armies an increased supply of men. The laboring force
of the rebellion was hopelessly disorganized. The war became like a
problem of arithmetic. As the Union armies pushed forward, the area
from which the Southern Confederacy could draw recruits and supplies
constantly grew smaller, while the area from which the Union recruited
its strength constantly grew larger; and everywhere, even within the
Southern lines, the Union had its allies. The fate of the rebellion
was then virtually decided; but it still required much bloody work to
convince the brave warriors who fought for it that they were really
beaten.

Neither did the Emancipation Proclamation forthwith command universal
assent among the people who were loyal to the Union. There were even
signs of a reaction against the administration in the fall elections of
1862, seemingly justifying the opinion, entertained by many, that the
President had really anticipated the development of popular feeling. The
cry that the war for the Union had been turned into an “abolition war”
was raised again by the opposition, and more loudly than ever. But
the good sense and patriotic instincts of the plain people gradually
marshalled themselves on Lincoln’s side, and he lost no opportunity to
help on this process by personal argument and admonition. There never
has been a President in such constant and active contact with the public
opinion of the country, as there never has been a President who, while
at the head of the government, remained so near to the people. Beyond
the circle of those who had long known him the feeling steadily grew
that the man in the White House was “honest Abe Lincoln” still, and
that every citizen might approach him with complaint, expostulation, or
advice, without danger of meeting a rebuff from power-proud authority,
or humiliating condescension; and this privilege was used by so many
and with such unsparing freedom that only superhuman patience could
have endured it all. There are men now living who would to-day read with
amazement, if not regret, what they ventured to say or write to him. But
Lincoln repelled no one whom he believed to speak to him in good faith
and with patriotic purpose. No good advice would go unheeded. No candid
criticism would offend him. No honest opposition, while it might pain
him, would produce a lasting alienation of feeling between him and the
opponent. It may truly be said that few men in power have ever been
exposed to more daring attempts to direct their course, to severer
censure of their acts, and to more cruel misrepresentation of their
motives: And all this he met with that good-natured humor peculiarly his
own, and with untiring effort to see the right and to impress it
upon those who differed from him. The conversations he had and the
correspondence he carried on upon matters of public interest, not only
with men in official position, but with private citizens, were almost
unceasing, and in a large number of public letters, written ostensibly
to meetings, or committees, or persons of importance, he addressed
himself directly to the popular mind. Most of these letters stand among
the finest monuments of our political literature. Thus he presented the
singular spectacle of a President who, in the midst of a great civil
war, with unprecedented duties weighing upon him, was constantly in
person debating the great features of his policy with the people.

While in this manner he exercised an ever-increasing influence upon the
popular understanding, his sympathetic nature endeared him more and
more to the popular heart. In vain did journals and speakers of the
opposition represent him as a lightminded trifler, who amused himself
with frivolous story-telling and coarse jokes, while the blood of the
people was flowing in streams. The people knew that the man at the head
of affairs, on whose haggard face the twinkle of humor so frequently
changed into an expression of profoundest sadness, was more than any
other deeply distressed by the suffering he witnessed; that he felt
the pain of every wound that was inflicted on the battlefield, and the
anguish of every woman or child who had lost husband or father; that
whenever he could he was eager to alleviate sorrow, and that his mercy
was never implored in vain. They looked to him as one who was with them
and of them in all their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, who
laughed with them and wept with them; and as his heart was theirs; so
their hearts turned to him. His popularity was far different from
that of Washington, who was revered with awe, or that of Jackson,
the unconquerable hero, for whom party enthusiasm never grew weary
of shouting. To Abraham Lincoln the people became bound by a genuine
sentimental attachment. It was not a matter of respect, or confidence,
or party pride, for this feeling spread far beyond the boundary lines of
his party; it was an affair of the heart, independent of mere reasoning.
When the soldiers in the field or their folks at home spoke of “Father
Abraham,” there was no cant in it. They felt that their President was
really caring for them as a father would, and that they could go to him,
every one of them, as they would go to a father, and talk to him of what
troubled them, sure to find a willing ear and tender sympathy. Thus,
their President, and his cause, and his endeavors, and his success
gradually became to them almost matters of family concern. And this
popularity carried him triumphantly through the Presidential election
of 1864, in spite of an opposition within his own party which at first
seemed very formidable.

Many of the radical antislavery men were never quite satisfied with
Lincoln’s ways of meeting the problems of the time. They were very
earnest and mostly very able men, who had positive ideas as to “how this
rebellion should be put down.” They would not recognize the necessity
of measuring the steps of the government according to the progress
of opinion among the plain people. They criticised Lincoln’s cautious
management as irresolute, halting, lacking in definite purpose and in
energy; he should not have delayed emancipation so long; he should not
have confided important commands to men of doubtful views as to slavery;
he should have authorized military commanders to set the slaves free
as they went on; he dealt too leniently with unsuccessful generals; he
should have put down all factious opposition with a strong hand instead
of trying to pacify it; he should have given the people accomplished
facts instead of arguing with them, and so on. It is true, these
criticisms were not always entirely unfounded. Lincoln’s policy had,
with the virtues of democratic government, some of its weaknesses, which
in the presence of pressing exigencies were apt to deprive governmental
action of the necessary vigor; and his kindness of heart, his
disposition always to respect the feelings of others, frequently made
him recoil from anything like severity, even when severity was urgently
called for. But many of his radical critics have since then revised
their judgment sufficiently to admit that Lincoln’s policy was, on the
whole, the wisest and safest; that a policy of heroic methods, while it
has sometimes accomplished great results, could in a democracy like
ours be maintained only by constant success; that it would have quickly
broken down under the weight of disaster; that it might have been
successful from the start, had the Union, at the beginning of the
conflict, had its Grants and Shermans and Sheridans, its Farraguts and
Porters, fully matured at the head of its forces; but that, as the great
commanders had to be evolved slowly from the developments of the war,
constant success could not be counted upon, and it was best to follow
a policy which was in friendly contact with the popular force, and
therefore more fit to stand trial of misfortune on the battlefield. But
at that period they thought differently, and their dissatisfaction with
Lincoln’s doings was greatly increased by the steps he took toward the
reconstruction of rebel States then partially in possession of the Union
forces.

In December, 1863, Lincoln issued an amnesty proclamation, offering
pardon to all implicated in the rebellion, with certain specified
exceptions, on condition of their taking and maintaining an oath to
support the Constitution and obey the laws of the United States and the
proclamations of the President with regard to slaves; and also promising
that when, in any of the rebel States, a number of citizens equal to one
tenth of the voters in 1860 should re-establish a state government in
conformity with the oath above mentioned, such should be recognized
by the Executive as the true government of the State. The proclamation
seemed at first to be received with general favor. But soon another
scheme of reconstruction, much more stringent in its provisions, was put
forward in the House of Representatives by Henry Winter Davis. Benjamin
Wade championed it in the Senate. It passed in the closing moments of
the session in July, 1864, and Lincoln, instead of making it a law by
his signature, embodied the text of it in a proclamation as a plan of
reconstruction worthy of being earnestly considered. The differences of
opinion concerning this subject had only intensified the feeling against
Lincoln which had long been nursed among the radicals, and some of
them openly declared their purpose of resisting his re-election to
the Presidency. Similar sentiments were manifested by the advanced
antislavery men of Missouri, who, in their hot faction-fight with the
“conservatives” of that State, had not received from Lincoln the active
support they demanded. Still another class of Union men, mainly in the
East, gravely shook their heads when considering the question whether
Lincoln should be re-elected. They were those who cherished in their
minds an ideal of statesmanship and of personal bearing in high office
with which, in their opinion, Lincoln’s individuality was much out of
accord. They were shocked when they heard him cap an argument upon grave
affairs of state with a story about “a man out in Sangamon County,”—a
story, to be sure, strikingly clinching his point, but sadly lacking in
dignity. They could not understand the man who was capable, in opening
a cabinet meeting, of reading to his secretaries a funny chapter from a
recent book of Artemus Ward, with which in an unoccupied moment he had
relieved his care-burdened mind, and who then solemnly informed the
executive council that he had vowed in his heart to issue a proclamation
emancipating the slaves as soon as God blessed the Union arms with
another victory. They were alarmed at the weakness of a President who
would indeed resist the urgent remonstrances of statesmen against his
policy, but could not resist the prayer of an old woman for the pardon
of a soldier who was sentenced to be shot for desertion. Such men,
mostly sincere and ardent patriots, not only wished, but earnestly set
to work, to prevent Lincoln’s renomination. Not a few of them actually
believed, in 1863, that, if the national convention of the Union party
were held then, Lincoln would not be supported by the delegation of a
single State. But when the convention met at Baltimore, in June, 1864,
the voice of the people was heard. On the first ballot Lincoln received
the votes of the delegations from all the States except Missouri; and
even the Missourians turned over their votes to him before the result of
the ballot was declared.

But even after his renomination the opposition to Lincoln within the
ranks of the Union party did not subside. A convention, called by the
dissatisfied radicals in Missouri, and favored by men of a similar
way of thinking in other States, had been held already in May, and
had nominated as its candidate for the Presidency General Fremont. He,
indeed, did not attract a strong following, but opposition movements
from different quarters appeared more formidable. Henry Winter Davis and
Benjamin Wade assailed Lincoln in a flaming manifesto. Other Union men,
of undoubted patriotism and high standing, persuaded themselves, and
sought to persuade the people, that Lincoln’s renomination was ill
advised and dangerous to the Union cause. As the Democrats had put off
their convention until the 29th of August, the Union party had, during
the larger part of the summer, no opposing candidate and platform to
attack, and the political campaign languished. Neither were the tidings
from the theatre of war of a cheering character. The terrible losses
suffered by Grant’s army in the battles of the Wilderness spread general
gloom. Sherman seemed for a while to be in a precarious position before
Atlanta. The opposition to Lincoln within the Union party grew louder in
its complaints and discouraging predictions. Earnest demands were heard
that his candidacy should be withdrawn. Lincoln himself, not knowing
how strongly the masses were attached to him, was haunted by dark
forebodings of defeat. Then the scene suddenly changed as if by magic.

The Democrats, in their national convention, declared the war a failure,
demanded, substantially, peace at any price, and nominated on such a
platform General McClellan as their candidate. Their convention had
hardly adjourned when the capture of Atlanta gave a new aspect to the
military situation. It was like a sun-ray bursting through a dark
cloud. The rank and file of the Union party rose with rapidly growing
enthusiasm. The song “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred
thousand strong,” resounded all over the land. Long before the decisive
day arrived, the result was beyond doubt, and Lincoln was re-elected
President by overwhelming majorities. The election over even his
severest critics found themselves forced to admit that Lincoln was the
only possible candidate for the Union party in 1864, and that neither
political combinations nor campaign speeches, nor even victories in the
field, were needed to insure his success. The plain people had all the
while been satisfied with Abraham Lincoln: they confided in him; they
loved him; they felt themselves near to him; they saw personified in him
the cause of Union and freedom; and they went to the ballot-box for him
in their strength.

The hour of triumph called out the characteristic impulses of his
nature. The opposition within the Union party had stung him to the
quick. Now he had his opponents before him, baffled and humiliated. Not
a moment did he lose to stretch out the hand of friendship to all. “Now
that the election is over,” he said, in response to a serenade, “may not
all, having a common interest, reunite in a common effort to save our
common country? For my own part, I have striven, and will strive, to
place no obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not
willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom. While I am deeply
sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, it adds nothing to
my satisfaction that any other man may be pained or disappointed by the
result. May I ask those who were with me to join with me in the same
spirit toward those who were against me?” This was Abraham Lincoln’s
character as tested in the furnace of prosperity.

The war was virtually decided, but not yet ended. Sherman was
irresistibly carrying the Union flag through the South. Grant had his
iron hand upon the ramparts of Richmond. The days of the Confederacy
were evidently numbered. Only the last blow remained to be struck. Then
Lincoln’s second inauguration came, and with it his second inaugural
address. Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg speech” has been much and justly
admired. But far greater, as well as far more characteristic, was that
inaugural in which he poured out the whole devotion and tenderness of
his great soul. It had all the solemnity of a father’s last admonition
and blessing to his children before he lay down to die. These were
its closing words: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondman’s two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice
toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God
gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the
battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve
and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations.”

This was like a sacred poem. No American President had ever spoken words
like these to the American people. America never had a President who
found such words in the depth of his heart.

Now followed the closing scenes of the war. 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. We are told that they pressed
around him, kissed his hands and his garments, and shouted and danced
for joy, while tears ran down the President’s care-furrowed cheeks.

A few days more brought the surrender of Lee’s army, and peace was
assured. The people of the North were wild with joy. Everywhere
festive guns were booming, bells pealing, the churches ringing with
thanksgivings, and jubilant multitudes thronging the thoroughfares, when
suddenly the news flashed over the land that Abraham Lincoln had been
murdered. The people were stunned by the blow. Then a wail of sorrow
went up such as America had never heard before. Thousands of Northern
households grieved as if they had lost their dearest member. Many a
Southern man cried out in his heart that his people had been robbed
of their best friend in their humiliation and distress, when Abraham
Lincoln was struck down. It was as if the tender affection which his
countrymen bore him had inspired all nations with a common sentiment.
All civilized mankind stood mourning around the coffin of the dead
President. Many of those, here and abroad, who not long before had
ridiculed and reviled him were among the first to hasten on with their
flowers of eulogy, and in that universal chorus of lamentation and
praise there was not a voice that did not tremble with genuine emotion.
Never since Washington’s death had there been such unanimity of judgment
as to a man’s virtues and greatness; and even Washington’s death,
although his name was held in greater reverence, did not touch so
sympathetic a chord in the people’s hearts.

Nor can it be said that this was owing to the tragic character of
Lincoln’s end. It is true, the death of this gentlest and most merciful
of rulers by the hand of a mad fanatic was well apt to exalt him beyond
his merits in the estimation of those who loved him, and to make his
renown the object of peculiarly tender solicitude. But it is also true
that the verdict pronounced upon him in those days has been affected
little by time, and that historical inquiry has served rather to
increase than to lessen the appreciation of his virtues, his abilities,
his services. Giving the fullest measure of credit to his great
ministers,—to Seward for his conduct of foreign affairs, to Chase for
the management of the finances under terrible difficulties, to Stanton
for the performance of his tremendous task as war secretary,—and
readily acknowledging that without the skill and fortitude of the great
commanders, and the heroism of the soldiers and sailors under them,
success could not have been achieved, the historian still finds that
Lincoln’s judgment and will were by no means governed by those around
him; that the most important steps were owing to his initiative; that
his was the deciding and directing mind; and that it was pre-eminently
he whose sagacity and whose character enlisted for the administration
in its struggles the countenance, the sympathy, and the support of the
people. It is found, even, that his judgment on military matters was
astonishingly acute, and that the advice and instructions he gave to the
generals commanding in the field would not seldom have done honor to the
ablest of them. History, therefore, without overlooking, or palliating,
or excusing any of his shortcomings or mistakes, continues to place
him foremost among the saviours of the Union and the liberators of the
slave. More than that, it awards to him the merit of having accomplished
what but few political philosophers would have recognized as
possible,—of leading the republic through four years of furious civil
conflict without any serious detriment to its free institutions.

He was, indeed, while President, violently denounced by the opposition
as a tyrant and a usurper, for having gone beyond his constitutional
powers in authorizing or permitting the temporary suppression of
newspapers, and in wantonly suspending the writ of habeas corpus and
resorting to arbitrary arrests. Nobody should be blamed who, when such
things are done, in good faith and from patriotic motives protests
against them. In a republic, arbitrary stretches of power, even when
demanded by necessity, should never be permitted to pass without a
protest on the one hand, and without an apology on the other. It is well
they did not so pass during our civil war. That arbitrary measures were
resorted to is true. That they were resorted to most sparingly, and only
when the government thought them absolutely required by the safety of
the republic, will now hardly be denied. But certain it is that the
history of the world does not furnish a single example of a government
passing through so tremendous a crisis as our civil war was with so
small a record of arbitrary acts, and so little interference with the
ordinary course of law outside the field of military operations. No
American President ever wielded such power as that which was thrust into
Lincoln’s hands. It is to be hoped that no American President ever
will have to be entrusted with such power again. But no man was ever
entrusted with it to whom its seductions were less dangerous than they
proved to be to Abraham Lincoln. With scrupulous care he endeavored,
even under the most trying circumstances, to remain strictly within the
constitutional limitations of his authority; and whenever the boundary
became indistinct, or when the dangers of the situation forced him
to cross it, he was equally careful to mark his acts as exceptional
measures, justifiable only by the imperative necessities of the civil
war, so that they might not pass into history as precedents for similar
acts in time of peace. It is an unquestionable fact that during the
reconstruction period which followed the war, more things were done
capable of serving as dangerous precedents than during the war itself.
Thus it may truly be said of him not only that under his guidance the
republic was saved from disruption and the country was purified of the
blot of slavery, but that, during the stormiest and most perilous crisis
in our history, he so conducted the government and so wielded his almost
dictatorial power as to leave essentially intact our free institutions
in all things that concern the rights and liberties of the citizens.
He understood well the nature of the problem. In his first message to
Congress he defined it in admirably pointed language: “Must a government
be of necessity too strong for the liberties of its own people, or
too weak to maintain its own existence? Is there in all republics this
inherent weakness?” This question he answered in the name of the great
American republic, as no man could have answered it better, with a
triumphant “No....”

It has been said that Abraham Lincoln died at the right moment for his
fame. However that may be, he had, at the time of his death, certainly
not exhausted his usefulness to his country. He was probably the only
man who could have guided the nation through the perplexities of the
reconstruction period in such a manner as to prevent in the work of
peace the revival of the passions of the war. He would indeed not have
escaped serious controversy as to details of policy; but he could have
weathered it far better than any other statesman of his time, for his
prestige with the active politicians had been immensely strengthened by
his triumphant re-election; and, what is more important, he would have
been supported by the confidence of the victorious Northern people that
he would do all to secure the safety of the Union and the rights of
the emancipated negro, and at the same time by the confidence of the
defeated Southern people that nothing would be done by him from motives
of vindictiveness, or of unreasoning fanaticism, or of a selfish party
spirit. “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” the foremost
of the victors would have personified in himself the genius of
reconciliation.

He might have rendered the country a great service in another direction.
A few days after the fall of Richmond, he pointed out to a friend the
crowd of office-seekers besieging his door. “Look at that,” said he.
“Now we have conquered the rebellion, but here you see something that
may become more dangerous to this republic than the rebellion itself.”
It is true, Lincoln as President did not profess what we now call civil
service reform principles. He used the patronage of the government
in many cases avowedly to reward party work, in many others to form
combinations and to produce political effects advantageous to the Union
cause, and in still others simply to put the right man into the right
place. But in his endeavors to strengthen the Union cause, and in his
search for able and useful men for public duties, he frequently went
beyond the limits of his party, and gradually accustomed himself to the
thought that, while party service had its value, considerations of
the public interest were, as to appointments to office, of far greater
consequence. Moreover, there had been such a mingling of different
political elements in support of the Union during the civil war that
Lincoln, standing at the head of that temporarily united motley mass,
hardly felt himself, in the narrow sense of the term, a party man.
And as he became strongly impressed with the dangers brought upon the
republic by the use of public offices as party spoils, it is by no means
improbable that, had he survived the all-absorbing crisis and found time
to turn to other objects, one of the most important reforms of later
days would have been pioneered by his powerful authority. This was
not to be. But the measure of his achievements was full enough for
immortality.

To the younger generation Abraham Lincoln has already become a
half-mythical figure, which, in the haze of historic distance, grows
to more and more heroic proportions, but also loses in distinctness of
outline and feature. This is indeed the common lot of popular heroes;
but the Lincoln legend will be more than ordinarily apt to become
fanciful, as his individuality, assembling seemingly incongruous
qualities and forces in a character at the same time grand and most
lovable, was so unique, and his career so abounding in startling
contrasts. As the state of society in which Abraham Lincoln grew up
passes away, the world will read with increasing wonder of the man who,
not only of the humblest origin, but remaining the simplest and
most unpretending of citizens, was raised to a position of power
unprecedented in our history; who was the gentlest and most peace-loving
of mortals, unable to see any creature suffer without a pang in his own
breast, and suddenly found himself called to conduct the greatest and
bloodiest of our wars; who wielded the power of government when stern
resolution and relentless force were the order of the day and then won
and ruled the popular mind and heart by the tender sympathies of his
nature; who was a cautious conservative by temperament and mental habit,
and led the most sudden and sweeping social revolution of our time;
who, preserving his homely speech and rustic manner even in the most
conspicuous position of that period, drew upon himself the scoffs of
polite society, and then thrilled the soul of mankind with utterances of
wonderful beauty and grandeur; who, in his heart the best friend of the
defeated South, was murdered because a crazy fanatic took him for its
most cruel enemy; who, while in power, was beyond measure lampooned and
maligned by sectional passion and an excited party spirit, and around
whose bier friend and foe gathered to praise him which they have since
never ceased to do—as one of the greatest of Americans and the best of
men.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, BY JOSEPH H. CHOATE


[This Address was delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophical
Institution, November 13, 1900. It is included in this set with the
courteous permission of the author and of Messrs. Thomas Y. Crowell &
Company.]


ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

When you asked me to deliver the Inaugural Address on this occasion,
I recognized that I owed this compliment to the fact that I was the
official representative of America, and in selecting a subject I
ventured to think that I might interest you for an hour in a brief study
in popular government, as illustrated by the life of the most American
of all Americans. I therefore offer no apology for asking your attention
to Abraham Lincoln—to his unique character and the part he bore in
two important achievements of modern history: the preservation of the
integrity of the American Union and the emancipation of the colored
race.

During his brief term of power he was probably the object of more abuse,
vilification, and ridicule than any other man in the world; but when he
fell by the hand of an assassin, at the very moment of his stupendous
victory, all the nations of the earth vied with one another in paying
homage to his character, and the thirty-five years that have since
elapsed have established his place in history as one of the great
benefactors not of his own country alone, but of the human race.

One of many noble utterances upon the occasion of his death was that in
which ‘Punch’ made its magnanimous recantation of the spirit with which
it had pursued him:

  “Beside this corpse that bears for winding sheet
   The stars and stripes he lived to rear anew,
   Between the mourners at his head and feet,
   Say, scurrile jester, is there room for you?

          ...................

  “Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
   To lame my pencil, and confute my pen
   To make me own this hind—of princes peer,
   This rail-splitter—a true born king of men.”

Fiction can furnish no match for the romance of his life, and biography
will be searched in vain for such startling vicissitudes of fortune,
so great power and glory won out of such humble beginnings and adverse
circumstances.

Doubtless you are all familiar with the salient points of his
extraordinary career. In the zenith of his fame he was the wise,
patient, courageous, successful ruler of men; exercising more power than
any monarch of his time, not for himself, but for the good of the people
who had placed it in his hands; commander-in-chief of a vast military
power, which waged with ultimate success the greatest war of the
century; the triumphant champion of popular government, the deliverer
of four millions of his fellowmen from bondage; honored by mankind as
Statesman, President, and Liberator.

Let us glance now at the first half of the brief life of which this was
the glorious and happy consummation. Nothing could be more squalid and
miserable than the home in which Abraham Lincoln was born—a one-roomed
cabin without floor or window in what was then the wilderness of
Kentucky, in the heart of that frontier life which swiftly moved
westward from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, always in advance of
schools and churches, of books and money, of railroads and newspapers,
of all things which are generally regarded as the comforts and even
necessaries of life. His father, ignorant, needy, and thriftless,
content if he could keep soul and body together for himself and his
family, was ever seeking, without success, to better his unhappy
condition by moving on from one such scene of dreary desolation to
another. The rude society which surrounded them was not much better. The
struggle for existence was hard, and absorbed all their energies. They
were fighting the forest, the wild beast, and the retreating savage.
From the time when he could barely handle tools until he attained his
majority, Lincoln’s life was that of a simple farm laborer, poorly clad,
housed, and fed, at work either on his father’s wretched farm or hired
out to neighboring farmers. But in spite, or perhaps by means, of this
rude environment, he grew to be a stalwart giant, reaching six feet four
at nineteen, and fabulous stories are told of his feats of strength.
With the growth of this mighty frame began that strange education which
in his ripening years was to qualify him for the great destiny that
awaited him, and the development of those mental faculties and moral
endowments which, by the time he reached middle life, were to make him
the sagacious, patient, and triumphant leader of a great nation in the
crisis of its fate. His whole schooling, obtained during such odd times
as could be spared from grinding labor, did not amount in all to as much
as one year, and the quality of the teaching was of the lowest possible
grade, including only the elements of reading, writing, and ciphering.
But out of these simple elements, when rightly used by the right man,
education is achieved, and Lincoln knew how to use them. As so often
happens, he seemed to take warning from his father’s unfortunate
example. Untiring industry, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and
an ever-growing desire to rise above his surroundings, were early
manifestations of his character.

Books were almost unknown in that community, but the Bible was in
every house, and somehow or other Pilgrim’s Progress, AEsop’s Fables,
a History of the United States, and a Life of Washington fell into his
hands. He trudged on foot many miles through the wilderness to borrow an
English Grammar, and is said to have devoured greedily the contents of
the Statutes of Indiana that fell in his way. These few volumes he read
and reread—and his power of assimilation was great. To be shut in with
a few books and to master them thoroughly sometimes does more for the
development of character than freedom to range at large, in a cursory
and indiscriminate way, through wide domains of literature. This youth’s
mind, at any rate, was thoroughly saturated with Biblical knowledge and
Biblical language, which, in after life, he used with great readiness
and effect. But it was the constant use of the little knowledge which he
had that developed and exercised his mental powers. After the hard
day’s work was done, while others slept, he toiled on, always reading or
writing. From an early age he did his own thinking and made up his own
mind—invaluable traits in the future President. Paper was such a scarce
commodity that, by the evening firelight, he would write and cipher
on the back of a wooden shovel, and then shave it off to make room for
more. By and by, as he approached manhood, he began speaking in the rude
gatherings of the neighborhood, and so laid the foundation of that art
of persuading his fellow-men which was one rich result of his education,
and one great secret of his subsequent success.

Accustomed as we are in these days of steam and telegraphs to have every
intelligent boy survey the whole world each morning before breakfast,
and inform himself as to what is going on in every nation, it is hardly
possible to conceive how benighted and isolated was the condition of the
community at Pigeon Creek in Indiana, of which the family of Lincoln’s
father formed a part, or how eagerly an ambitious and high-spirited boy,
such as he, must have yearned to escape. The first glimpse that he ever
got of any world beyond the narrow confines of his home was in 1828, at
the age of nineteen, when a neighbor employed him to accompany his son
down the river to New Orleans to dispose of a flatboat of produce—a
commission which he discharged with great success.

Shortly after his return from this his first excursion into the outer
world, his father, tired of failure in Indiana, packed his family and
all his worldly goods into a single wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen, and
after a fourteen days’ tramp through the wilderness, pitched his camp
once more, in Illinois. Here Abraham, having come of age and being now
his own master, rendered the last service of his minority by ploughing
the fifteen-acre lot and splitting from the tall walnut trees of the
primeval forest enough rails to surround the little clearing with a
fence. Such was the meagre outfit of this coming leader of men, at the
age when the future British Prime Minister or statesman emerges from the
university as a double first or senior wrangler, with every advantage
that high training and broad culture and association with the wisest and
the best of men and women can give, and enters upon some form of public
service on the road to usefulness and honor, the University course being
only the first stage of the public training. So Lincoln, at twenty-one,
had just begun his preparation for the public life to which he soon
began to aspire. For some years yet he must continue to earn his daily
bread by the sweat of his brow, having absolutely no means, no home,
no friend to consult. More farm work as a hired hand, a clerkship in a
village store, the running of a mill, another trip to New Orleans on a
flatboat of his own contriving, a pilot’s berth on the river—these were
the means by which he subsisted until, in the summer of 1832, when he
was twenty-three years of age, an event occurred which gave him public
recognition.

The Black Hawk war broke out, and, the Governor of Illinois calling for
volunteers to repel the band of savages whose leader bore that name,
Lincoln enlisted and was elected captain by his comrades, among whom he
had already established his supremacy by signal feats of strength and
more than one successful single combat. During the brief hostilities
he was engaged in no battle and won no military glory, but his local
leadership was established. The same year he offered himself as a
candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, but failed at the polls. Yet
his vast popularity with those who knew him was manifest. The district
consisted of several counties, but the unanimous vote of the people
of his own county was for Lincoln. Another unsuccessful attempt at
store-keeping was followed by better luck at surveying, until his horse
and instruments were levied upon under execution for the debts of his
business adventure.

I have been thus detailed in sketching his early years because upon
these strange foundations the structure of his great fame and service
was built. In the place of a school and university training fortune
substituted these trials, hardships, and struggles as a preparation for
the great work which he had to do. It turned out to be exactly what
the emergency required. Ten years instead at the public school and the
university certainly never could have fitted this man for the unique
work which was to be thrown upon him. Some other Moses would have had to
lead us to our Jordan, to the sight of our promised land of liberty.

At the age of twenty-five he became a member of the Legislature of
Illinois, and so continued for eight years, and, in the meantime,
qualified himself by reading such law books as he could borrow at
random—for he was too poor to buy any to be called to the Bar. For
his second quarter of a century—during which a single term in Congress
introduced him into the arena of national questions—he gave himself up
to law and politics. In spite of his soaring ambition, his two years
in Congress gave him no premonition of the great destiny that awaited
him,—and at its close, in 1849, we find him an unsuccessful applicant
to the President for appointment as Commissioner of the General Land
Office—a purely administrative bureau; a fortunate escape for
himself and for his country. Year by year his knowledge and power, his
experience and reputation extended, and his mental faculties seemed to
grow by what they fed on. His power of persuasion, which had always been
marked, was developed to an extraordinary degree, now that he became
engaged in congenial questions and subjects. Little by little he rose to
prominence at the Bar, and became the most effective public speaker in
the West. Not that he possessed any of the graces of the orator; but his
logic was invincible, and his clearness and force of statement impressed
upon his hearers the convictions of his honest mind, while his broad
sympathies and sparkling and genial humor made him a universal favorite
as far and as fast as his acquaintance extended.

These twenty years that elapsed from the time of his establishment as
a lawyer and legislator in Springfield, the new capital of Illinois,
furnished a fitting theatre for the development and display of his great
faculties, and, with his new and enlarged opportunities, he obviously
grew in mental stature in this second period of his career, as if
to compensate for the absolute lack of advantages under which he had
suffered in youth. As his powers enlarged, his reputation extended,
for he was always before the people, felt a warm sympathy with all that
concerned them, took a zealous part in the discussion of every public
question, and made his personal influence ever more widely and deeply
felt.

My brethren of the legal profession will naturally ask me, how could
this rough backwoodsman, whose youth had been spent in the forest or
on the farm and the flatboat, without culture or training, education or
study, by the random reading, on the wing, of a few miscellaneous law
books, become a learned and accomplished lawyer? Well, he never did.
He never would have earned his salt as a ‘Writer’ for the ‘Signet’,
nor have won a place as advocate in the Court of Session, where the
technique of the profession has reached its highest perfection, and
centuries of learning and precedent are involved in the equipment of a
lawyer. Dr. Holmes, when asked by an anxious young mother, “When should
the education of a child begin?” replied, “Madam, at least two centuries
before it is born!” and so I am sure it is with the Scots lawyer.

But not so in Illinois in 1840. Between 1830 and 1880 its population
increased twenty-fold, and when Lincoln began practising law in
Springfield in 1837, life in Illinois was very crude and simple, and so
were the courts and the administration of justice. Books and libraries
were scarce. But the people loved justice, upheld the law, and followed
the courts, and soon found their favorites among the advocates. The
fundamental principles of the common law, as set forth by Blackstone
and Chitty, were not so difficult to acquire; and brains, common sense,
force of character, tenacity of purpose, ready wit and power of speech
did the rest, and supplied all the deficiencies of learning.

The lawsuits of those days were extremely simple, and the principles of
natural justice were mainly relied on to dispose of them at the Bar
and on the Bench, without resort to technical learning. Railroads,
corporations absorbing the chief business of the community, combined
and inherited wealth, with all the subtle and intricate questions they
breed, had not yet come in—and so the professional agents and the
equipment which they require were not needed. But there were many highly
educated and powerful men at the Bar of Illinois, even in those early
days, whom the spirit of enterprise had carried there in search of fame
and fortune. It was by constant contact and conflict with these that
Lincoln acquired professional strength and skill. Every community and
every age creates its own Bar, entirely adequate for its present uses
and necessities. So in Illinois, as the population and wealth of the
State kept on doubling and quadrupling, its Bar presented a growing
abundance of learning and science and technical skill. The early
practitioners grew with its growth and mastered the requisite knowledge.
Chicago soon grew to be one of the largest and richest and certainly
the most intensely active city on the continent, and if any of my
professional friends here had gone there in Lincoln’s later years, to
try or argue a cause, or transact other business, with any idea that
Edinburgh or London had a monopoly of legal learning, science, or
subtlety, they would certainly have found their mistake.

In those early days in the West, every lawyer, especially every court
lawyer, was necessarily a politician, constantly engaged in the public
discussion of the many questions evolved from the rapid development
of town, county, State, and Federal affairs. Then and there, in this
regard, public discussion supplied the place which the universal
activity of the press has since monopolized, and the public speaker who,
by clearness, force, earnestness, and wit; could make himself felt on
the questions of the day would rapidly come to the front. In the absence
of that immense variety of popular entertainments which now feed the
public taste and appetite, the people found their chief amusement in
frequenting the courts and public and political assemblies. In either
place, he who impressed, entertained, and amused them most was the
hero of the hour. They did not discriminate very carefully between the
eloquence of the forum and the eloquence of the hustings. Human nature
ruled in both alike, and he who was the most effective speaker in a
political harangue was often retained as most likely to win in a cause
to be tried or argued. And I have no doubt in this way many retainers
came to Lincoln. Fees, money in any form, had no charms for him—in
his eager pursuit of fame he could not afford to make money. He was
ambitious to distinguish himself by some great service to mankind, and
this ambition for fame and real public service left no room for avarice
in his composition. However much he earned, he seems to have ended every
year hardly richer than he began it, and yet, as the years passed,
fees came to him freely. One of L 1,000 is recorded—a very large
professional fee at that time, even in any part of America, the paradise
of lawyers. I lay great stress on Lincoln’s career as a lawyer—much
more than his biographers do because in America a state of things
exists wholly different from that which prevails in Great Britain. The
profession of the law always has been and is to this day the principal
avenue to public life; and I am sure that his training and experience
in the courts had much to do with the development of those forces of
intellect and character which he soon displayed on a broader arena.

It was in political controversy, of course, that he acquired his wide
reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression upon the people of
what had now become the powerful State of Illinois, and upon the people
of the Great West, to whom the political power and control of the United
States were already surely and swiftly passing from the older Eastern
States. It was this reputation and this impression, and the familiar
knowledge of his character which had come to them from his local
leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West to present him
as their candidate, and to press him upon the Republican convention of
1860 as the fit and necessary leader in the struggle for life which was
before the nation.

That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible question of
slavery—and I must trust to your general knowledge of the history
of that question to make intelligible the attitude and leadership of
Lincoln as the champion of the hosts of freedom in the final contest.
Negro slavery had been firmly established in the Southern States from
an early period of their history. In 1619, the year before the Mayflower
landed our Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had
discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown in Virginia: All
through the colonial period their importation had continued. A few had
found their way into the Northern States, but none of them in sufficient
numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis for political power.
At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there is no
doubt that the principal members of the convention not only condemned
slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, but believed that by
the suppression of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual
extinction in the South, as it certainly was in the North. Washington,
in his will, provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and
said to Jefferson that it “was among his first wishes to see some plan
adopted by which slavery in his country might be abolished.” Jefferson
said, referring to the institution: “I tremble for my country when I
think that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever,”—and
Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry were all utterly opposed
to it. But it was made the subject of a fatal compromise in the Federal
Constitution, whereby its existence was recognized in the States as a
basis of representation, the prohibition of the importation of slaves
was postponed for twenty years, and the return of fugitive slaves
provided for. But no imminent danger was apprehended from it till, by
the invention of the cotton gin in 1792, cotton culture by negro labor
became at once and forever the leading industry of the South, and gave
a new impetus to the importation of slaves, so that in 1808, when
the constitutional prohibition took effect, their numbers had vastly
increased. From that time forward slavery became the basis of a great
political power, and the Southern States, under all circumstances and at
every opportunity, carried on a brave and unrelenting struggle for its
maintenance and extension.

The conscience of the North was slow to rise against it, though bitter
controversies from time to time took place. The Southern leaders
threatened disunion if their demands were not complied with. To save the
Union, compromise after compromise was made, but each one in the end was
broken. The Missouri Compromise, made in 1820 upon the occasion of
the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave State, whereby, in
consideration of such admission, slavery was forever excluded from the
Northwest Territory, was ruthlessly repealed in 1854, by a Congress
elected in the interests of the slave power, the intent being to force
slavery into that vast territory which had so long been dedicated to
freedom. This challenge at last aroused the slumbering conscience and
passion of the North, and led to the formation of the Republican party
for the avowed purpose of preventing, by constitutional methods, the
further extension of slavery.

In its first campaign, in 1856, though it failed to elect its
candidates; it received a surprising vote and carried many of the
States. No one could any longer doubt that the North had made up its
mind that no threats of disunion should deter it from pressing its
cherished purpose and performing its long neglected duty. From the
outset, Lincoln was one of the most active and effective leaders and
speakers of the new party, and the great debates between Lincoln and
Douglas in 1858, as the respective champions of the restriction and
extension of slavery, attracted the attention of the whole country.
Lincoln’s powerful arguments carried conviction everywhere. His moral
nature was thoroughly aroused his conscience was stirred to the quick.
Unless slavery was wrong, nothing was wrong. Was each man, of whatever
color, entitled to the fruits of his own labor, or could one man live
in idle luxury by the sweat of another’s brow, whose skin was darker?
He was an implicit believer in that principle of the Declaration of
Independence that all men are vested with certain inalienable rights
the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. On this
doctrine he staked his case and carried it. We have time only for one or
two sentences in which he struck the keynote of the contest.

“The real issue in this country is the eternal struggle between these
two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two
principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and
will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity,
and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in
whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You
work and toil and earn bread and I’ll eat it.’”

He foresaw with unerring vision that the conflict was inevitable and
irrepressible—that one or the other, the right or the wrong, freedom
or slavery, must ultimately prevail and wholly prevail, throughout the
country; and this was the principle that carried the war, once begun, to
a finish.

One sentence of his is immortal:

“Under the operation of the policy of compromise, the slavery agitation
has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion
it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘A
house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government
cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect
the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do
expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or
all the other; either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates
will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the
States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

During the entire decade from 1850 to 1860 the agitation of the
slavery question was at the boiling point, and events which have become
historical continually indicated the near approach of the overwhelming
storm. No sooner had the Compromise Acts of 1850 resulted in a temporary
peace, which everybody said must be final and perpetual, than new
outbreaks came. The forcible carrying away of fugitive slaves by Federal
troops from Boston agitated that ancient stronghold of freedom to its
foundations. The publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which truly exposed
the frightful possibilities of the slave system; the reckless attempts
by force and fraud to establish it in Kansas against the will of the
vast majority of the settlers; the beating of Summer in the Senate
Chamber for words spoken in debate; the Dred Scott decision in the
Supreme Court, which made the nation realize that the slave power had at
last reached the fountain of Federal justice; and finally the execution
of John Brown, for his wild raid into Virginia, to invite the slaves to
rally to the standard of freedom which he unfurled:—all these events
tend to illustrate and confirm Lincoln’s contention that the nation
could not permanently continue half slave and half free, but must become
all one thing or all the other. When John Brown lay under sentence of
death he declared that now he was sure that slavery must be wiped out in
blood; but neither he nor his executioners dreamt that within four years
a million soldiers would be marching across the country for its final
extirpation, to the music of the war-song of the great conflict:

   “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
   But his soul is marching on.”

And now, at the age of fifty-one, this child of the wilderness, this
farm laborer, rail-sputter, flatboatman, this surveyor, lawyer, orator,
statesman, and patriot, found himself elected by the great party which
was pledged to prevent at all hazards the further extension of slavery,
as the chief magistrate of the Republic, bound to carry out that
purpose, to be the leader and ruler of the nation in its most trying
hour.

Those who believe that there is a living Providence that overrules and
conducts the affairs of nations, find in the elevation of this plain man
to this extraordinary fortune and to this great duty, which he so
fitly discharged, a signal vindication of their faith. Perhaps to this
philosophical institution the judgment of our philosopher Emerson will
commend itself as a just estimate of Lincoln’s historical place.

“His occupying the chair of state was a triumph of the good sense of
mankind and of the public conscience. He grew according to the need; his
mind mastered the problem of the day: and as the problem grew, so did
his comprehension of it. In the war there was no place for holiday
magistrate, nor fair-weather sailor. The new pilot was hurried to
the helm in a tornado. In four years—four years of battle days—his
endurance, his fertility of resource, his magnanimity, were sorely
tried, and never found wanting. There, by his courage, his justice, his
even temper, his fertile counsel, his humanity, he stood a heroic figure
in the centre of a heroic epoch. He is the true history of the American
people in his time, the true representative of this continent—father
of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the
thought of their mind—articulated in his tongue.”

He was born great, as distinguished from those who achieve greatness or
have it thrust upon them, and his inherent capacity, mental, moral, and
physical, having been recognized by the educated intelligence of a free
people, they happily chose him for their ruler in a day of deadly peril.

It is now forty years since I first saw and heard Abraham Lincoln, but
the impression which he left on my mind is ineffaceable. After his great
successes in the West he came to New York to make a political address.
He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people
among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing
impressive or imposing about him—except that his great stature singled
him out from the crowd: his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame;
his face was of a dark pallor, without the slightest tinge of color; his
seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle;
his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave
little evidence of that brain power which had raised him from the lowest
to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before
the meeting, he seemed ill at ease, with that sort of apprehension which
a young man might feel before presenting himself to a new and strange
audience, whose critical disposition he dreaded. It was a great
audience, including all the noted men—all the learned and cultured of
his party in New York editors, clergymen, statesmen, lawyers, merchants,
critics. They were all very curious to hear him. His fame as a powerful
speaker had preceded him, and exaggerated rumor of his wit—the worst
forerunner of an orator—had reached the East. When Mr. Bryant presented
him, on the high platform of the Cooper Institute, a vast sea of eager
upturned faces greeted him, full of intense curiosity to see what this
rude child of the people was like. He was equal to the occasion. When
he spoke he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face
shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half
he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and
manner of delivery were severely simple. What Lowell called “the
grand simplicities of the Bible,” with which he was so familiar, were
reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric,
without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point. If any came
expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they
must have been startled at the earnest and sincere purity of his
utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere
self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all
meretricious arts, and found his own way to the grandeur and strength of
absolute simplicity.

He spoke upon the theme which he had mastered so thoroughly. He
demonstrated by copious historical proofs and masterly logic that the
fathers who created the Constitution in order to form a more perfect
union, to establish justice, and to secure the blessings of liberty
to themselves and their posterity, intended to empower the Federal
Government to exclude slavery from the Territories. In the kindliest
spirit he protested against the avowed threat of the Southern States to
destroy the Union if, in order to secure freedom in those vast regions
out of which future States were to be carved, a Republican President
were elected. He closed with an appeal to his audience, spoken with all
the fire of his aroused and kindling conscience, with a full outpouring
of his love of justice and liberty, to maintain their political purpose
on that lofty and unassailable issue of right and wrong which alone
could justify it, and not to be intimidated from their high resolve and
sacred duty by any threats of destruction to the government or of ruin
to themselves. He concluded with this telling sentence, which drove the
whole argument home to all our hearts: “Let us have faith that right
makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as
we understand it.” That night the great hall, and the next day the whole
city, rang with delighted applause and congratulations, and he who had
come as a stranger departed with the laurels of great triumph.

Alas! in five years from that exulting night I saw him again, for the
last time, in the same city, borne in his coffin through its draped
streets. With tears and lamentations a heart-broken people accompanied
him from Washington, the scene of his martyrdom, to his last
resting-place in the young city of the West where he had worked his way
to fame.

Never was a new ruler in a more desperate plight than Lincoln when
he entered office on the fourth of March, 1861, four months after his
election, and took his oath to support the Constitution and the Union.
The intervening time had been busily employed by the Southern States in
carrying out their threat of disunion in the event of his election.
As soon as the fact was ascertained, seven of them had seceded and had
seized upon the forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other public property
of the United States within their boundaries, and were making every
preparation for war. In the meantime the retiring President, who had
been elected by the slave power, and who thought the seceding States
could not lawfully be coerced, had done absolutely nothing. Lincoln
found himself, by the Constitution, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and
Navy of the United States, but with only a remnant of either at hand.
Each was to be created on a great scale out of the unknown resources of
a nation untried in war.

In his mild and conciliatory inaugural address, while appealing to the
seceding States to return to their allegiance, he avowed his purpose to
keep the solemn oath he had taken that day, to see that the laws of the
Union were faithfully executed, and to use the troops to recover the
forts, navy yards, and other property belonging to the government. It
is probable, however, that neither side actually realized that war
was inevitable, and that the other was determined to fight, until the
assault on Fort Sumter presented the South as the first aggressor
and roused the North to use every possible resource to maintain the
government and the imperilled Union, and to vindicate the supremacy of
the flag over every inch of the territory of the United States. The
fact that Lincoln’s first proclamation called for only 75,000 troops, to
serve for three months, shows how inadequate was even his idea of what
the future had in store. But from that moment Lincoln and his loyal
supporters never faltered in their purpose. They knew they could win,
that it was their duty to win, and that for America the whole hope
of the future depended upon their winning; for now by the acts of the
seceding States the issue of the election to secure or prevent the
extension of slavery—stood transformed into a struggle to preserve or
to destroy the Union.

We cannot follow this contest. You know its gigantic proportions; that
it lasted four years instead of three months; that in its progress,
instead of 75,000 men, more than 2,000,000 were enrolled on the side
of the government alone; that the aggregate cost and loss to the nation
approximated to 1,000,000,000 pounds sterling, and that not less than
300,000 brave and precious lives were sacrificed on each side. History
has recorded how Lincoln bore himself during these four frightful years;
that he was the real President, the responsible and actual head of the
government, through it all; that he listened to all advice, heard all
parties, and then, always realizing his responsibility to God and the
nation, decided every great executive question for himself. His absolute
honesty had become proverbial long before he was President. “Honest Abe
Lincoln” was the name by which he had been known for years. His every
act attested it.

In all the grandeur of the vast power that he wielded, he never ceased
to be one of the plain people, as he always called them, never lost or
impaired his perfect sympathy with them, was always in perfect touch
with them and open to their appeals; and here lay the very secret of
his personality and of his power, for the people in turn gave him their
absolute confidence. His courage, his fortitude, his patience, his
hopefulness, were sorely tried but never exhausted.

He was true as steel to his generals, but had frequent occasion to
change them, as he found them inadequate. This serious and painful duty
rested wholly upon him, and was perhaps his most important function as
Commander-in-Chief; but when, at last, he recognized in General Grant
the master of the situation, the man who could and would bring the war
to a triumphant end, he gave it all over to him and upheld him with all
his might. Amid all the pressure and distress that the burdens of office
brought upon him, his unfailing sense of humor saved him; probably it
made it possible for him to live under the burden. He had always been
the great story-teller of the West, and he used and cultivated this
faculty to relieve the weight of the load he bore.

It enabled him to keep the wonderful record of never having lost his
temper, no matter what agony he had to bear. A whole night might be
spent in recounting the stories of his wit, humor, and harmless sarcasm.
But I will recall only two of his sayings, both about General Grant, who
always found plenty of enemies and critics to urge the President to oust
him from his command. One, I am sure, will interest all Scotchmen. They
repeated with malicious intent the gossip that Grant drank. “What
does he drink?” asked Lincoln. “Whiskey,” was, of course, the answer;
doubtless you can guess the brand. “Well,” said the President, “just
find out what particular kind he uses and I’ll send a barrel to each of
my other generals.” The other must be as pleasing to the British as
to the American ear. When pressed again on other grounds to get rid of
Grant, he declared, “I can’t spare that man, he fights!”

He was tender-hearted to a fault, and never could resist the appeals of
wives and mothers of soldiers who had got into trouble and were under
sentence of death for their offences. His Secretary of War and other
officials complained that they never could get deserters shot. As surely
as the women of the culprit’s family could get at him he always gave
way. Certainly you will all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the
suffering relatives of those who had fallen in battle. His heart bled
with theirs. Never was there a more gentle and tender utterance than his
letter to a mother who had given all her sons to her country, written at
a time when the angel of death had visited almost every household in the
land, and was already hovering over him.

“I have been shown,” he says, “in the files of the War Department a
statement that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously
on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words
of mine which should attempt to beguile you from your grief for a
loss so overwhelming but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the
consolation which may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died
to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the
lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a
sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.”

Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her queenly
and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and tender to soothe
the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.

The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted the
country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will doubtless
secure for him a foremost place in history among the philanthropists
and benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading
slavery, so many millions of his fellow-beings described in the law and
existing in fact as “chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners
and possessors, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever.”
Rarely does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service
to his kind—to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.

Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more signal instance of this
triumph of an idea than here. William Lloyd Garrison, who thirty years
before had begun his crusade for the abolition of slavery, and had lived
to see this glorious and unexpected consummation of the hopeless cause
to which he had devoted his life, well described the proclamation as
a “great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and
beneficent in its far-reaching consequences, and eminently just and
right alike to the oppressor and the oppressed.”

Lincoln had always been heart and soul opposed to slavery. Tradition
says that on the trip on the flatboat to New Orleans he formed his
first and last opinion of slavery at the sight of negroes chained and
scourged, and that then and there the iron entered into his soul. No
boy could grow to manhood in those days as a poor white in Kentucky and
Indiana, in close contact with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a
growing consciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as
of its frightful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois,
where the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution and
violently against every movement for its abolition or restriction, upon
the passage of resolutions to that effect he had the courage with one
companion to put on record his protest, “believing that the institution
of slavery is founded both in injustice and bad policy.” No great
demonstration of courage, you will say; but that was at a time when
Garrison, for his abolition utterances, had been dragged by an angry mob
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in
the very year that Lovejoy in the same State of Illinois was slain by
rioters while defending his press, from which he had printed antislavery
appeals.

In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition in the District
of Columbia, with compensation to the owners, for until they raised
treasonable hands against the life of the nation he always maintained
that the property of the slaveholders, into which they had come by two
centuries of descent, without fault on their part, ought not to be taken
away from them without just compensation. He used to say that, one way
or another, he had voted forty-two times for the Wilmot Proviso, which
Mr. Wilmot of Pennsylvania moved as an addition to every bill which
affected United States territory, “that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall ever exist in any part of the said territory,” and it is
evident that his condemnation of the system, on moral grounds as a crime
against the human race, and on political grounds as a cancer that was
sapping the vitals of the nation, and must master its whole being or
be itself extirpated, grew steadily upon him until it culminated in his
great speeches in the Illinois debate.

By the mere election of Lincoln to the Presidency, the further extension
of slavery into the Territories was rendered forever impossible—Vox
populi, vox Dei. Revolutions never go backward, and when founded on a
great moral sentiment stirring the heart of an indignant people their
edicts are irresistible and final. Had the slave power acquiesced in
that election, had the Southern States remained under the Constitution
and within the Union, and relied upon their constitutional and legal
rights, their favorite institution, immoral as it was, blighting and
fatal as it was, might have endured for another century. The great party
that had elected him, unalterably determined against its extension, was
nevertheless pledged not to interfere with its continuance in the States
where it already existed. Of course, when new regions were forever
closed against it, from its very nature it must have begun to shrink
and to dwindle; and probably gradual and compensated emancipation,
which appealed very strongly to the new President’s sense of justice and
expediency, would, in the progress of time, by a reversion to the ideas
of the founders of the Republic, have found a safe outlet for both
masters and slaves. But whom the gods wish to destroy they first make
mad, and when seven States, afterwards increased to eleven, openly
seceded from the Union, when they declared and began the war upon the
nation, and challenged its mighty power to the desperate and protracted
struggle for its life, and for the maintenance of its authority as
a nation over its territory, they gave to Lincoln and to freedom the
sublime opportunity of history.

In his first inaugural address, when as yet not a drop of precious blood
had been shed, while he held out to them the olive branch in one hand,
in the other he presented the guarantees of the Constitution, and after
reciting the emphatic resolution of the convention that nominated
him, that the maintenance inviolate of the “rights of the States, and
especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic
institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential
to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our
political fabric depend,” he reiterated this sentiment, and declared,
with no mental reservation, “that all the protection which, consistently
with the Constitution and the laws, can be given, will be cheerfully
given to all the States when lawfully demanded for whatever cause as
cheerfully to one section as to another.”

When, however, these magnanimous overtures for peace and reunion were
rejected; when the seceding States defied the Constitution and every
clause and principle of it; when they persisted in staying out of the
Union from which they had seceded, and proceeded to carve out of its
territory a new and hostile empire based on slavery; when they flew at
the throat of the nation and plunged it into the bloodiest war of the
nineteenth century the tables were turned, and the belief gradually came
to the mind of the President that if the Rebellion was not soon subdued
by force of arms, if the war must be fought out to the bitter end, then
to reach that end the salvation of the nation itself might require
the destruction of slavery wherever it existed; that if the war was to
continue on one side for Disunion, for no other purpose than to preserve
slavery, it must continue on the other side for the Union, to destroy
slavery.

As he said, “Events control me; I cannot control events,” and as the
dreadful war progressed and became more deadly and dangerous, the
unalterable conviction was forced upon him that, in order that the
frightful sacrifice of life and treasure on both sides might not be all
in vain, it had become his duty as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, as
a necessary war measure, to strike a blow at the Rebellion which,
all others failing, would inevitably lead to its annihilation, by
annihilating the very thing for which it was contending. His own words
are the best:

“I understood that my oath to preserve the Constitution to the best of
my ability imposed upon me the duty of preserving by every indispensable
means that government—that nation—of which that Constitution was the
organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the
Constitution? By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often
a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely
given to save a limb. I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional
might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the
Constitution through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I
assumed this ground and now avow it. I could not feel that to the best
of my ability I had ever tried to preserve the Constitution if to save
slavery or any minor matter I should permit the wreck of government,
country, and Constitution all together.”

And so, at last, when in his judgment the indispensable necessity had
come, he struck the fatal blow, and signed the proclamation which has
made his name immortal. By it, the President, as Commander-in-Chief in
time of actual armed rebellion, and as a fit and necessary war measure
for suppressing the rebellion, proclaimed all persons held as slaves
in the States and parts of States then in rebellion to be thenceforward
free, and declared that the executive, with the army and navy, would
recognize and maintain their freedom.

In the other great steps of the government, which led to the triumphant
prosecution of the war, he necessarily shared the responsibility and the
credit with the great statesmen who stayed up his hands in his cabinet,
with Seward, Chase and Stanton, and the rest,—and with his generals and
admirals, his soldiers and sailors, but this great act was absolutely
his own. The conception and execution were exclusively his. He laid it
before his cabinet as a measure on which his mind was made up and could
not be changed, asking them only for suggestions as to details. He chose
the time and the circumstances under which the Emancipation should be
proclaimed and when it should take effect.

It came not an hour too soon; but public opinion in the North would not
have sustained it earlier. In the first eighteen months of the war its
ravages had extended from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi. Many
victories in the West had been balanced and paralyzed by inaction
and disasters in Virginia, only partially redeemed by the bloody and
indecisive battle of Antietam; a reaction had set in from the general
enthusiasm which had swept the Northern States after the assault upon
Sumter. It could not truly be said that they had lost heart, but faction
was raising its head. Heard through the land like the blast of a
bugle, the proclamation rallied the patriotism of the country to fresh
sacrifices and renewed ardor. It was a step that could not be revoked.
It relieved the conscience of the nation from an incubus that had
oppressed it from its birth. The United States were rescued from the
false predicament in which they had been from the beginning, and the
great popular heart leaped with new enthusiasm for “Liberty and Union,
henceforth and forever, one and inseparable.” It brought not only moral
but material support to the cause of the government, for within two
years 120,000 colored troops were enlisted in the military service and
following the national flag, supported by all the loyalty of the North,
and led by its choicest spirits. One mother said, when her son was
offered the command of the first colored regiment, “If he accepts it
I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.” He was shot
heading a gallant charge of his regiment.... The Confederates replied to
a request of his friends for his body that they had “buried him under a
layer of his niggers...;” but that mother has lived to enjoy thirty-six
years of his glory, and Boston has erected its noblest monument to his
memory.

The effect of the proclamation upon the actual progress of the war was
not immediate, but wherever the Federal armies advanced they carried
freedom with them, and when the summer came round the new spirit and
force which had animated the heart of the government and people were
manifest. In the first week of July the decisive battle of Gettysburg
turned the tide of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river
free from its source to the Gulf.

On foreign nations the influence of the proclamation and of these new
victories was of great importance. In those days, when there was no
cable, it was not easy for foreign observers to appreciate what was
really going on; they could not see clearly the true state of affairs,
as in the last year of the nineteenth century we have been able, by our
new electric vision, to watch every event at the antipodes and observe
its effect. The Rebel emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention,
spared no pains to impress upon the minds of public and private men
and upon the press their own views of the character of the contest. The
prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad than at home. The
stock markets of the world gambled upon its chances, and its bonds at
one time were high in favor.

Such ideas as these were seriously held: that the North was fighting for
empire and the South for independence; that the Southern States, instead
of being the grossest oligarchies, essentially despotisms, founded on
the right of one man to appropriate the fruit of other men’s toil and to
exclude them from equal rights, were real republics, feebler to be sure
than their Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom,
and that the mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to
crush them; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had created
a nation; that the republican experiment had failed and the Union had
ceased to exist. But the crowning argument to foreign minds was that
it was an utter impossibility for the government to win in the contest;
that the success of the Southern States, so far as separation was
concerned, was as certain as any event yet future and contingent could
be; that the subjugation of the South by the North, even if it could be
accomplished, would prove a calamity to the United States and the world,
and especially calamitous to the negro race; and that such a victory
would necessarily leave the people of the South for many generations
cherishing deadly hostility against the government and the North, and
plotting always to recover their independence.

When Lincoln issued his proclamation he knew that all these ideas were
founded in error; that the national resources were inexhaustible;
that the government could and would win, and that if slavery were once
finally disposed of, the only cause of difference being out of the way,
the North and South would come together again, and by and by be as good
friends as ever. In many quarters abroad the proclamation was
welcomed with enthusiasm by the friends of America; but I think the
demonstrations in its favor that brought more gladness to Lincoln’s
heart than any other were the meetings held in the manufacturing
centres, by the very operatives upon whom the war bore the hardest,
expressing the most enthusiastic sympathy with the proclamation, while
they bore with heroic fortitude the grievous privations which the war
entailed upon them. Mr. Lincoln’s expectation when he announced to the
world that all slaves in all States then in rebellion were set free
must have been that the avowed position of his government, that the
continuance of the war now meant the annihilation of slavery, would make
intervention impossible for any foreign nation whose people were lovers
of liberty—and so the result proved.

The growth and development of Lincoln’s mental power and moral force, of
his intense and magnetic personality, after the vast responsibilities of
government were thrown upon him at the age of fifty-two, furnish a rare
and striking illustration of the marvellous capacity and adaptability of
the human intellect—of the sound mind in the sound body. He came to
the discharge of the great duties of the Presidency with absolutely no
experience in the administration of government, or of the vastly
varied and complicated questions of foreign and domestic policy which
immediately arose, and continued to press upon him during the rest of
his life; but he mastered each as it came, apparently with the facility
of a trained and experienced ruler. As Clarendon said of Cromwell, “His
parts seemed to be raised by the demands of great station.” His life
through it all was one of intense labor, anxiety, and distress, without
one hour of peaceful repose from first to last. But he rose to every
occasion. He led public opinion, but did not march so far in advance of
it as to fail of its effective support in every great emergency. He
knew the heart and thought of the people, as no man not in constant and
absolute sympathy with them could have known it, and so holding their
confidence, he triumphed through and with them. Not only was there this
steady growth of intellect, but the infinite delicacy of his nature and
its capacity for refinement developed also, as exhibited in the
purity and perfection of his language and style of speech. The rough
backwoodsman, who had never seen the inside of a university, became in
the end, by self-training and the exercise of his own powers of mind,
heart, and soul, a master of style, and some of his utterances will rank
with the best, the most perfectly adapted to the occasion which produced
them.

Have you time to listen to his two-minutes speech at Gettysburg, at the
dedication of the Soldiers’ Cemetery? His whole soul was in it:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a
great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of
that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final
resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might
live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But
in a larger sense we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot
hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here
have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The
world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to
be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. 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 that 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 this nation under God shall 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.”

He lived to see his work indorsed by an overwhelming majority of his
countrymen. In his second inaugural address, pronounced just forty days
before his death, there is a single passage which well displays his
indomitable will and at the same time his deep religious feeling,
his sublime charity to the enemies of his country, and his broad and
catholic humanity:

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences
which in the Providence of God must needs come, but which, having
continued through the appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that
He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to
those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure
from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always
ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen’s two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the
work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall
have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan to do all which
may achieve, and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and
with all nations.”

His prayer was answered. The forty days of life that remained to
him were crowned with great historic events. He lived to see
his Proclamation of Emancipation embodied in an amendment of the
Constitution, adopted by Congress, and submitted to the States for
ratification. The mighty scourge of war did speedily pass away, for it
was given him to witness the surrender of the Rebel army and the fall of
their capital, and the starry flag that he loved waving in triumph over
the national soil. When he died by the madman’s hand in the supreme hour
of victory, the vanquished lost their best friend, and the human race
one of its noblest examples; and all the friends of freedom and justice,
in whose cause he lived and died, joined hands as mourners at his grave.



THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1832–1843



1832



ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF SANGAMON COUNTY.


March 9, 1832.

FELLOW CITIZENS:—Having become a candidate for the honorable office of
one of your Representatives in the next General Assembly of this State,
in according with an established custom and the principles of true
Republicanism it becomes my duty to make known to you, the people whom I
propose to represent, my sentiments with regard to local affairs.

Time and experience have verified to a demonstration the public utility
of internal improvements. That the poorest and most thinly populated
countries would be greatly benefited by the opening of good roads, and
in the clearing of navigable streams within their limits, is what no
person will deny. Yet it is folly to undertake works of this or
any other without first knowing that we are able to finish them—as
half-finished work generally proves to be labor lost. There cannot
justly be any objection to having railroads and canals, any more than to
other good things, provided they cost nothing. The only objection is to
paying for them; and the objection arises from the want of ability to
pay.

With respect to the County of Sangamon, some....

Yet, however desirable an object the construction of a railroad through
our country may be, however high our imaginations may be heated at
thoughts of it,—there is always a heart-appalling shock accompanying
the amount of its cost, which forces us to shrink from our pleasing
anticipations. The probable cost of this contemplated railroad is
estimated at $290,000; the bare statement of which, in my opinion, is
sufficient to justify the belief that the improvement of the Sangamon
River is an object much better suited to our infant resources.......

What the cost of this work would be, I am unable to say. It is probable,
however, that it would not be greater than is common to streams of the
same length. Finally, I believe the improvement of the Sangamon River
to be vastly important and highly desirable to the people of the county;
and, if elected, any measure in the Legislature having this for its
object, which may appear judicious, will meet my approbation and receive
my support.

It appears that the practice of loaning money at exorbitant rates of
interest has already been opened as a field for discussion; so I suppose
I may enter upon it without claiming the honor or risking the danger
which may await its first explorer. It seems as though we are never
to have an end to this baneful and corroding system, acting almost as
prejudicially to the general interests of the community as a direct tax
of several thousand dollars annually laid on each county for the benefit
of a few individuals only, unless there be a law made fixing the limits
of usury. A law for this purpose, I am of opinion, may be made without
materially injuring any class of people. In cases of extreme necessity,
there could always be means found to cheat the law; while in all other
cases it would have its intended effect. I would favor the passage of
a law on this subject which might not be very easily evaded. Let it be
such that the labor and difficulty of evading it could only be justified
in cases of greatest necessity.

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan
or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most
important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every
man may receive at least a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to
read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly
appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object
of vital importance, even on this account alone, to say nothing of the
advantages and satisfaction to be derived from all being able to read
the Scriptures, and other works both of a religious and moral nature,
for themselves.

For my part, I desire to see the time when education—and by its means,
morality, sobriety, enterprise, and industry—shall become much more
general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power
to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might
have a tendency to accelerate that happy period.

With regard to existing laws, some alterations are thought to be
necessary. Many respectable men have suggested that our estray laws, the
law respecting the issuing of executions, the road law, and some others,
are deficient in their present form, and require alterations. But,
considering the great probability that the framers of those laws were
wiser than myself, I should prefer not meddling with them, unless they
were first attacked by others; in which case I should feel it both a
privilege and a duty to take that stand which, in my view, might tend
most to the advancement of justice.

But, fellow-citizens, I shall conclude. Considering the great degree of
modesty which should always attend youth, it is probable I have already
been more presuming than becomes me. However, upon the subjects of
which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in
regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is
better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon
as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce
them.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or
not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being
truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their
esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be
developed. I am young, and unknown to many of you. I was born, and have
ever remained, in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy
or popular relations or friends to recommend me. My case is thrown
exclusively upon the independent voters of the county; and, if
elected, they will have conferred a favor upon me for which I shall be
unremitting in my labors to compensate. But, if the good people in
their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too
familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.

Your friend and fellow-citizen, A. LINCOLN.

New Salem, March 9, 1832.



1833



TO E. C. BLANKENSHIP.


NEW SALEM, Aug. 10, 1833

E. C. BLANKENSHIP.

Dear Sir:—In regard to the time David Rankin served the enclosed
discharge shows correctly—as well as I can recollect—having no writing
to refer. The transfer of Rankin from my company occurred as follows:
Rankin having lost his horse at Dixon’s ferry and having acquaintance in
one of the foot companies who were going down the river was desirous
to go with them, and one Galishen being an acquaintance of mine and
belonging to the company in which Rankin wished to go wished to leave
it and join mine, this being the case it was agreed that they should
exchange places and answer to each other’s names—as it was expected
we all would be discharged in very few days. As to a blanket—I have no
knowledge of Rankin ever getting any. The above embraces all the facts
now in my recollection which are pertinent to the case.

I shall take pleasure in giving any further information in my power
should you call on me.

Your friend, A. LINCOLN.



RESPONSE TO REQUEST FOR POSTAGE RECEIPT


TO Mr. SPEARS.

Mr. SPEARS:

At your request I send you a receipt for the postage on your paper. I am
somewhat surprised at your request. I will, however, comply with it.
The law requires newspaper postage to be paid in advance, and now that
I have waited a full year you choose to wound my feelings by insinuating
that unless you get a receipt I will probably make you pay it again.

Respectfully, A. LINCOLN.



1836



ANNOUNCEMENT OF POLITICAL VIEWS.


New Salem, June 13, 1836.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE “JOURNAL”—In your paper of last Saturday I see
a communication, over the signature of “Many Voters,” in which the
candidates who are announced in the Journal are called upon to “show
their hands.” Agreed. Here’s mine.

I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in
bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to
the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding
females).

If elected, I shall consider the whole people of Sangamon my
constituents, as well those that oppose as those that support me.

While acting as their representative, I shall be governed by their will
on all subjects upon which I have the means of knowing what their will
is; and upon all others I shall do what my own judgment teaches me
will best advance their interests. Whether elected or not, I go for
distributing the proceeds of the sales of the public lands to the
several States, to enable our State, in common with others, to dig
canals and construct railroads without borrowing money and paying the
interest on it. If alive on the first Monday in November, I shall vote
for Hugh L. White for President.

Very respectfully, A. LINCOLN.



RESPONSE TO POLITICAL SMEAR


TO ROBERT ALLEN

New Salem, June 21, 1836

DEAR COLONEL:—I am told that during my absence last week you passed
through this place, and stated publicly that you were in possession of a
fact or facts which, if known to the public, would entirely destroy the
prospects of N. W. Edwards and myself at the ensuing election; but that,
through favor to us, you should forbear to divulge them. No one has
needed favors more than I, and, generally, few have been less unwilling
to accept them; but in this case favor to me would be injustice to the
public, and therefore I must beg your pardon for declining it. That
I once had the confidence of the people of Sangamon, is sufficiently
evident; and if I have since done anything, either by design or
misadventure, which if known would subject me to a forfeiture of that
confidence, he that knows of that thing, and conceals it, is a traitor
to his country’s interest.

I find myself wholly unable to form any conjecture of what fact or
facts, real or supposed, you spoke; but my opinion of your veracity will
not permit me for a moment to doubt that you at least believed what you
said. I am flattered with the personal regard you manifested for me;
but I do hope that, on more mature reflection, you will view the public
interest as a paramount consideration, and therefore determine to let
the worst come. I here assure you that the candid statement of facts
on your part, however low it may sink me, shall never break the tie of
personal friendship between us. I wish an answer to this, and you are at
liberty to publish both, if you choose.

Very respectfully, A. LINCOLN.



TO MISS MARY OWENS.


VANDALIA, December 13, 1836.

MARY:—I have been sick ever since my arrival, or I should have written
sooner. It is but little difference, however, as I have very little
even yet to write. And more, the longer I can avoid the mortification
of looking in the post-office for your letter and not finding it, the
better. You see I am mad about that old letter yet. I don’t like very
well to risk you again. I’ll try you once more, anyhow.

The new State House is not yet finished, and consequently the
Legislature is doing little or nothing. The governor delivered an
inflammatory political message, and it is expected there will be some
sparring between the parties about it as soon as the two Houses get to
business. Taylor delivered up his petition for the new county to one
of our members this morning. I am told he despairs of its success, on
account of all the members from Morgan County opposing it. There are
names enough on the petition, I think, to justify the members from our
county in going for it; but if the members from Morgan oppose it, which
they say they will, the chance will be bad.

Our chance to take the seat of government to Springfield is better than
I expected. An internal-improvement convention was held there since we
met, which recommended a loan of several millions of dollars, on the
faith of the State, to construct railroads. Some of the Legislature are
for it, and some against it; which has the majority I cannot tell.
There is great strife and struggling for the office of the United States
Senator here at this time. It is probable we shall ease their pains in
a few days. The opposition men have no candidate of their own, and
consequently they will smile as complacently at the angry snarl of the
contending Van Buren candidates and their respective friends as the
Christian does at Satan’s rage. You recollect that I mentioned at the
outset of this letter that I had been unwell. That is the fact, though
I believe I am about well now; but that, with other things I cannot
account for, have conspired, and have gotten my spirits so low that I
feel that I would rather be any place in the world than here. I really
cannot endure the thought of staying here ten weeks. Write back as soon
as you get this, and, if possible, say something that will please me,
for really I have not been pleased since I left you. This letter is
so dry and stupid that I am ashamed to send it, but with my present
feelings I cannot do any better.

Give my best respects to Mr. and Mrs. Able and family.

Your friend, LINCOLN



1837



SPEECH IN ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.


January [?], 1837

Mr. CHAIRMAN:—Lest I should fall into the too common error of being
mistaken in regard to which side I design to be upon, I shall make it
my first care to remove all doubt on that point, by declaring that I am
opposed to the resolution under consideration, in toto. Before I proceed
to the body of the subject, I will further remark, that it is not
without a considerable degree of apprehension that I venture to cross
the track of the gentleman from Coles [Mr. Linder]. Indeed, I do not
believe I could muster a sufficiency of courage to come in contact with
that gentleman, were it not for the fact that he, some days since,
most graciously condescended to assure us that he would never be found
wasting ammunition on small game. On the same fortunate occasion,
he further gave us to understand, that he regarded himself as being
decidedly the superior of our common friend from Randolph [Mr. Shields];
and feeling, as I really do, that I, to say the most of myself, am
nothing more than the peer of our friend from Randolph, I shall
regard the gentleman from Coles as decidedly my superior also, and
consequently, in the course of what I shall have to say, whenever I
shall have occasion to allude to that gentleman, I shall endeavor
to adopt that kind of court language which I understand to be due to
decided superiority. In one faculty, at least, there can be no dispute
of the gentleman’s superiority over me and most other men, and that is,
the faculty of entangling a subject, so that neither himself, or
any other man, can find head or tail to it. Here he has introduced a
resolution embracing ninety-nine printed lines across common writing
paper, and yet more than one half of his opening speech has been made
upon subjects about which there is not one word said in his resolution.

Though his resolution embraces nothing in regard to the
constitutionality of the Bank, much of what he has said has been with
a view to make the impression that it was unconstitutional in its
inception. Now, although I am satisfied that an ample field may be found
within the pale of the resolution, at least for small game, yet, as
the gentleman has traveled out of it, I feel that I may, with all due
humility, venture to follow him. The gentleman has discovered that some
gentleman at Washington city has been upon the very eve of deciding our
Bank unconstitutional, and that he would probably have completed his
very authentic decision, had not some one of the Bank officers placed
his hand upon his mouth, and begged him to withhold it. The fact
that the individuals composing our Supreme Court have, in an official
capacity, decided in favor of the constitutionality of the Bank, would,
in my mind, seem a sufficient answer to this. It is a fact known to all,
that the members of the Supreme Court, together with the Governor, form
a Council of Revision, and that this Council approved this Bank charter.
I ask, then, if the extra-judicial decision not quite but almost made
by the gentleman at Washington, before whom, by the way, the question of
the constitutionality of our Bank never has, nor never can come—is to
be taken as paramount to a decision officially made by that tribunal,
by which, and which alone, the constitutionality of the Bank can ever be
settled? But, aside from this view of the subject, I would ask, if the
committee which this resolution proposes to appoint are to examine into
the Constitutionality of the Bank? Are they to be clothed with power to
send for persons and papers, for this object? And after they have found
the bank to be unconstitutional, and decided it so, how are they to
enforce their decision? What will their decision amount to? They cannot
compel the Bank to cease operations, or to change the course of its
operations. What good, then, can their labors result in? Certainly none.

The gentleman asks, if we, without an examination, shall, by giving the
State deposits to the Bank, and by taking the stock reserved for the
State, legalize its former misconduct. Now I do not pretend to possess
sufficient legal knowledge to decide whether a legislative enactment
proposing to, and accepting from, the Bank, certain terms, would have
the effect to legalize or wipe out its former errors, or not; but I can
assure the gentleman, if such should be the effect, he has already got
behind the settlement of accounts; for it is well known to all, that the
Legislature, at its last session, passed a supplemental Bank charter,
which the Bank has since accepted, and which, according to his doctrine,
has legalized all the alleged violations of its original charter in the
distribution of its stock.

I now proceed to the resolution. By examination it will be found that
the first thirty-three lines, being precisely one third of the whole,
relate exclusively to the distribution of the stock by the commissioners
appointed by the State. Now, Sir, it is clear that no question can arise
on this portion of the resolution, except a question between capitalists
in regard to the ownership of stock. Some gentlemen have their stock in
their hands, while others, who have more money than they know what to
do with, want it; and this, and this alone, is the question, to settle
which we are called on to squander thousands of the people’s money.
What interest, let me ask, have the people in the settlement of this
question? What difference is it to them whether the stock is owned by
Judge Smith or Sam Wiggins? If any gentleman be entitled to stock in the
Bank, which he is kept out of possession of by others, let him assert
his right in the Supreme Court, and let him or his antagonist, whichever
may be found in the wrong, pay the costs of suit. It is an old maxim,
and a very sound one, that he that dances should always pay the fiddler.
Now, Sir, in the present case, if any gentlemen, whose money is a burden
to them, choose to lead off a dance, I am decidedly opposed to the
people’s money being used to pay the fiddler. No one can doubt that the
examination proposed by this resolution must cost the State some ten or
twelve thousand dollars; and all this to settle a question in which
the people have no interest, and about which they care nothing. These
capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the
people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves we are
called upon to appropriate the people’s money to settle the quarrel.

I leave this part of the resolution and proceed to the remainder. It
will be found that no charge in the remaining part of the resolution, if
true, amounts to the violation of the Bank charter, except one, which I
will notice in due time. It might seem quite sufficient to say no more
upon any of these charges or insinuations than enough to show they are
not violations of the charter; yet, as they are ingeniously framed and
handled, with a view to deceive and mislead, I will notice in their
order all the most prominent of them. The first of these is in relation
to a connection between our Bank and several banking institutions in
other States. Admitting this connection to exist, I should like to see
the gentleman from Coles, or any other gentleman, undertake to show that
there is any harm in it. What can there be in such a connection, that
the people of Illinois are willing to pay their money to get a peep
into? By a reference to the tenth section of the Bank charter, any
gentleman can see that the framers of the act contemplated the holding
of stock in the institutions of other corporations. Why, then, is it,
when neither law nor justice forbids it, that we are asked to spend our
time and money in inquiring into its truth?

The next charge, in the order of time, is, that some officer, director,
clerk or servant of the Bank, has been required to take an oath of
secrecy in relation to the affairs of said Bank. Now, I do not know
whether this be true or false—neither do I believe any honest man
cares. I know that the seventh section of the charter expressly
guarantees to the Bank the right of making, under certain restrictions,
such by-laws as it may think fit; and I further know that the requiring
an oath of secrecy would not transcend those restrictions. What, then,
if the Bank has chosen to exercise this right? Whom can it injure? Does
not every merchant have his secret mark? and who is ever silly enough
to complain of it? I presume if the Bank does require any such oath of
secrecy, it is done through a motive of delicacy to those individuals
who deal with it. Why, Sir, not many days since, one gentleman upon this
floor, who, by the way, I have no doubt is now ready to join this hue
and cry against the Bank, indulged in a philippic against one of the
Bank officials, because, as he said, he had divulged a secret.

Immediately following this last charge, there are several insinuations
in the resolution, which are too silly to require any sort of notice,
were it not for the fact that they conclude by saying, “to the great
injury of the people at large.” In answer to this I would say that it
is strange enough, that the people are suffering these “great injuries,”
and yet are not sensible of it! Singular indeed that the people should
be writhing under oppression and injury, and yet not one among them
to be found to raise the voice of complaint. If the Bank be inflicting
injury upon the people, why is it that not a single petition is
presented to this body on the subject? If the Bank really be a
grievance, why is it that no one of the real people is found to ask
redress of it? The truth is, no such oppression exists. If it did, our
people would groan with memorials and petitions, and we would not be
permitted to rest day or night, till we had put it down. The people know
their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them, when
they are invaded. Let them call for an investigation, and I shall ever
stand ready to respond to the call. But they have made no such call. I
make the assertion boldly, and without fear of contradiction, that no
man, who does not hold an office, or does not aspire to one, has ever
found any fault of the Bank. It has doubled the prices of the products
of their farms, and filled their pockets with a sound circulating
medium, and they are all well pleased with its operations. No, Sir, it
is the politician who is the first to sound the alarm (which, by
the way, is a false one.) It is he, who, by these unholy means, is
endeavoring to blow up a storm that he may ride upon and direct. It is
he, and he alone, that here proposes to spend thousands of the people’s
public treasure, for no other advantage to them than to make valueless
in their pockets the reward of their industry. Mr. Chairman, this work
is exclusively the work of politicians; a set of men who have interests
aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of
them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest
men. I say this with the greater freedom, because, being a politician
myself, none can regard it as personal.

Again, it is charged, or rather insinuated, that officers of the Bank
have loaned money at usurious rates of interest. Suppose this to be
true, are we to send a committee of this House to inquire into it?
Suppose the committee should find it true, can they redress the injured
individuals? Assuredly not. If any individual had been injured in this
way, is there not an ample remedy to be found in the laws of the land?
Does the gentleman from Coles know that there is a statute standing in
full force making it highly penal for an individual to loan money at a
higher rate of interest than twelve per cent? If he does not he is too
ignorant to be placed at the head of the committee which his resolution
purposes and if he does, his neglect to mention it shows him to be too
uncandid to merit the respect or confidence of any one.

But besides all this, if the Bank were struck from existence, could
not the owners of the capital still loan it usuriously, as well as now?
whatever the Bank, or its officers, may have done, I know that
usurious transactions were much more frequent and enormous before the
commencement of its operations than they have ever been since.

The next insinuation is, that the Bank has refused specie payments.
This, if true is a violation of the charter. But there is not the
least probability of its truth; because, if such had been the fact, the
individual to whom payment was refused would have had an interest in
making it public, by suing for the damages to which the charter entitles
him. Yet no such thing has been done; and the strong presumption is,
that the insinuation is false and groundless.

From this to the end of the resolution, there is nothing that merits
attention—I therefore drop the particular examination of it.

By a general view of the resolution, it will be seen that a principal
object of the committee is to examine into, and ferret out, a mass of
corruption supposed to have been committed by the commissioners
who apportioned the stock of the Bank. I believe it is universally
understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly unless
they have a motive to do otherwise. If this be true, we can only suppose
that the commissioners acted corruptly by also supposing that they were
bribed to do so. Taking this view of the subject, I would ask if the
Bank is likely to find it more difficult to bribe the committee of
seven, which, we are about to appoint, than it may have found it to
bribe the commissioners?

(Here Mr. Linder called to order. The Chair decided that Mr. Lincoln
was not out of order. Mr. Linder appealed to the House, but, before the
question was put, withdrew his appeal, saying he preferred to let the
gentleman go on; he thought he would break his own neck. Mr. Lincoln
proceeded:)

Another gracious condescension! I acknowledge it with gratitude. I know
I was not out of order; and I know every sensible man in the House knows
it. I was not saying that the gentleman from Coles could be bribed, nor,
on the other hand, will I say he could not. In that particular I leave
him where I found him. I was only endeavoring to show that there was at
least as great a probability of any seven members that could be selected
from this House being bribed to act corruptly, as there was that the
twenty-four commissioners had been so bribed. By a reference to
the ninth section of the Bank charter, it will be seen that those
commissioners were John Tilson, Robert K. McLaughlin, Daniel Warm, A.G.
S. Wight, John C. Riley, W. H. Davidson, Edward M. Wilson, Edward L.
Pierson, Robert R. Green, Ezra Baker, Aquilla Wren, John Taylor, Samuel
C. Christy, Edmund Roberts, Benjamin Godfrey, Thomas Mather, A. M.
Jenkins, W. Linn, W. S. Gilman, Charles Prentice, Richard I. Hamilton,
A.H. Buckner, W. F. Thornton, and Edmund D. Taylor.

These are twenty-four of the most respectable men in the State. Probably
no twenty-four men could be selected in the State with whom the people
are better acquainted, or in whose honor and integrity they would
more readily place confidence. And I now repeat, that there is less
probability that those men have been bribed and corrupted, than that
any seven men, or rather any six men, that could be selected from the
members of this House, might be so bribed and corrupted, even though
they were headed and led on by “decided superiority” himself.

In all seriousness, I ask every reasonable man, if an issue be joined
by these twenty-four commissioners, on the one part, and any other
seven men, on the other part, and the whole depend upon the honor and
integrity of the contending parties, to which party would the greatest
degree of credit be due? Again: Another consideration is, that we have
no right to make the examination. What I shall say upon this head I
design exclusively for the law-loving and law-abiding part of the House.
To those who claim omnipotence for the Legislature, and who in the
plenitude of their assumed powers are disposed to disregard the
Constitution, law, good faith, moral right, and everything else, I have
not a word to say. But to the law-abiding part I say, examine the Bank
charter, go examine the Constitution, go examine the acts that the
General Assembly of this State has passed, and you will find just as
much authority given in each and every of them to compel the Bank to
bring its coffers to this hall and to pour their contents upon this
floor, as to compel it to submit to this examination which this
resolution proposes. Why, Sir, the gentleman from Coles, the mover of
this resolution, very lately denied on this floor that the Legislature
had any right to repeal or otherwise meddle with its own acts, when
those acts were made in the nature of contracts, and had been accepted
and acted on by other parties. Now I ask if this resolution does not
propose, for this House alone, to do what he, but the other day, denied
the right of the whole Legislature to do? He must either abandon the
position he then took, or he must now vote against his own resolution.
It is no difference to me, and I presume but little to any one else,
which he does.

I am by no means the special advocate of the Bank. I have long thought
that it would be well for it to report its condition to the General
Assembly, and that cases might occur, when it might be proper to make an
examination of its affairs by a committee. Accordingly, during the
last session, while a bill supplemental to the Bank charter was pending
before the House, I offered an amendment to the same, in these words:
“The said corporation shall, at the next session of the General
Assembly, and at each subsequent General Session, during the existence
of its charter, report to the same the amount of debts due from said
corporation; the amount of debts due to the same; the amount of specie
in its vaults, and an account of all lands then owned by the same, and
the amount for which such lands have been taken; and moreover, if said
corporation shall at any time neglect or refuse to submit its books,
papers, and all and everything necessary for a full and fair examination
of its affairs, to any person or persons appointed by the General
Assembly, for the purpose of making such examination, the said
corporation shall forfeit its charter.”

This amendment was negatived by a vote of 34 to 15. Eleven of the 34 who
voted against it are now members of this House; and though it would
be out of order to call their names, I hope they will all recollect
themselves, and not vote for this examination to be made without
authority, inasmuch as they refused to receive the authority when it was
in their power to do so.

I have said that cases might occur, when an examination might be proper;
but I do not believe any such case has now occurred; and if it has,
I should still be opposed to making an examination without legal
authority. I am opposed to encouraging that lawless and mobocratic
spirit, whether in relation to the Bank or anything else, which is
already abroad in the land and is spreading with rapid and fearful
impetuosity, to the ultimate overthrow of every institution, of every
moral principle, in which persons and property have hitherto found
security.

But supposing we had the authority, I would ask what good can result
from the examination? Can we declare the Bank unconstitutional, and
compel it to desist from the abuses of its power, provided we find such
abuses to exist? Can we repair the injuries which it may have done to
individuals? Most certainly we can do none of these things. Why
then shall we spend the public money in such employment? Oh, say the
examiners, we can injure the credit of the Bank, if nothing else, Please
tell me, gentlemen, who will suffer most by that? You cannot injure, to
any extent, the stockholders. They are men of wealth—of large capital;
and consequently, beyond the power of malice. But by injuring the credit
of the Bank, you will depreciate the value of its paper in the hands of
the honest and unsuspecting farmer and mechanic, and that is all you can
do. But suppose you could effect your whole purpose; suppose you could
wipe the Bank from existence, which is the grand ultimatum of the
project, what would be the consequence? why, Sir, we should spend
several thousand dollars of the public treasure in the operation,
annihilate the currency of the State, render valueless in the hands of
our people that reward of their former labors, and finally be once more
under the comfortable obligation of paying the Wiggins loan, principal
and interest.



OPPOSITION TO MOB-RULE


ADDRESS BEFORE THE YOUNG MEN’S LYCEUM OF SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS.

January 27, 1838.

As a subject for the remarks of the evening, “The Perpetuation of our
Political Institutions” is selected.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American
people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of
the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the
fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility
of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the
government of a system of political institutions conducing more
essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which
the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of
existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental
blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them;
they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic,
but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the
task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through
themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its
valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; it is ours only
to transmit these—the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the
latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—to the
latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task
gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and
love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully
to perform.

How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach
of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect
some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a
blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with
all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military
chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink
from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand
years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer:
If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from
abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and
finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die
by suicide.

I hope I am over-wary; but if I am not, there is even now something
of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which
pervades the country—the growing disposition to substitute the wild and
furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the
worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. This
disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now
exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a
violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. Accounts
of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times.
They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are
neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns
of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they
confined to the slave holding or the non-slave holding States. Alike
they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves,
and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever
then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of
them. Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are
perhaps the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the
Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers—a
set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or
very honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by
the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature passed but
a single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an
insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State;
then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally,
strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in
many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of
hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and
from these to strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling
from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost
sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery
of the forest.

Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim
only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps
the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been
witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized
in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree,
and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time
he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with
the world.

Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more
and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and
order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to
attract anything more than an idle remark.

But you are perhaps ready to ask, “What has this to do with the
perpetuation of our political institutions?” I answer, It has much to
do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but
a small evil, and much of its danger consists in the proneness of
our minds to regard its direct as its only consequences. Abstractly
considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of but little
consequence. They constitute a portion of population that is worse than
useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be
set by it, is never matter of reasonable regret with any one. If
they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or
smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the operation.
Similar too is the correct reasoning in regard to the burning of the
negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life by the perpetration of an
outrageous murder upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens
of the city, and had he not died as he did, he must have died by the
sentence of the law in a very short time afterwards. As to him alone,
it was as well the way it was as it could otherwise have been. But the
example in either case was fearful. When men take it in their heads
to-day to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that in
the confusion usually attending such transactions they will be as likely
to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one
who is, and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow
may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same
mistake. And not only so: the innocent, those who have ever set their
faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty
fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by
step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and
property of individuals are trodden down and disregarded. But all this,
even, is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples, by instances
of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit
are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to
no restraint but dread of punishment, they thus become absolutely
unrestrained. Having ever regarded government as their deadliest bane,
they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations, and pray for
nothing so much as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand,
good men, men who love tranquillity, who desire to abide by the laws and
enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense
of their country, seeing their property destroyed, their families
insulted, and their lives endangered, their persons injured, and seeing
nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better, become tired
of and disgusted with a government that offers them no protection, and
are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing
to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocratic spirit which
all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of
any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may
effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the
people. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the
vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands
of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob
provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and
hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on
it, this government cannot last. By such things the feelings of the best
citizens will become more or less alienated from it, and thus it will
be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak to
make their friendship effectual. At such a time, and under such
circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting
to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric
which for the last half century has been the fondest hope of the lovers
of freedom throughout the world.

I know the American people are much attached to their government; I know
they would suffer much for its sake; I know they would endure evils
long and patiently before they would ever think of exchanging it for
another,—yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually
despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons
and property are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob,
the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural
consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.

Here, then, is one point at which danger may be expected.

The question recurs, How shall we fortify against it? The answer is
simple. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to
his posterity swear by the blood of the Revolution never to violate
in the least particular the laws of the country, and never to tolerate
their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the
support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the
Constitution and laws let every American pledge his life, his property,
and his sacred honor. Let every man remember that to violate the law is
to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the charter of his
own and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws be breathed
by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap;
let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be
written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs; let it be preached
from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts
of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the
nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the
grave and the gay of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions,
sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

While ever a state of feeling such as this shall universally or even
very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort,
and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom.

When, I so pressingly urge a strict observance of all the laws, let me
not be understood as saying there are no bad laws, or that grievances
may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been
made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although
bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still,
while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be
religiously observed. So also in unprovided cases. If such arise, let
proper legal provisions be made for them with the least possible delay,
but till then let them, if not too intolerable, be borne with.

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any
case that may arise, as, for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism,
one of two positions is necessarily true—that is, the thing is right
within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all
good citizens, or it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by
legal enactments; and in neither case is the interposition of mob law
either necessary, justifiable, or excusable.

But it may be asked, Why suppose danger to our political institutions?
Have we not preserved them for more than fifty years? And why may we not
for fifty times as long?

We hope there is no sufficient reason. We hope all danger may be
overcome; but to conclude that no danger may ever arise would itself be
extremely dangerous. There are now, and will hereafter be, many causes,
dangerous in their tendency, which have not existed heretofore, and
which are not too insignificant to merit attention. That our government
should have been maintained in its original form, from its establishment
until now, is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support
it through that period, which now are decayed and crumbled away. Through
that period it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment; now it is
understood to be a successful one. Then, all that sought celebrity
and fame and distinction expected to find them in the success of that
experiment. Their all was staked upon it; their destiny was inseparably
linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring
world a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition which had
hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical—namely,
the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded they
were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties,
and cities, and rivers, and mountains; and to be revered and sung,
toasted through all time. If they failed, they were to be called
knaves and fools, and fanatics for a fleeting hour; then to sink and be
forgotten. They succeeded. The experiment is successful, and thousands
have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught;
and I believe it is true that with the catching end the pleasures of
the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already
appropriated. But new reapers will arise, and they too will seek a
field. It is to deny what the history of the world tells us is true, to
suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring
up amongst us. And when they do, they will as naturally seek the
gratification of their ruling passion as others have done before them.
The question then is, Can that gratification be found in supporting
and in maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most
certainly it cannot. Many great and good men, sufficiently qualified for
any task they should undertake, may ever be found whose ambition would
aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a Gubernatorial or a
Presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or
the tribe of the eagle. What! think you these places would satisfy an
Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon? Never! Towering genius disdains
a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no
distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected
to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve
under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor,
however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if
possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves
or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable, then, to expect that some man
possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to
push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time spring up among us? And
when such an one does it will require the people to be united with each
other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent,
to successfully frustrate his designs.

Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as
willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm, yet,
that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of
building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.

Here then is a probable case, highly dangerous, and such an one as could
not have well existed heretofore.

Another reason which once was, but which, to the same extent, is now no
more, has done much in maintaining our institutions thus far. I mean the
powerful influence which the interesting scenes of the Revolution had
upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment. By
this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature,
and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength,
were for the time in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive,
while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of
revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed
exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of
circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to
lie dormant, or to become the active agents in the advancement of
the noblest of causes—that of establishing and maintaining civil and
religious liberty.

But this state of feeling must fade, is fading, has faded, with the
circumstances that produced it.

I do not mean to say that the scenes of the Revolution are now or ever
will be entirely forgotten, but that, like everything else, they must
fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the
lapse of time. In history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted,
so long as the Bible shall be read; but even granting that they will,
their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they
cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were by the
generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle, nearly
every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The
consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a
father, a son, or a brother, a living history was to be found in
every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own
authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in
the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read
and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and
the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more
forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foeman
could never do the silent artillery of time has done—the leveling of
its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the
all-restless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and
there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage,
unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to
combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, then to sink
and be no more.

They were pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have
crumbled away that temple must fall unless we, their descendants, supply
their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober
reason. Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future
be our enemy. Reason cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must
furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. Let those
materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and
in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws; and that we
improved to the last, that we remained free to the last, that we revered
his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile
foot to pass over or desecrate his resting place, shall be that which to
learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington.

Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its
basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution,
“the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”



PROTEST IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE ON THE SUBJECT OF SLAVERY.


March 3, 1837.

The following protest was presented to the House, which was read and
ordered to be spread in the journals, to wit:

“Resolutions upon the subject of domestic slavery having passed both
branches of the General Assembly at its present session, the undersigned
hereby protest against the passage of the same.

“They believe that the institution of slavery is founded on both
injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition
doctrines tends rather to increase than abate its evils.

“They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under
the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the
different States.

“They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power,
under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia,
but that the power ought not to be exercised, unless at the request of
the people of the District.

“The difference between these opinions and those contained in the said
resolutions is their reason for entering this protest.

“DAN STONE,

“A. LINCOLN,

“Representatives from the County of Sangamon.”



TO MISS MARY OWENS.


SPRINGFIELD, May 7, 1837.

MISS MARY S. OWENS.

FRIEND MARY:—I have commenced two letters to send you before this, both
of which displeased me before I got half done, and so I tore them up.
The first I thought was not serious enough, and the second was on the
other extreme. I shall send this, turn out as it may.

This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull business, after
all; at least it is so to me. I am quite as lonesome here as I ever was
anywhere in my life. I have been spoken to by but one woman since I have
been here, and should not have been by her if she could have avoided it.
I ’ve never been to church yet, and probably shall not be soon. I stay
away because I am conscious I should not know how to behave myself.

I am often thinking of what we said about your coming to live at
Springfield. I am afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great
deal of flourishing about in carriages here, which it would be your doom
to see without sharing it. You would have to be poor, without the means
of hiding your poverty. Do you believe you could bear that patiently?
Whatever woman may cast her lot with mine, should any ever do so, it is
my intention to do all in my power to make her happy and contented; and
there is nothing I can imagine that would make me more unhappy than to
fail in the effort. I know I should be much happier with you than the
way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you. What you have
said to me may have been in the way of jest, or I may have misunderstood
you. If so, then let it be forgotten; if otherwise, I much wish you
would think seriously before you decide. What I have said I will most
positively abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had
better not do it. You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may
be more severe than you now imagine. I know you are capable of thinking
correctly on any subject, and if you deliberate maturely upon this
subject before you decide, then I am willing to abide your decision.

You must write me a good long letter after you get this. You have
nothing else to do, and though it might not seem interesting to you
after you had written it, it would be a good deal of company to me in
this “busy wilderness.” Tell your sister I don’t want to hear any more
about selling out and moving. That gives me the “hypo” whenever I think
of it.

Yours, etc., LINCOLN.



TO JOHN BENNETT.


SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Aug. 5, 1837. JOHN BENNETT, ESQ.

DEAR SIR:—Mr. Edwards tells me you wish to know whether the act to which
your own incorporation provision was attached passed into a law. It
did. You can organize under the general incorporation law as soon as you
choose.

I also tacked a provision onto a fellow’s bill to authorize the
relocation of the road from Salem down to your town, but I am not
certain whether or not the bill passed, neither do I suppose I can
ascertain before the law will be published, if it is a law. Bowling
Greene, Bennette Abe? and yourself are appointed to make the change. No
news. No excitement except a little about the election of Monday next.

I suppose, of course, our friend Dr. Heney stands no chance in your
diggings.

Your friend and humble servant, A. LINCOLN.



TO MARY OWENS.


SPRINGFIELD, Aug. 16, 1837

FRIEND MARY: You will no doubt think it rather strange that I should
write you a letter on the same day on which we parted, and I can only
account for it by supposing that seeing you lately makes me think of you
more than usual; while at our late meeting we had but few expressions
of thoughts. You must know that I cannot see you, or think of you, with
entire indifference; and yet it may be that you are mistaken in regard
to what my real feelings toward you are.

If I knew you were not, I should not have troubled you with this letter.
Perhaps any other man would know enough without information; but I
consider it my peculiar right to plead ignorance, and your bounden duty
to allow the plea.

I want in all cases to do right; and most particularly so in all cases
with women.

I want, at this particular time, more than any thing else to do right
with you; and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it
would, to let you alone I would do it. And, for the purpose of making
the matter as plain as possible, I now say that you can drop the
subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me for ever
and leave this letter unanswered without calling forth one accusing
murmur from me. And I will even go further and say that, if it will add
anything to your comfort or peace of mind to do so, it is my sincere
wish that you should. Do not understand by this that I wish to cut your
acquaintance. I mean no such thing. What I do wish is that our further
acquaintance shall depend upon yourself. If such further acquaintance
would contribute nothing to your happiness, I am sure it would not to
mine. If you feel yourself in any degree bound to me, I am now willing
to release you, provided you wish it; while on the other hand I am
willing and even anxious to bind you faster if I can be convinced
that it will, in any considerable degree, add to your happiness. This,
indeed, is the whole question with me. Nothing would make me more
miserable than to believe you miserable, nothing more happy than to know
you were so.

In what I have now said, I think I cannot be misunderstood; and to make
myself understood is the only object of this letter.

If it suits you best not to answer this, farewell. A long life and
a merry one attend you. But, if you conclude to write back, speak as
plainly as I do. There can neither be harm nor danger in saying to me
anything you think, just in the manner you think it. My respects to your
sister.

Your friend, LINCOLN.



LEGAL SUIT OF WIDOW v.s. Gen. ADAMS


TO THE PEOPLE.

“SANGAMON JOURNAL,” SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Aug. 19, 1837.

In accordance with our determination, as expressed last week, we present
to the reader the articles which were published in hand-bill form, in
reference to the case of the heirs of Joseph Anderson vs. James Adams.
These articles can now be read uninfluenced by personal or party
feeling, and with the sole motive of learning the truth. When that is
done, the reader can pass his own judgment on the matters at issue.

We only regret in this case, that the publications were not made some
weeks before the election. Such a course might have prevented the
expressions of regret, which have often been heard since, from different
individuals, on account of the disposition they made of their votes.

To the Public:

It is well known to most of you, that there is existing at this time
considerable excitement in regard to Gen. Adams’s titles to certain
tracts of land, and the manner in which he acquired them. As I
understand, the Gen. charges that the whole has been gotten up by a knot
of lawyers to injure his election; and as I am one of the knot to which
he refers, and as I happen to be in possession of facts connected with
the matter, I will, in as brief a manner as possible, make a statement
of them, together with the means by which I arrived at the knowledge of
them.

Sometime in May or June last, a widow woman, by the name of Anderson,
and her son, who resides in Fulton county, came to Springfield, for
the purpose as they said of selling a ten acre lot of ground lying near
town, which they claimed as the property of the deceased husband and
father.

When they reached town they found the land was claimed by Gen. Adams.
John T. Stuart and myself were employed to look into the matter, and if
it was thought we could do so with any prospect of success, to commence
a suit for the land. I went immediately to the recorder’s office to
examine Adams’s title, and found that the land had been entered by one
Dixon, deeded by Dixon to Thomas, by Thomas to one Miller, and by Miller
to Gen. Adams. The oldest of these three deeds was about ten or eleven
years old, and the latest more than five, all recorded at the same
time, and that within less than one year. This I thought a suspicious
circumstance, and I was thereby induced to examine the deeds very
closely, with a view to the discovery of some defect by which to
overturn the title, being almost convinced then it was founded in fraud.
I discovered that in the deed from Thomas to Miller, although Miller’s
name stood in a sort of marginal note on the record book, it was nowhere
in the deed itself. I told the fact to Talbott, the recorder, and
proposed to him that he should go to Gen. Adams’s and get the original
deed, and compare it with the record, and thereby ascertain whether
the defect was in the original or there was merely an error in the
recording. As Talbott afterwards told me, he went to the General’s, but
not finding him at home, got the deed from his son, which, when compared
with the record, proved what we had discovered was merely an error of
the recorder. After Mr. Talbott corrected the record, he brought the
original to our office, as I then thought and think yet, to show us
that it was right. When he came into the room he handed the deed to me,
remarking that the fault was all his own. On opening it, another paper
fell out of it, which on examination proved to be an assignment of a
judgment in the Circuit Court of Sangamon County from Joseph Anderson,
the late husband of the widow above named, to James Adams, the judgment
being in favor of said Anderson against one Joseph Miller. Knowing that
this judgment had some connection with the land affair, I immediately
took a copy of it, which is word for word, letter for letter and cross
for cross as follows:

Joseph Anderson, vs. Joseph Miller.

Judgment in Sangamon Circuit Court against Joseph Miller obtained on a
note originally 25 dolls and interest thereon accrued. I assign all my
right, title and interest to James Adams which is in consideration of a
debt I owe said Adams.

his JOSEPH x ANDERSON. mark.

As the copy shows, it bore date May 10, 1827; although the judgment
assigned by it was not obtained until the October afterwards, as may be
seen by any one on the records of the Circuit Court. Two other strange
circumstances attended it which cannot be represented by a copy. One of
them was, that the date “1827” had first been made “1837” and, without
the figure “3,” being fully obliterated, the figure “2” had afterwards
been made on top of it; the other was that, although the date was ten
years old, the writing on it, from the freshness of its appearance, was
thought by many, and I believe by all who saw it, not to be more than a
week old. The paper on which it was written had a very old appearance;
and there were some old figures on the back of it which made the
freshness of the writing on the face of it much more striking than I
suppose it otherwise might have been. The reader’s curiosity is no doubt
excited to know what connection this assignment had with the land in
question. The story is this: Dixon sold and deeded the land to Thomas;
Thomas sold it to Anderson; but before he gave a deed, Anderson sold it
to Miller, and took Miller’s note for the purchase money. When this
note became due, Anderson sued Miller on it, and Miller procured an
injunction from the Court of Chancery to stay the collection of the
money until he should get a deed for the land. Gen. Adams was employed
as an attorney by Anderson in this chancery suit, and at the October
term, 1827, the injunction was dissolved, and a judgment given in favor
of Anderson against Miller; and it was provided that Thomas was to
execute a deed for the land in favor of Miller and deliver it to Gen.
Adams, to be held up by him till Miller paid the judgment, and then to
deliver it to him. Miller left the county without paying the judgment.
Anderson moved to Fulton county, where he has since died When the widow
came to Springfield last May or June, as before mentioned, and found the
land deeded to Gen. Adams by Miller, she was naturally led to inquire
why the money due upon the judgment had not been sent to them, inasmuch
as he, Gen. Adams, had no authority to deliver Thomas’s deed to Miller
until the money was paid. Then it was the General told her, or perhaps
her son, who came with her, that Anderson, in his lifetime, had assigned
the judgment to him, Gen. Adams. I am now told that the General is
exhibiting an assignment of the same judgment bearing date “1828” and
in other respects differing from the one described; and that he is
asserting that no such assignment as the one copied by me ever existed;
or if there did, it was forged between Talbott and the lawyers, and
slipped into his papers for the purpose of injuring him. Now, I can only
say that I know precisely such a one did exist, and that Ben. Talbott,
Wm. Butler, C.R. Matheny, John T. Stuart, Judge Logan, Robert Irwin, P.
C. Canedy and S. M. Tinsley, all saw and examined it, and that at least
one half of them will swear that IT WAS IN GENERAL ADAMS’S HANDWRITING!!
And further, I know that Talbott will swear that he got it out of the
General’s possession, and returned it into his possession again. The
assignment which the General is now exhibiting purports to have been by
Anderson in writing. The one I copied was signed with a cross.

I am told that Gen. Neale says that he will swear that he heard Gen.
Adams tell young Anderson that the assignment made by his father was
signed with a cross.

The above are ‘facts,’ as stated. I leave them without comment. I have
given the names of persons who have knowledge of these facts, in order
that any one who chooses may call on them and ascertain how far they
will corroborate my statements. I have only made these statements
because I am known by many to be one of the individuals against whom
the charge of forging the assignment and slipping it into the General’s
papers has been made, and because our silence might be construed into
a confession of its truth. I shall not subscribe my name; but I hereby
authorize the editor of the Journal to give it up to any one that may
call for it.



LINCOLN AND TALBOTT IN REPLY TO GEN. ADAMS.


“SANGAMON JOURNAL,” SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Oct. 28, 1837.

In the Republican of this morning a publication of Gen. Adams’s appears,
in which my name is used quite unreservedly. For this I thank the
General. I thank him because it gives me an opportunity, without
appearing obtrusive, of explaining a part of a former publication of
mine, which appears to me to have been misunderstood by many.

In the former publication alluded to, I stated, in substance, that
Mr. Talbott got a deed from a son of Gen. Adams’s for the purpose of
correcting a mistake that had occurred on the record of the said deed
in the recorder’s office; that he corrected the record, and brought the
deed and handed it to me, and that on opening the deed, another paper,
being the assignment of a judgment, fell out of it. This statement
Gen. Adams and the editor of the Republican have seized upon as a most
palpable evidence of fabrication and falsehood. They set themselves
gravely about proving that the assignment could not have been in the
deed when Talbott got it from young Adams, as he, Talbott, would have
seen it when he opened the deed to correct the record. Now, the truth
is, Talbott did see the assignment when he opened the deed, or at least
he told me he did on the same day; and I only omitted to say so, in
my former publication, because it was a matter of such palpable and
necessary inference. I had stated that Talbott had corrected the record
by the deed; and of course he must have opened it; and, just as the
General and his friends argue, must have seen the assignment. I omitted
to state the fact of Talbott’s seeing the assignment, because its
existence was so necessarily connected with other facts which I did
state, that I thought the greatest dunce could not but understand
it. Did I say Talbott had not seen it? Did I say anything that was
inconsistent with his having seen it before? Most certainly I did
neither; and if I did not, what becomes of the argument? These logical
gentlemen can sustain their argument only by assuming that I did say
negatively everything that I did not say affirmatively; and upon the
same assumption, we may expect to find the General, if a little harder
pressed for argument, saying that I said Talbott came to our office with
his head downward, not that I actually said so, but because I omitted to
say he came feet downward.

In his publication to-day, the General produces the affidavit of Reuben
Radford, in which it is said that Talbott told Radford that he did not
find the assignment in the deed, in the recording of which the error
was committed, but that he found it wrapped in another paper in the
recorder’s office, upon which statement the Genl. comments as follows,
to wit: “If it be true as stated by Talbott to Radford, that he
found the assignment wrapped up in another paper at his office, that
contradicts the statement of Lincoln that it fell out of the deed.”

Is common sense to be abused with such sophistry? Did I say what Talbott
found it in? If Talbott did find it in another paper at his office, is
that any reason why he could not have folded it in a deed and brought
it to my office? Can any one be so far duped as to be made believe that
what may have happened at Talbot’s office at one time is inconsistent
with what happened at my office at another time?

Now Talbott’s statement of the case as he makes it to me is this, that
he got a bunch of deeds from young Adams, and that he knows he found the
assignment in the bunch, but he is not certain which particular deed it
was in, nor is he certain whether it was folded in the same deed out of
which it was taken, or another one, when it was brought to my office. Is
this a mysterious story? Is there anything suspicious about it?

“But it is useless to dwell longer on this point. Any man who is not
wilfully blind can see at a flash, that there is no discrepancy, and
Lincoln has shown that they are not only inconsistent with truth, but
each other”—I can only say, that I have shown that he has done no such
thing; and if the reader is disposed to require any other evidence than
the General’s assertion, he will be of my opinion.

Excepting the General’s most flimsy attempt at mystification, in regard
to a discrepance between Talbott and myself, he has not denied a single
statement that I made in my hand-bill. Every material statement that
I made has been sworn to by men who, in former times, were thought as
respectable as General Adams. I stated that an assignment of a judgment,
a copy of which I gave, had existed—Benj. Talbott, C. R. Matheny, Wm.
Butler, and Judge Logan swore to its existence. I stated that it was
said to be in Gen. Adams’s handwriting—the same men swore it was in
his handwriting. I stated that Talbott would swear that he got it out of
Gen. Adams’s possession—Talbott came forward and did swear it.

Bidding adieu to the former publication, I now propose to examine the
General’s last gigantic production. I now propose to point out some
discrepancies in the General’s address; and such, too, as he shall not
be able to escape from. Speaking of the famous assignment, the General
says: “This last charge, which was their last resort, their dying
effort to render my character infamous among my fellow citizens, was
manufactured at a certain lawyer’s office in the town, printed at the
office of the Sangamon Journal, and found its way into the world some
time between two days just before the last election.” Now turn to Mr.
Keys’ affidavit, in which you will find the following, viz.: “I
certify that some time in May or the early part of June, 1837, I saw
at Williams’s corner a paper purporting to be an assignment from Joseph
Anderson to James Adams, which assignment was signed by a mark to
Anderson’s name,” etc. Now mark, if Keys saw the assignment on the last
of May or first of June, Gen. Adams tells a falsehood when he says
it was manufactured just before the election, which was on the 7th of
August; and if it was manufactured just before the election, Keys tells
a falsehood when he says he saw it on the last of May or first of
June. Either Keys or the General is irretrievably in for it; and in the
General’s very condescending language, I say “Let them settle it between
them.”

Now again, let the reader, bearing in mind that General Adams has
unequivocally said, in one part of his address, that the charge in
relation to the assignment was manufactured just before the election,
turn to the affidavit of Peter S. Weber, where the following will be
found viz.: “I, Peter S. Weber, do certify that from the best of
my recollection, on the day or day after Gen. Adams started for the
Illinois Rapids, in May last, that I was at the house of Gen. Adams,
sitting in the kitchen, situated on the back part of the house, it being
in the afternoon, and that Benjamin Talbott came around the house, back
into the kitchen, and appeared wild and confused, and that he laid a
package of papers on the kitchen table and requested that they should be
handed to Lucian. He made no apology for coming to the kitchen, nor
for not handing them to Lucian himself, but showed the token of being
frightened and confused both in demeanor and speech and for what cause I
could not apprehend.”

Commenting on Weber’s affidavit, Gen. Adams asks, “Why this fright and
confusion?” I reply that this is a question for the General himself.
Weber says that it was in May, and if so, it is most clear that Talbott
was not frightened on account of the assignment, unless the General
lies when he says the assignment charge was manufactured just before the
election. Is it not a strong evidence, that the General is not traveling
with the pole-star of truth in his front, to see him in one part of
his address roundly asserting that the assignment was manufactured
just before the election, and then, forgetting that position, procuring
Weber’s most foolish affidavit, to prove that Talbott had been engaged
in manufacturing it two months before?

In another part of his address, Gen. Adams says: “That I hold an
assignment of said judgment, dated the 20th of May, 1828, and signed
by said Anderson, I have never pretended to deny or conceal, but stated
that fact in one of my circulars previous to the election, and also
in answer to a bill in chancery.” Now I pronounce this statement
unqualifiedly false, and shall not rely on the word or oath of any
man to sustain me in what I say; but will let the whole be decided by
reference to the circular and answer in chancery of which the General
speaks. In his circular he did speak of an assignment; but he did not
say it bore date 20th of May, 1828; nor did he say it bore any date. In
his answer in chancery, he did say that he had an assignment; but he
did not say that it bore date the 20th May, 1828; but so far from it, he
said on oath (for he swore to the answer) that as well as recollected,
he obtained it in 1827. If any one doubts, let him examine the circular
and answer for himself. They are both accessible.

It will readily be observed that the principal part of Adams’s defense
rests upon the argument that if he had been base enough to forge an
assignment he would not have been fool enough to forge one that would
not cover the case. This argument he used in his circular before the
election. The Republican has used it at least once, since then; and
Adams uses it again in his publication of to-day. Now I pledge myself to
show that he is just such a fool that he and his friends have contended
it was impossible for him to be. Recollect—he says he has a genuine
assignment; and that he got Joseph Klein’s affidavit, stating that he
had seen it, and that he believed the signature to have been executed
by the same hand that signed Anderson’s name to the answer in chancery.
Luckily Klein took a copy of this genuine assignment, which I have been
permitted to see; and hence I know it does not cover the case. In the
first place it is headed “Joseph Anderson vs. Joseph Miller,” and heads
off “Judgment in Sangamon Circuit Court.” Now, mark, there never was
a case in Sangamon Circuit Court entitled Joseph Anderson vs. Joseph
Miller. The case mentioned in my former publication, and the only
one between these parties that ever existed in the Circuit Court, was
entitled Joseph Miller vs. Joseph Anderson, Miller being the plaintiff.
What then becomes of all their sophistry about Adams not being fool
enough to forge an assignment that would not cover the case? It is
certain that the present one does not cover the case; and if he got
it honestly, it is still clear that he was fool enough to pay for an
assignment that does not cover the case.

The General asks for the proof of disinterested witnesses. Whom does he
consider disinterested? None can be more so than those who have already
testified against him. No one of them had the least interest on earth,
so far as I can learn, to injure him. True, he says they had conspired
against him; but if the testimony of an angel from Heaven were
introduced against him, he would make the same charge of conspiracy.
And now I put the question to every reflecting man, Do you believe that
Benjamin Talbott, Chas. R. Matheny, William Butler and Stephen T. Logan,
all sustaining high and spotless characters, and justly proud of them,
would deliberately perjure themselves, without any motive whatever,
except to injure a man’s election; and that, too, a man who had been a
candidate, time out of mind, and yet who had never been elected to any
office?

Adams’s assurance, in demanding disinterested testimony, is surpassing.
He brings in the affidavit of his own son, and even of Peter S. Weber,
with whom I am not acquainted, but who, I suppose, is some black or
mulatto boy, from his being kept in the kitchen, to prove his points;
but when such a man as Talbott, a man who, but two years ago, ran
against Gen. Adams for the office of Recorder and beat him more than
four votes to one, is introduced against him, he asks the community,
with all the consequence of a lord, to reject his testimony.

I might easily write a volume, pointing out inconsistencies between
the statements in Adams’s last address with one another, and with other
known facts; but I am aware the reader must already be tired with
the length of this article. His opening statements, that he was first
accused of being a Tory, and that he refuted that; that then the
Sampson’s ghost story was got up, and he refuted that; that as a last
resort, a dying effort, the assignment charge was got up is all as false
as hell, as all this community must know. Sampson’s ghost first made
its appearance in print, and that, too, after Keys swears he saw the
assignment, as any one may see by reference to the files of papers; and
Gen. Adams himself, in reply to the Sampson’s ghost story, was the first
man that raised the cry of toryism, and it was only by way of set-off,
and never in seriousness, that it was bandied back at him. His effort is
to make the impression that his enemies first made the charge of toryism
and he drove them from that, then Sampson’s ghost, he drove them from
that, then finally the assignment charge was manufactured just before
election. Now, the only general reply he ever made to the Sampson’s
ghost and tory charges he made at one and the same time, and not in
succession as he states; and the date of that reply will show, that it
was made at least a month after the date on which Keys swears he saw the
Anderson assignment. But enough. In conclusion I will only say that I
have a character to defend as well as Gen. Adams, but I disdain to whine
about it as he does. It is true I have no children nor kitchen boys; and
if I had, I should scorn to lug them in to make affidavits for me.

A. LINCOLN, September 6, 1837.



Gen. ADAMS CONTROVERSY—CONTINUED


TO THE PUBLIC.

“SANGAMON JOURNAL,” Springfield, Ill, Oct.28, 1837.

Such is the turn which things have taken lately, that when Gen. Adams
writes a book, I am expected to write a commentary on it. In the
Republican of this morning he has presented the world with a new work
of six columns in length; in consequence of which I must beg the room of
one column in the Journal. It is obvious that a minute reply cannot
be made in one column to everything that can be said in six; and,
consequently, I hope that expectation will be answered if I reply to
such parts of the General’s publication as are worth replying to.

It may not be improper to remind the reader that in his publication of
Sept. 6th General Adams said that the assignment charge was manufactured
just before the election; and that in reply I proved that statement to
be false by Keys, his own witness. Now, without attempting to explain,
he furnishes me with another witness (Tinsley) by which the same thing
is proved, to wit, that the assignment was not manufactured just before
the election; but that it was some weeks before. Let it be borne in mind
that Adams made this statement—has himself furnished two witnesses to
prove its falsehood, and does not attempt to deny or explain it. Before
going farther, let a pin be stuck here, labeled “One lie proved and
confessed.” On the 6th of September he said he had before stated in
the hand-bill that he held an assignment dated May 20th, 1828, which in
reply I pronounced to be false, and referred to the hand-bill for the
truth of what I said. This week he forgets to make any explanation of
this. Let another pin be stuck here, labelled as before. I mention these
things because, if, when I convict him in one falsehood, he is permitted
to shift his ground and pass it by in silence, there can be no end to
this controversy.

The first thing that attracts my attention in the General’s present
production is the information he is pleased to give to “those who are
made to suffer at his (my) hands.”

Under present circumstances, this cannot apply to me, for I am not
a widow nor an orphan: nor have I a wife or children who might by
possibility become such. Such, however, I have no doubt, have been,
and will again be made to suffer at his hands! Hands! Yes, they are
the mischievous agents. The next thing I shall notice is his favorite
expression, “not of lawyers, doctors and others,” which he is so fond of
applying to all who dare expose his rascality. Now, let it be remembered
that when he first came to this country he attempted to impose himself
upon the community as a lawyer, and actually carried the attempt so
far as to induce a man who was under a charge of murder to entrust the
defence of his life in his hands, and finally took his money and got
him hanged. Is this the man that is to raise a breeze in his favor by
abusing lawyers? If he is not himself a lawyer, it is for the lack of
sense, and not of inclination. If he is not a lawyer, he is a liar, for
he proclaimed himself a lawyer, and got a man hanged by depending on
him.

Passing over such parts of the article as have neither fact nor argument
in them, I come to the question asked by Adams whether any person ever
saw the assignment in his possession. This is an insult to common sense.
Talbott has sworn once and repeated time and again, that he got it out
of Adams’s possession and returned it into the same possession. Still,
as though he was addressing fools, he has assurance to ask if any person
ever saw it in his possession.

Next I quote a sentence, “Now my son Lucian swears that when Talbott
called for the deed, that he, Talbott, opened it and pointed out the
error.” True. His son Lucian did swear as he says; and in doing so, he
swore what I will prove by his own affidavit to be a falsehood. Turn to
Lucian’s affidavit, and you will there see that Talbott called for the
deed by which to correct an error on the record. Thus it appears that
the error in question was on the record, and not in the deed. How then
could Talbott open the deed and point out the error? Where a thing is
not, it cannot be pointed out. The error was not in the deed, and of
course could not be pointed out there. This does not merely prove that
the error could not be pointed out, as Lucian swore it was; but it
proves, too, that the deed was not opened in his presence with a special
view to the error, for if it had been, he could not have failed to see
that there was no error in it. It is easy enough to see why Lucian swore
this. His object was to prove that the assignment was not in the deed
when Talbott got it: but it was discovered he could not swear this
safely, without first swearing the deed was opened—and if he swore it
was opened, he must show a motive for opening it, and the conclusion
with him and his father was that the pointing out the error would appear
the most plausible.

For the purpose of showing that the assignment was not in the bundle
when Talbott got it, is the story introduced into Lucian’s affidavit
that the deeds were counted. It is a remarkable fact, and one that
should stand as a warning to all liars and fabricators, that in this
short affidavit of Lucian’s he only attempted to depart from the truth,
so far as I have the means of knowing, in two points, to wit, in the
opening the deed and pointing out the error and the counting of the
deeds,—and in both of these he caught himself. About the counting, he
caught himself thus—after saying the bundle contained five deeds and
a lease, he proceeds, “and I saw no other papers than the said deed and
lease.” First he has six papers, and then he saw none but two; for “my
son Lucian’s” benefit, let a pin be stuck here.

Adams again adduces the argument, that he could not have forged the
assignment, for the reason that he could have had no motive for it. With
those that know the facts there is no absence of motive. Admitting the
paper which he has filed in the suit to be genuine, it is clear that it
cannot answer the purpose for which he designs it. Hence his motive for
making one that he supposed would answer is obvious. His making the date
too old is also easily enough accounted for. The records were not in his
hands, and then, there being some considerable talk upon this particular
subject, he knew he could not examine the records to ascertain the
precise dates without subjecting himself to suspicion; and hence he
concluded to try it by guess, and, as it turned out, missed it a little.
About Miller’s deposition I have a word to say. In the first place,
Miller’s answer to the first question shows upon its face that he had
been tampered with, and the answer dictated to him. He was asked if he
knew Joel Wright and James Adams; and above three-fourths of his answer
consists of what he knew about Joseph Anderson, a man about whom nothing
had been asked, nor a word said in the question—a fact that can only be
accounted for upon the supposition that Adams had secretly told him what
he wished him to swear to.

Another of Miller’s answers I will prove both by common sense and the
Court of Record is untrue. To one question he answers, “Anderson brought
a suit against me before James Adams, then an acting justice of the
peace in Sangamon County, before whom he obtained a judgment.

“Q.—Did you remove the same by injunction to the Sangamon Circuit
Court? Ans.—I did remove it.”

Now mark—it is said he removed it by injunction. The word “injunction”
in common language imports a command that some person or thing shall
not move or be removed; in law it has the same meaning. An injunction
issuing out of chancery to a justice of the peace is a command to him to
stop all proceedings in a named case until further orders. It is not an
order to remove but to stop or stay something that is already moving.
Besides this, the records of the Sangamon Circuit Court show that the
judgment of which Miller swore was never removed into said Court by
injunction or otherwise.

I have now to take notice of a part of Adams’s address which in the
order of time should have been noticed before. It is in these words:
“I have now shown, in the opinion of two competent judges, that the
handwriting of the forged assignment differed from mine, and by one of
them that it could not be mistaken for mine.” That is false. Tinsley no
doubt is the judge referred to; and by reference to his certificate it
will be seen that he did not say the handwriting of the assignment
could not be mistaken for Adams’s—nor did he use any other expression
substantially, or anything near substantially, the same. But if Tinsley
had said the handwriting could not be mistaken for Adams’s, it would
have been equally unfortunate for Adams: for it then would have
contradicted Keys, who says, “I looked at the writing and judged it the
said Adams’s or a good imitation.”

Adams speaks with much apparent confidence of his success on attending
lawsuits, and the ultimate maintenance of his title to the land in
question. Without wishing to disturb the pleasure of his dream, I would
say to him that it is not impossible that he may yet be taught to sing a
different song in relation to the matter.

At the end of Miller’s deposition, Adams asks, “Will Mr. Lincoln now say
that he is almost convinced my title to this ten acre tract of land
is founded in fraud?” I answer, I will not. I will now change the
phraseology so as to make it run—I am quite convinced, &c. I cannot
pass in silence Adams’s assertion that he has proved that the forged
assignment was not in the deed when it came from his house by Talbott,
the recorder. In this, although Talbott has sworn that the assignment
was in the bundle of deeds when it came from his house, Adams has
the unaccountable assurance to say that he has proved the contrary by
Talbott. Let him or his friends attempt to show wherein he proved any
such thing by Talbott.

In his publication of the 6th of September he hinted to Talbott, that
he might be mistaken. In his present, speaking of Talbott and me he says
“They may have been imposed upon.” Can any man of the least penetration
fail to see the object of this? After he has stormed and raged till he
hopes and imagines he has got us a little scared he wishes to softly
whisper in our ears, “If you’ll quit I will.” If he could get us to say
that some unknown, undefined being had slipped the assignment into
our hands without our knowledge, not a doubt remains but that he would
immediately discover that we were the purest men on earth. This is the
ground he evidently wishes us to understand he is willing to compromise
upon. But we ask no such charity at his hands. We are neither mistaken
nor imposed upon. We have made the statements we have because we know
them to be true and we choose to live or die by them.

Esq. Carter, who is Adams’s friend, personal and political, will
recollect, that, on the 5th of this month, he (Adams), with a great
affectation of modesty, declared that he would never introduce his own
child as a witness. Notwithstanding this affectation of modesty, he has
in his present publication introduced his child as witness; and as if to
show with how much contempt he could treat his own declaration, he
has had this same Esq. Carter to administer the oath to him. And so
important a witness does he consider him, and so entirely does the whole
of his entire present production depend upon the testimony of his child,
that in it he has mentioned “my son,” “my son Lucian,” “Lucian, my son,”
and the like expressions no less than fifteen different times. Let it
be remembered here, that I have shown the affidavit of “my darling son
Lucian” to be false by the evidence apparent on its own face; and I now
ask if that affidavit be taken away what foundation will the fabric have
left to stand upon?

General Adams’s publications and out-door maneuvering, taken in
connection with the editorial articles of the Republican, are not more
foolish and contradictory than they are ludicrous and amusing. One
week the Republican notifies the public that Gen. Adams is preparing
an instrument that will tear, rend, split, rive, blow up, confound,
overwhelm, annihilate, extinguish, exterminate, burst asunder, and grind
to powder all its slanderers, and particularly Talbott and Lincoln—all
of which is to be done in due time.

Then for two or three weeks all is calm—not a word said. Again the
Republican comes forth with a mere passing remark that “public” opinion
has decided in favor of Gen. Adams, and intimates that he will give
himself no more trouble about the matter. In the meantime Adams himself
is prowling about and, as Burns says of the devil, “For prey, and holes
and corners tryin’,” and in one instance goes so far as to take an old
acquaintance of mine several steps from a crowd and, apparently weighed
down with the importance of his business, gravely and solemnly asks him
if “he ever heard Lincoln say he was a deist.”

Anon the Republican comes again. “We invite the attention of the public
to General Adams’s communication,” &c. “The victory is a great one, the
triumph is overwhelming.” I really believe the editor of the Illinois
Republican is fool enough to think General Adams leads off—“Authors
most egregiously mistaken &c. Most woefully shall their presumption be
punished,” &c. (Lord have mercy on us.) “The hour is yet to come, yea,
nigh at hand—(how long first do you reckon?)—when the Journal and its
junto shall say, I have appeared too early.” “Their infamy shall be laid
bare to the public gaze.” Suddenly the General appears to relent at the
severity with which he is treating us and he exclaims: “The condemnation
of my enemies is the inevitable result of my own defense.” For your
health’s sake, dear Gen., do not permit your tenderness of heart to
afflict you so much on our account. For some reason (perhaps because we
are killed so quickly) we shall never be sensible of our suffering.

Farewell, General. I will see you again at court if not before—when and
where we will settle the question whether you or the widow shall have
the land.

A. LINCOLN. October 18, 1837.



1838



TO Mrs. O. H. BROWNING—A FARCE


SPRINGFIELD, April 1, 1838.

DEAR MADAM:—Without apologizing for being egotistical, I shall make the
history of so much of my life as has elapsed since I saw you the subject
of this letter. And, by the way, I now discover that, in order to give
a full and intelligible account of the things I have done and suffered
since I saw you, I shall necessarily have to relate some that happened
before.

It was, then, in the autumn of 1836 that a married lady of my
acquaintance, and who was a great friend of mine, being about to pay a
visit to her father and other relatives residing in Kentucky, proposed
to me that on her return she would bring a sister of hers with her on
condition that I would engage to become her brother-in-law with all
convenient despatch. I, of course, accepted the proposal, for you know
I could not have done otherwise had I really been averse to it; but
privately, between you and me, I was most confoundedly well pleased with
the project. I had seen the said sister some three years before, thought
her intelligent and agreeable, and saw no good objection to plodding
life through hand in hand with her. Time passed on; the lady took her
journey and in due time returned, sister in company, sure enough. This
astonished me a little, for it appeared to me that her coming so readily
showed that she was a trifle too willing, but on reflection it occurred
to me that she might have been prevailed on by her married sister to
come without anything concerning me ever having been mentioned to her,
and so I concluded that if no other objection presented itself, I would
consent to waive this. All this occurred to me on hearing of her arrival
in the neighborhood—for, be it remembered, I had not yet seen her,
except about three years previous, as above mentioned. In a few days we
had an interview, and, although I had seen her before, she did not look
as my imagination had pictured her. I knew she was over-size, but she
now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. I knew she was called an
“old maid,” and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the
appellation, but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid
thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features,—for
her skin was too full of fat to permit of its contracting into
wrinkles,—but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in
general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head that nothing
could have commenced at the size of infancy and reached her present bulk
in less than thirty-five or forty years; and in short, I was not at
all pleased with her. But what could I do? I had told her sister that I
would take her for better or for worse, and I made a point of honor and
conscience in all things to stick to my word especially if others had
been induced to act on it which in this case I had no doubt they had,
for I was now fairly convinced that no other man on earth would have
her, and hence the conclusion that they were bent on holding me to my
bargain.

“Well,” thought I, “I have said it, and, be the consequences what they
may, it shall not be my fault if I fail to do it.” At once I determined
to consider her my wife; and, this done, all my powers of discovery were
put to work in search of perfections in her which might be fairly set
off against her defects. I tried to imagine her handsome, which, but
for her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true. Exclusive of this no
woman that I have ever seen has a finer face. I also tried to convince
myself that the mind was much more to be valued than the person; and in
this she was not inferior, as I could discover, to any with whom I had
been acquainted.

Shortly after this, without coming to any positive understanding with
her, I set out for Vandalia, when and where you first saw me. During
my stay there I had letters from her which did not change my opinion of
either her intellect or intention, but on the contrary confirmed it in
both.

All this while, although I was fixed, “firm as the surge-repelling
rock,” in my resolution, I found I was continually repenting the
rashness which had led me to make it. Through life, I have been in no
bondage, either real or imaginary, from the thraldom of which I so much
desired to be free. After my return home, I saw nothing to change my
opinions of her in any particular. She was the same, and so was I. I now
spent my time in planning how I might get along through life after my
contemplated change of circumstances should have taken place, and how I
might procrastinate the evil day for a time, which I really dreaded as
much, perhaps more, than an Irishman does the halter.

After all my suffering upon this deeply interesting subject, here I am,
wholly, unexpectedly, completely, out of the “scrape”; and now I want to
know if you can guess how I got out of it——out, clear, in every sense
of the term; no violation of word, honor, or conscience. I don’t believe
you can guess, and so I might as well tell you at once. As the lawyer
says, it was done in the manner following, to wit: After I had delayed
the matter as long as I thought I could in honor do (which, by the way,
had brought me round into the last fall), I concluded I might as well
bring it to a consummation without further delay; and so I mustered
my resolution, and made the proposal to her direct; but, shocking to
relate, she answered, No. At first I supposed she did it through an
affectation of modesty, which I thought but ill became her under the
peculiar circumstances of her case; but on my renewal of the charge,
I found she repelled it with greater firmness than before. I tried it
again and again but with the same success, or rather with the same want
of success.

I finally was forced to give it up; at which I very unexpectedly found
myself mortified almost beyond endurance. I was mortified, it seemed
to me, in a hundred different ways. My vanity was deeply wounded by the
reflection that I had been too stupid to discover her intentions, and at
the same time never doubting that I understood them perfectly, and also
that she, whom I had taught myself to believe nobody else would have,
had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness. And, to cap the
whole, I then for the first time began to suspect that I was really a
little in love with her. But let it all go. I’ll try and outlive it.
Others have been made fools of by the girls, but this can never with
truth be said of me. I most emphatically in this instance, made a fool
of myself. I have now come to the conclusion never again to think of
marrying, and for this reason: I can never be satisfied with any one who
would be blockhead enough to have me.

When you receive this, write me a long yarn about something to amuse me.
Give my respects to Mr. Browning.

Your sincere friend, A. LINCOLN.



1839



REMARKS ON SALE OF PUBLIC LANDS


IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, January 17, 1839.

Mr. Lincoln, from Committee on Finance, to which the subject was
referred, made a report on the subject of purchasing of the United
States all the unsold lands lying within the limits of the State of
Illinois, accompanied by resolutions that this State propose to purchase
all unsold lands at twenty-five cents per acre, and pledging the faith
of the State to carry the proposal into effect if the government accept
the same within two years.

Mr. Lincoln thought the resolutions ought to be seriously considered. In
reply to the gentleman from Adams, he said that it was not to enrich the
State. The price of the lands may be raised, it was thought by some; by
others, that it would be reduced. The conclusion in his mind was that
the representatives in this Legislature from the country in which
the lands lie would be opposed to raising the price, because it would
operate against the settlement of the lands. He referred to the lands in
the military tract. They had fallen into the hands of large speculators
in consequence of the low price. He was opposed to a low price of land.
He thought it was adverse to the interests of the poor settler, because
speculators buy them up. He was opposed to a reduction of the price of
public lands.

Mr. Lincoln referred to some official documents emanating from Indiana,
and compared the progressive population of the two States. Illinois
had gained upon that State under the public land system as it is. His
conclusion was that ten years from this time Illinois would have no more
public land unsold than Indiana now has. He referred also to Ohio. That
State had sold nearly all her public lands. She was but twenty years
ahead of us, and as our lands were equally salable—more so, as he
maintained—we should have no more twenty years from now than she has at
present.

Mr. Lincoln referred to the canal lands, and supposed that the policy of
the State would be different in regard to them, if the representatives
from that section of country could themselves choose the policy; but the
representatives from other parts of the State had a veto upon it, and
regulated the policy. He thought that if the State had all the lands,
the policy of the Legislature would be more liberal to all sections.

He referred to the policy of the General Government. He thought that
if the national debt had not been paid, the expenses of the government
would not have doubled, as they had done since that debt was paid.



TO ——— ROW.


SPRINGFIELD, June 11, 1839 DEAR ROW:

Mr. Redman informs me that you wish me to write you the particulars of
a conversation between Dr. Felix and myself relative to you. The Dr.
overtook me between Rushville and Beardstown.

He, after learning that I had lived at Springfield, asked if I was
acquainted with you. I told him I was. He said you had lately been
elected constable in Adams, but that you never would be again. I asked
him why. He said the people there had found out that you had been
sheriff or deputy sheriff in Sangamon County, and that you came off and
left your securities to suffer. He then asked me if I did not know such
to be the fact. I told him I did not think you had ever been sheriff or
deputy sheriff in Sangamon, but that I thought you had been constable. I
further told him that if you had left your securities to suffer in that
or any other case, I had never heard of it, and that if it had been so,
I thought I would have heard of it.

If the Dr. is telling that I told him anything against you whatever, I
authorize you to contradict it flatly. We have no news here.

Your friend, as ever, A. LINCOLN.



SPEECH ON NATIONAL BANK


IN THE HALL OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, December 20, 1839.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:—It is peculiarly embarrassing to me to attempt a
continuance of the discussion, on this evening, which has been conducted
in this hall on several preceding ones. It is so because on each of
those evenings there was a much fuller attendance than now, without any
reason for its being so, except the greater interest the community feel
in the speakers who addressed them then than they do in him who is to do
so now. I am, indeed, apprehensive that the few who have attended
have done so more to spare me mortification than in the hope of being
interested in anything I may be able to say. This circumstance casts
a damp upon my spirits, which I am sure I shall be unable to overcome
during the evening. But enough of preface.

The subject heretofore and now to be discussed is the subtreasury scheme
of the present administration, as a means of collecting, safe-keeping,
transferring, and disbursing, the revenues of the nation, as contrasted
with a national bank for the same purposes. Mr. Douglas has said that we
(the Whigs) have not dared to meet them (the Locos) in argument on this
question. I protest against this assertion. I assert that we have again
and again, during this discussion, urged facts and arguments against
the subtreasury which they have neither dared to deny nor attempted to
answer. But lest some may be led to believe that we really wish to avoid
the question, I now propose, in my humble way, to urge those arguments
again; at the same time begging the audience to mark well the positions
I shall take and the proof I shall offer to sustain them, and that they
will not again permit Mr. Douglas or his friends to escape the force of
them by a round and groundless assertion that we “dare not meet them in
argument.”

Of the subtreasury, then, as contrasted with a national bank for the
before-enumerated purposes, I lay down the following propositions, to
wit: (1) It will injuriously affect the community by its operation on
the circulating medium. (2) It will be a more expensive fiscal agent.
(3) It will be a less secure depository of the public money. To show
the truth of the first proposition, let us take a short review of our
condition under the operation of a national bank. It was the depository
of the public revenues. Between the collection of those revenues and the
disbursement of them by the government, the bank was permitted to and
did actually loan them out to individuals, and hence the large amount of
money actually collected for revenue purposes, which by any other
plan would have been idle a great portion of the time, was kept almost
constantly in circulation. Any person who will reflect that money is
only valuable while in circulation will readily perceive that any device
which will keep the government revenues in constant circulation, instead
of being locked up in idleness, is no inconsiderable advantage. By the
subtreasury the revenue is to be collected and kept in iron boxes until
the government wants it for disbursement; thus robbing the people of the
use of it, while the government does not itself need it, and while the
money is performing no nobler office than that of rusting in iron boxes.
The natural effect of this change of policy, every one will see, is
to reduce the quantity of money in circulation. But, again, by
the subtreasury scheme the revenue is to be collected in specie. I
anticipate that this will be disputed. I expect to hear it said that
it is not the policy of the administration to collect the revenue
in specie. If it shall, I reply that Mr. Van Buren, in his message
recommending the subtreasury, expended nearly a column of that document
in an attempt to persuade Congress to provide for the collection of the
revenue in specie exclusively; and he concludes with these words:

“It may be safely assumed that no motive of convenience to the citizens
requires the reception of bank paper.” In addition to this, Mr.
Silas Wright, Senator from New York, and the political, personal and
confidential friend of Mr. Van Buren, drafted and introduced into the
Senate the first subtreasury bill, and that bill provided for ultimately
collecting the revenue in specie. It is true, I know, that that clause
was stricken from the bill, but it was done by the votes of the Whigs,
aided by a portion only of the Van Buren senators. No subtreasury
bill has yet become a law, though two or three have been considered by
Congress, some with and some without the specie clause; so that I
admit there is room for quibbling upon the question of whether the
administration favor the exclusive specie doctrine or not; but I take it
that the fact that the President at first urged the specie doctrine,
and that under his recommendation the first bill introduced embraced it,
warrants us in charging it as the policy of the party until their head
as publicly recants it as he at first espoused it. I repeat, then, that
by the subtreasury the revenue is to be collected in specie. Now mark
what the effect of this must be. By all estimates ever made there are
but between sixty and eighty millions of specie in the United States.
The expenditures of the Government for the year 1838—the last for which
we have had the report—were forty millions. Thus it is seen that if the
whole revenue be collected in specie, it will take more than half of all
the specie in the nation to do it. By this means more than half of all
the specie belonging to the fifteen millions of souls who compose the
whole population of the country is thrown into the hands of the public
office-holders, and other public creditors comprising in number perhaps
not more than one quarter of a million, leaving the other fourteen
millions and three quarters to get along as they best can, with less
than one half of the specie of the country, and whatever rags and
shinplasters they may be able to put, and keep, in circulation. By
this means, every office-holder and other public creditor may, and
most likely will, set up shaver; and a most glorious harvest will the
specie-men have of it,—each specie-man, upon a fair division, having to
his share the fleecing of about fifty-nine rag-men. In all candor let me
ask, was such a system for benefiting the few at the expense of the many
ever before devised? And was the sacred name of Democracy ever before
made to indorse such an enormity against the rights of the people?

I have already said that the subtreasury will reduce the quantity of
money in circulation. This position is strengthened by the recollection
that the revenue is to be collected in Specie, so that the mere amount
of revenue is not all that is withdrawn, but the amount of paper
circulation that the forty millions would serve as a basis to is
withdrawn, which would be in a sound state at least one hundred
millions. When one hundred millions, or more, of the circulation we
now have shall be withdrawn, who can contemplate without terror the
distress, ruin, bankruptcy, and beggary that must follow? The man
who has purchased any article—say a horse—on credit, at one hundred
dollars, when there are two hundred millions circulating in the country,
if the quantity be reduced to one hundred millions by the arrival of
pay-day, will find the horse but sufficient to pay half the debt; and
the other half must either be paid out of his other means, and thereby
become a clear loss to him, or go unpaid, and thereby become a clear
loss to his creditor. What I have here said of a single case of the
purchase of a horse will hold good in every case of a debt existing at
the time a reduction in the quantity of money occurs, by whomsoever, and
for whatsoever, it may have been contracted. It may be said that
what the debtor loses the creditor gains by this operation; but on
examination this will be found true only to a very limited extent. It is
more generally true that all lose by it—the creditor by losing more of
his debts than he gains by the increased value of those he collects; the
debtor by either parting with more of his property to pay his debts
than he received in contracting them, or by entirely breaking up his
business, and thereby being thrown upon the world in idleness.

The general distress thus created will, to be sure, be temporary,
because, whatever change may occur in the quantity of money in any
community, time will adjust the derangement produced; but while that
adjustment is progressing, all suffer more or less, and very many lose
everything that renders life desirable. Why, then, shall we suffer a
severe difficulty, even though it be but temporary, unless we receive
some equivalent for it?

What I have been saying as to the effect produced by a reduction of the
quantity of money relates to the whole country. I now propose to
show that it would produce a peculiar and permanent hardship upon the
citizens of those States and Territories in which the public lands lie.
The land-offices in those States and Territories, as all know, form the
great gulf by which all, or nearly all, the money in them is swallowed
up. When the quantity of money shall be reduced, and consequently
everything under individual control brought down in proportion, the
price of those lands, being fixed by law, will remain as now. Of
necessity it will follow that the produce or labor that now raises money
sufficient to purchase eighty acres will then raise but sufficient
to purchase forty, or perhaps not that much; and this difficulty and
hardship will last as long, in some degree, as any portion of these
lands shall remain undisposed of. Knowing, as I well do, the difficulty
that poor people now encounter in procuring homes, I hesitate not to say
that when the price of the public lands shall be doubled or trebled, or,
which is the same thing, produce and labor cut down to one half or one
third of their present prices, it will be little less than impossible
for them to procure those homes at all....

Well, then, what did become of him? (Postmaster General Barry) Why, the
President immediately expressed his high disapprobation of his almost
unequaled incapacity and corruption by appointing him to a foreign
mission, with a salary and outfit of $18,000 a year! The party now
attempt to throw Barry off, and to avoid the responsibility of his sins.
Did not the President indorse those sins when, on the very heel of
their commission, he appointed their author to the very highest and most
honorable office in his gift, and which is but a single step behind the
very goal of American political ambition?

I return to another of Mr. Douglas’s excuses for the expenditures of
1838, at the same time announcing the pleasing intelligence that this is
the last one. He says that ten millions of that year’s expenditure was
a contingent appropriation, to prosecute an anticipated war with Great
Britain on the Maine boundary question. Few words will settle this.
First, that the ten millions appropriated was not made till 1839, and
consequently could not have been expended in 1838; second, although it
was appropriated, it has never been expended at all. Those who heard Mr.
Douglas recollect that he indulged himself in a contemptuous expression
of pity for me. “Now he’s got me,” thought I. But when he went on to
say that five millions of the expenditure of 1838 were payments of the
French indemnities, which I knew to be untrue; that five millions had
been for the post-office, which I knew to be untrue; that ten millions
had been for the Maine boundary war, which I not only knew to be untrue,
but supremely ridiculous also; and when I saw that he was stupid enough
to hope that I would permit such groundless and audacious assertions to
go unexposed,—I readily consented that, on the score both of veracity
and sagacity, the audience should judge whether he or I were the more
deserving of the world’s contempt.

Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party and
the Whigs is that, although the former sometimes err in practice,
they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in
principle; and, better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative
expression in these words: “The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel,
but they are sound in the head and the heart.” The first branch of the
figure—that is, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel—I admit
is not merely figuratively, but literally true. Who that looks but for
a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their
hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to
Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find
refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly
affected in their heels with a species of “running itch”? It seems
that this malady of their heels operates on these sound-headed and
honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the comic song
did on its owner: which, when he had once got started on it, the more he
tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing
this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems too
strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier, who was always
boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably
retreated without orders at the first charge of an engagement, being
asked by his captain why he did so, replied: “Captain, I have as brave a
heart as Julius Caesar ever had; but, somehow or other, whenever
danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.” So with Mr.
Lamborn’s party. They take the public money into their hand for the
most laudable purpose that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate; but
before they can possibly get it out again, their rascally “vulnerable
heels” will run away with them.

Seriously this proposition of Mr. Lamborn is nothing more or less than
a request that his party may be tried by their professions instead of
their practices. Perhaps no position that the party assumes is more
liable to or more deserving of exposure than this very modest request;
and nothing but the unwarrantable length to which I have already
extended these remarks forbids me now attempting to expose it. For the
reason given, I pass it by.

I shall advert to but one more point. Mr. Lamborn refers to the late
elections in the States, and from their results confidently predicts
that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next
Presidential election. Address that argument to cowards and to knaves;
with the free and the brave it will effect nothing. It may be true; if
it must, let it. Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours
may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was
the last to desert, but that I never deserted her. I know that the great
volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that
reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption in a
current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity
over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave
unscathed no green spot or living thing; while on its bosom are riding,
like demons on the waves of hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and
fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course with
the hopelessness of their effort; and, knowing this, I cannot deny that
all may be swept away. Broken by it I, too, may be; bow to it I never
will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to
deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not
deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those
dimensions not wholly unworthy of its almighty Architect, it is when I
contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world beside,
and I standing up boldly and alone, and hurling defiance at her
victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before
high heaven and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to
the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and
my love. And who that thinks with me will not fearlessly adopt the oath
that I take? Let none falter who thinks he is right, and we may succeed.
But if, after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the
proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed
shade of our country’s freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment,
and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death,
we never faltered in defending.



TO JOHN T. STUART.


SPRINGFIELD, December 23, 1839.

DEAR STUART:

Dr. Henry will write you all the political news. I write this about some
little matters of business. You recollect you told me you had drawn the
Chicago Masark money, and sent it to the claimants. A hawk-billed Yankee
is here besetting me at every turn I take, saying that Robert Kinzie
never received the eighty dollars to which he was entitled. Can you tell
me anything about the matter? Again, old Mr. Wright, who lives up South
Fork somewhere, is teasing me continually about some deeds which he says
he left with you, but which I can find nothing of. Can you tell me where
they are? The Legislature is in session and has suffered the bank to
forfeit its charter without benefit of clergy. There seems to be little
disposition to resuscitate it.

Whenever a letter comes from you to Mrs.____________ I carry it to her,
and then I see Betty; she is a tolerable nice “fellow” now. Maybe I will
write again when I get more time.

Your friend as ever, A. LINCOLN

P. S.—The Democratic giant is here, but he is not much worth talking
about. A.L.



1840



CIRCULAR FROM WHIG COMMITTEE.


Confidential.

January [1?], 1840.

To MESSRS ———

GENTLEMEN:—In obedience to a resolution of the Whig State convention,
we have appointed you the Central Whig Committee of your county. The
trust confided to you will be one of watchfulness and labor; but we hope
the glory of having contributed to the overthrow of the corrupt powers
that now control our beloved country will be a sufficient reward for the
time and labor you will devote to it. Our Whig brethren throughout the
Union have met in convention, and after due deliberation and
mutual concessions have elected candidates for the Presidency and
Vice-Presidency not only worthy of our cause, but worthy of the support
of every true patriot who would have our country redeemed, and her
institutions honestly and faithfully administered. To overthrow the
trained bands that are opposed to us whose salaried officers are ever
on the watch, and whose misguided followers are ever ready to obey their
smallest commands, every Whig must not only know his duty, but must
firmly resolve, whatever of time and labor it may cost, boldly and
faithfully to do it. Our intention is to organize the whole State, so
that every Whig can be brought to the polls in the coming Presidential
contest. We cannot do this, however, without your co-operation; and
as we do our duty, so we shall expect you to do yours. After due
deliberation, the following is the plan of organization, and the duties
required of each county committee:

(1) To divide their county into small districts, and to appoint in each
a subcommittee, whose duty it shall be to make a perfect list of all the
voters in their respective districts, and to ascertain with certainty
for whom they will vote. If they meet with men who are doubtful as to
the man they will support, such voters should be designated in separate
lines, with the name of the man they will probably support.

(2) It will be the duty of said subcommittee to keep a constant watch on
the doubtful voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those
in whom they have the most confidence, and also to place in their hands
such documents as will enlighten and influence them.

(3) It will also be their duty to report to you, at least once a month,
the progress they are making, and on election days see that every Whig
is brought to the polls.

(4) The subcommittees should be appointed immediately; and by the last
of April, at least, they should make their first report.

(5) On the first of each month hereafter we shall expect to hear from
you. After the first report of your subcommittees, unless there should
be found a great many doubtful voters, you can tell pretty accurately
the manner in which your county will vote. In each of your letters to
us, you will state the number of certain votes both for and against us,
as well as the number of doubtful votes, with your opinion of the manner
in which they will be cast.

(6) When we have heard from all the counties, we shall be able to
tell with similar accuracy the political complexion of the State. This
information will be forwarded to you as soon as received.

(7) Inclosed is a prospectus for a newspaper to be continued until after
the Presidential election. It will be superintended by ourselves, and
every Whig in the State must take it. It will be published so low that
every one can afford it. You must raise a fund and forward us for extra
copies,—every county ought to send—fifty or one hundred dollars,—and
the copies will be forwarded to you for distribution among our political
opponents. The paper will be devoted exclusively to the great cause
in which we are engaged. Procure subscriptions, and forward them to us
immediately.

(8) Immediately after any election in your county, you must inform us of
its results; and as early as possible after any general election we will
give you the like information.

(9) A senator in Congress is to be elected by our next Legislature. Let
no local interests divide you, but select candidates that can succeed.

(10) Our plan of operations will of course be concealed from every one
except our good friends who of right ought to know them.

Trusting much in our good cause, the strength of our candidates, and
the determination of the Whigs everywhere to do their duty, we go to
the work of organization in this State confident of success. We have
the numbers, and if properly organized and exerted, with the gallant
Harrison at our head, we shall meet our foes and conquer them in all
parts of the Union.

Address your letters to Dr. A. G. Henry, R. F, Barrett; A. Lincoln, E.
D. Baker, J. F. Speed.



TO JOHN T. STUART.


SPRINGFIELD, March 1, 1840

DEAR STUART:

I have never seen the prospects of our party so bright in these parts
as they are now. We shall carry this county by a larger majority than
we did in 1836, when you ran against May. I do not think my prospects,
individually, are very flattering, for I think it probable I shall
not be permitted to be a candidate; but the party ticket will succeed
triumphantly. Subscriptions to the “Old Soldier” pour in without
abatement. This morning I took from the post office a letter from Dubois
enclosing the names of sixty subscribers, and on carrying it to Francis
I found he had received one hundred and forty more from other quarters
by the same day’s mail. That is but an average specimen of every day’s
receipts. Yesterday Douglas, having chosen to consider himself insulted
by something in the Journal, undertook to cane Francis in the street.
Francis caught him by the hair and jammed him back against a market cart
where the matter ended by Francis being pulled away from him. The
whole affair was so ludicrous that Francis and everybody else (Douglass
excepted) have been laughing about it ever since.

I send you the names of some of the V.B. men who have come out for
Harrison about town, and suggest that you send them some documents.

Moses Coffman (he let us appoint him a delegate yesterday), Aaron
Coffman, George Gregory, H. M. Briggs, Johnson (at Birchall’s
Bookstore), Michael Glyn, Armstrong (not Hosea nor Hugh, but a
carpenter), Thomas Hunter, Moses Pileher (he was always a Whig and
deserves attention), Matthew Crowder Jr., Greenberry Smith; John Fagan,
George Fagan, William Fagan (these three fell out with us about Early,
and are doubtful now), John M. Cartmel, Noah Rickard, John Rickard,
Walter Marsh.

The foregoing should be addressed at Springfield.

Also send some to Solomon Miller and John Auth at Salisbury. Also to
Charles Harper, Samuel Harper, and B. C. Harper, and T. J. Scroggins,
John Scroggins at Pulaski, Logan County.

Speed says he wrote you what Jo Smith said about you as he passed here.
We will procure the names of some of his people here, and send them to
you before long. Speed also says you must not fail to send us the New
York Journal he wrote for some time since.

Evan Butler is jealous that you never send your compliments to him. You
must not neglect him next time.

Your friend, as ever, A. LINCOLN



RESOLUTION IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.


November 28, 1840.

In the Illinois House of Representatives, November 28, 1840, Mr. Lincoln
offered the following:

Resolved, That so much of the governor’s message as relates to
fraudulent voting, and other fraudulent practices at elections, be
referred to the Committee on Elections, with instructions to said
committee to prepare and report to the House a bill for such an act as
may in their judgment afford the greatest possible protection of the
elective franchise against all frauds of all sorts whatever.



RESOLUTION IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.


December 2, 1840.

Resolved, That the Committee on Education be instructed to inquire
into the expediency of providing by law for the examination as to the
qualification of persons offering themselves as school teachers, that no
teacher shall receive any part of the public school fund who shall not
have successfully passed such examination, and that they report by bill
or otherwise.



REMARKS IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.


December 4, 1840

In the House of Representatives, Illinois, December 4, 1840, on
presentation of a report respecting petition of H. N. Purple, claiming
the seat of Mr. Phelps from Peoria, Mr. Lincoln moved that the House
resolve itself into Committee of the Whole on the question, and take
it up immediately. Mr. Lincoln considered the question of the highest
importance whether an individual had a right to sit in this House or
not. The course he should propose would be to take up the evidence and
decide upon the facts seriatim.

Mr. Drummond wanted time; they could not decide in the heat of debate,
etc.

Mr. Lincoln thought that the question had better be gone into now.
In courts of law jurors were required to decide on evidence, without
previous study or examination. They were required to know nothing of
the subject until the evidence was laid before them for their immediate
decision. He thought that the heat of party would be augmented by delay.

The Speaker called Mr. Lincoln to order as being irrelevant; no mention
had been made of party heat.

Mr. Drummond said he had only spoken of debate. Mr. Lincoln asked what
caused the heat, if it was not party? Mr. Lincoln concluded by urging
that the question would be decided now better than hereafter, and he
thought with less heat and excitement.

(Further debate, in which Lincoln participated.)



REMARKS IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.


December 4, 1840.

In the Illinois House of Representatives, December 4, 1840, House in
Committee of the Whole on the bill providing for payment of interest on
the State debt,—Mr. Lincoln moved to strike out the body and amendments
of the bill, and insert in lieu thereof an amendment which in substance
was that the governor be authorized to issue bonds for the payment of
the interest; that these be called “interest bonds”; that the taxes
accruing on Congress lands as they become taxable be irrevocably set
aside and devoted as a fund to the payment of the interest bonds. Mr.
Lincoln went into the reasons which appeared to him to render this plan
preferable to that of hypothecating the State bonds. By this course we
could get along till the next meeting of the Legislature, which was
of great importance. To the objection which might be urged that these
interest bonds could not be cashed, he replied that if our other bonds
could, much more could these, which offered a perfect security, a fund
being irrevocably set aside to provide for their redemption. To another
objection, that we should be paying compound interest, he would reply
that the rapid growth and increase of our resources was in so great a
ratio as to outstrip the difficulty; that his object was to do the best
that could be done in the present emergency. All agreed that the faith
of the State must be preserved; this plan appeared to him preferable
to a hypothecation of bonds, which would have to be redeemed and the
interest paid. How this was to be done, he could not see; therefore he
had, after turning the matter over in every way, devised this measure,
which would carry us on till the next Legislature.

(Mr. Lincoln spoke at some length, advocating his measure.)

Lincoln advocated his measure, December 11, 1840.

December 12, 1840, he had thought some permanent provision ought to be
made for the bonds to be hypothecated, but was satisfied taxation and
revenue could not be connected with it now.



1841



TO JOHN T. STUART—ON DEPRESSION


SPRINGFIELD, Jan 23, 1841

DEAR STUART: I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were
equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one
cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell; I
awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die
or be better, as it appears to me.... I fear I shall be unable to attend
any business here, and a change of scene might help me. If I could be
myself, I would rather remain at home with Judge Logan. I can write no
more.



REMARKS IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE.


January 23, 1841

In the House of Representatives January 23, 1841, while discussing the
continuation of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, Mr. Moore was afraid
the holders of the “scrip” would lose.

Mr. Napier thought there was no danger of that; and Mr. Lincoln said he
had not examined to see what amount of scrip would probably be needed.
The principal point in his mind was this, that nobody was obliged to
take these certificates. It is altogether voluntary on their part, and
if they apprehend it will fall in their hands they will not take it.
Further the loss, if any there be, will fall on the citizens of that
section of the country.

This scrip is not going to circulate over an extensive range of country,
but will be confined chiefly to the vicinity of the canal. Now, we find
the representatives of that section of the country are all in favor of
the bill.

When we propose to protect their interests, they say to us: Leave us
to take care of ourselves; we are willing to run the risk. And this
is reasonable; we must suppose they are competent to protect their own
interests, and it is only fair to let them do it.



CIRCULAR FROM WHIG COMMITTEE.


February 9, 1841.

Appeal to the People of the State of Illinois.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:—When the General Assembly, now about adjourning,
assembled in November last, from the bankrupt state of the public
treasury, the pecuniary embarrassments prevailing in every department
of society, the dilapidated state of the public works, and the impending
danger of the degradation of the State, you had a right to expect
that your representatives would lose no time in devising and adopting
measures to avert threatened calamities, alleviate the distresses of
the people, and allay the fearful apprehensions in regard to the future
prosperity of the State. It was not expected by you that the spirit of
party would take the lead in the councils of the State, and make every
interest bend to its demands. Nor was it expected that any party would
assume to itself the entire control of legislation, and convert the
means and offices of the State, and the substance of the people, into
aliment for party subsistence. Neither could it have been expected by
you that party spirit, however strong its desires and unreasonable
its demands, would have passed the sanctuary of the Constitution, and
entered with its unhallowed and hideous form into the formation of the
judiciary system.

At the early period of the session, measures were adopted by the
dominant party to take possession of the State, to fill all public
offices with party men, and make every measure affecting the interests
of the people and the credit of the State operate in furtherance of
their party views. The merits of men and measures therefore became the
subject of discussion in caucus, instead of the halls of legislation,
and decisions there made by a minority of the Legislature have been
executed and carried into effect by the force of party discipline,
without any regard whatever to the rights of the people or the interests
of the State. The Supreme Court of the State was organized, and judges
appointed, according to the provisions of the Constitution, in 1824.
The people have never complained of the organization of that court; no
attempt has ever before been made to change that department. Respect for
public opinion, and regard for the rights and liberties of the people,
have hitherto restrained the spirit of party from attacks upon the
independence and integrity of the judiciary. The same judges have
continued in office since 1824; their decisions have not been the
subject of complaint among the people; the integrity and honesty of the
court have not been questioned, and it has never been supposed that
the court has ever permitted party prejudice or party considerations
to operate upon their decisions. The court was made to consist of four
judges, and by the Constitution two form a quorum for the transaction
of business. With this tribunal, thus constituted, the people have
been satisfied for near sixteen years. The same law which organized the
Supreme Court in 1824 also established and organized circuit courts
to be held in each county in the State, and five circuit judges were
appointed to hold those courts. In 1826 the Legislature abolished these
circuit courts, repealed the judges out of office, and required the
judges of the Supreme Court to hold the circuit courts. The reasons
assigned for this change were, first, that the business of the country
could be better attended to by the four judges of the Supreme Court than
by the two sets of judges; and, second, the state of the public treasury
forbade the employment of unnecessary officers. In 1828 a circuit was
established north of the Illinois River, in order to meet the wants of
the people, and a circuit judge was appointed to hold the courts in that
circuit.

In 1834 the circuit-court system was again established throughout the
State, circuit judges appointed to hold the courts, and the judges of
the Supreme Court were relieved from the performance of circuit court
duties. The change was recommended by the then acting governor of the
State, General W. L. D. Ewing, in the following terms:

“The augmented population of the State, the multiplied number of
organized counties, as well as the increase of business in all, has
long since convinced every one conversant with this department of
our government of the indispensable necessity of an alteration in
our judiciary system, and the subject is therefore recommended to the
earnest patriotic consideration of the Legislature. The present system
has never been exempt from serious and weighty objections. The idea of
appealing from the circuit court to the same judges in the Supreme Court
is recommended by little hopes of redress to the injured party below.
The duties of the circuit, too, it may be added, consume one half of the
year, leaving a small and inadequate portion of time (when that required
for domestic purposes is deducted) to erect, in the decisions of the
Supreme Court, a judicial monument of legal learning and research,
which the talent and ability of the court might otherwise be entirely
competent to.”

With this organization of circuit courts the people have never
complained. The only complaints which we have heard have come from
circuits which were so large that the judges could not dispose of the
business, and the circuits in which Judges Pearson and Ralston lately
presided.

Whilst the honor and credit of the State demanded legislation upon the
subject of the public debt, the canal, the unfinished public works, and
the embarrassments of the people, the judiciary stood upon a basis
which required no change—no legislative action. Yet the party in power,
neglecting every interest requiring legislative action, and wholly
disregarding the rights, wishes, and interests of the people, has, for
the unholy purpose of providing places for its partisans and supplying
them with large salaries, disorganized that department of the
government. Provision is made for the election of five party judges
of the Supreme Court, the proscription of four circuit judges, and the
appointment of party clerks in more than half the counties of the
State. Men professing respect for public opinion, and acknowledged to be
leaders of the party, have avowed in the halls of legislation that
the change in the judiciary was intended to produce political results
favorable to their party and party friends. The immutable principles
of justice are to make way for party interests, and the bonds of social
order are to be rent in twain, in order that a desperate faction may
be sustained at the expense of the people. The change proposed in the
judiciary was supported upon grounds so destructive to the institutions
of the country, and so entirely at war with the rights and liberties
of the people, that the party could not secure entire unanimity in its
support, three Democrats of the Senate and five of the House voting
against the measure. They were unwilling to see the temples of justice
and the seats of independent judges occupied by the tools of faction.
The declarations of the party leaders, the selection of party men for
judges, and the total disregard for the public will in the adoption of
the measure, prove conclusively that the object has been not reform, but
destruction; not the advancement of the highest interests of the State,
but the predominance of party.

We cannot in this manner undertake to point out all the objections to
this party measure; we present you with those stated by the Council
of Revision upon returning the bill, and we ask for them a candid
consideration.

Believing that the independence of the judiciary has been destroyed,
that hereafter our courts will be independent of the people, and
entirely dependent upon the Legislature; that our rights of property
and liberty of conscience can no longer be regarded as safe from the
encroachments of unconstitutional legislation; and knowing of no other
remedy which can be adopted consistently with the peace and good order
of society, we call upon you to avail yourselves of the opportunity
afforded, and, at the next general election, vote for a convention of
the people.

   S. H. LITTLE,
   E. D. BAKER,
   J. J. HARDIN,
   E. B. WEBS,
   A. LINCOLN,
   J. GILLESPIE,

   Committee on behalf of the Whig members of the Legislature.



AGAINST THE REORGANIZATION OF THE JUDICIARY.


EXTRACT FROM A PROTEST IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE

February 26, 1841

For the reasons thus presented, and for others no less apparent, the
undersigned cannot assent to the passage of the bill, or permit it to
become a law, without this evidence of their disapprobation; and they
now protest against the reorganization of the judiciary, because—(1)
It violates the great principles of free government by subjecting the
judiciary to the Legislature. (2) It is a fatal blow at the independence
of the judges and the constitutional term of their office. (3) It is a
measure not asked for, or wished for, by the people. (4) It will greatly
increase the expense of our courts, or else greatly diminish their
utility. (5) It will give our courts a political and partisan character,
thereby impairing public confidence in their decisions. (6) It will
impair our standing with other States and the world. (7)It is a party
measure for party purposes, from which no practical good to the people
can possibly arise, but which may be the source of immeasurable evils.

The undersigned are well aware that this protest will be altogether
unavailing with the majority of this body. The blow has already fallen,
and we are compelled to stand by, the mournful spectators of the ruin it
will cause.

[Signed by 35 members, among whom was Abraham Lincoln.]



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED—MURDER CASE


SPRINGFIELD June 19, 1841.

DEAR SPEED:—We have had the highest state of excitement here for a week
past that our community has ever witnessed; and, although the public
feeling is somewhat allayed, the curious affair which aroused it is very
far from being even yet cleared of mystery. It would take a quire of
paper to give you anything like a full account of it, and I therefore
only propose a brief outline. The chief personages in the drama are
Archibald Fisher, supposed to be murdered, and Archibald Trailor, Henry
Trailor, and William Trailor, supposed to have murdered him. The three
Trailors are brothers: the first, Arch., as you know, lives in town;
the second, Henry, in Clary’s Grove; and the third, William, in Warren
County; and Fisher, the supposed murdered, being without a family, had
made his home with William. On Saturday evening, being the 29th of May,
Fisher and William came to Henry’s in a one-horse dearborn, and there
stayed over Sunday; and on Monday all three came to Springfield (Henry
on horseback) and joined Archibald at Myers’s, the Dutch carpenter.
That evening at supper Fisher was missing, and so next morning some
ineffectual search was made for him; and on Tuesday, at one o’clock
P.M., William and Henry started home without him. In a day or two Henry
and one or two of his Clary-Grove neighbors came back for him again, and
advertised his disappearance in the papers. The knowledge of the matter
thus far had not been general, and here it dropped entirely, till about
the 10th instant, when Keys received a letter from the postmaster in
Warren County, that William had arrived at home, and was telling a very
mysterious and improbable story about the disappearance of Fisher, which
induced the community there to suppose he had been disposed of unfairly.
Keys made this letter public, which immediately set the whole town and
adjoining county agog. And so it has continued until yesterday. The mass
of the people commenced a systematic search for the dead body, while
Wickersham was despatched to arrest Henry Trailor at the Grove, and Jim
Maxcy to Warren to arrest William. On Monday last, Henry was brought in,
and showed an evident inclination to insinuate that he knew Fisher to be
dead, and that Arch. and William had killed him. He said he guessed the
body could be found in Spring Creek, between the Beardstown road and
Hickox’s mill. Away the people swept like a herd of buffalo, and cut
down Hickox’s mill-dam nolens volens, to draw the water out of the pond,
and then went up and down and down and up the creek, fishing and raking,
and raking and ducking and diving for two days, and, after all, no dead
body found.

In the meantime a sort of scuffling-ground had been found in the brush
in the angle, or point, where the road leading into the woods past
the brewery and the one leading in past the brick-yard meet. From the
scuffle-ground was the sign of something about the size of a man having
been dragged to the edge of the thicket, where it joined the track
of some small-wheeled carriage drawn by one horse, as shown by the
road-tracks. The carriage-track led off toward Spring Creek. Near this
drag-trail Dr. Merryman found two hairs, which, after a long scientific
examination, he pronounced to be triangular human hairs, which term, he
says, includes within it the whiskers, the hair growing under the arms
and on other parts of the body; and he judged that these two were of the
whiskers, because the ends were cut, showing that they had flourished in
the neighborhood of the razor’s operations. On Thursday last Jim Maxcy
brought in William Trailor from Warren. On the same day Arch. was
arrested and put in jail. Yesterday (Friday) William was put upon his
examining trial before May and Lovely. Archibald and Henry were both
present. Lamborn prosecuted, and Logan, Baker, and your humble servant
defended. A great many witnesses were introduced and examined, but I
shall only mention those whose testimony seemed most important. The
first of these was Captain Ransdell. He swore that when William and
Henry left Springfield for home on Tuesday before mentioned they did not
take the direct route,—which, you know, leads by the butcher shop,—but
that they followed the street north until they got opposite, or nearly
opposite, May’s new house, after which he could not see them from where
he stood; and it was afterwards proved that in about an hour after they
started, they came into the street by the butcher shop from toward the
brickyard. Dr. Merryman and others swore to what is stated about the
scuffle-ground, drag-trail, whiskers, and carriage tracks. Henry was
then introduced by the prosecution. He swore that when they started for
home they went out north, as Ransdell stated, and turned down west
by the brick-yard into the woods, and there met Archibald; that they
proceeded a small distance farther, when he was placed as a sentinel to
watch for and announce the approach of any one that might happen that
way; that William and Arch. took the dearborn out of the road a small
distance to the edge of the thicket, where they stopped, and he saw
them lift the body of a man into it; that they then moved off with the
carriage in the direction of Hickox’s mill, and he loitered about for
something like an hour, when William returned with the carriage, but
without Arch., and said they had put him in a safe place; that they went
somehow he did not know exactly how—into the road close to the brewery,
and proceeded on to Clary’s Grove. He also stated that some time during
the day William told him that he and Arch. had killed Fisher the evening
before; that the way they did it was by him William knocking him down
with a club, and Arch. then choking him to death.

An old man from Warren, called Dr. Gilmore, was then introduced on
the part of the defense. He swore that he had known Fisher for several
years; that Fisher had resided at his house a long time at each of two
different spells—once while he built a barn for him, and once while
he was doctored for some chronic disease; that two or three years ago
Fisher had a serious hurt in his head by the bursting of a gun, since
which he had been subject to continued bad health and occasional
aberration of mind. He also stated that on last Tuesday, being the same
day that Maxcy arrested William Trailor, he (the doctor) was from home
in the early part of the day, and on his return, about eleven o’clock,
found Fisher at his house in bed, and apparently very unwell; that he
asked him how he came from Springfield; that Fisher said he had come by
Peoria, and also told of several other places he had been at more in the
direction of Peoria, which showed that he at the time of speaking did
not know where he had been wandering about in a state of derangement.
He further stated that in about two hours he received a note from one of
Trailor’s friends, advising him of his arrest, and requesting him to go
on to Springfield as a witness, to testify as to the state of Fisher’s
health in former times; that he immediately set off, calling up two
of his neighbors as company, and, riding all evening and all night,
overtook Maxcy and William at Lewiston in Fulton County; that Maxcy
refusing to discharge Trailor upon his statement, his two neighbors
returned and he came on to Springfield. Some question being made as to
whether the doctor’s story was not a fabrication, several acquaintances
of his (among whom was the same postmaster who wrote Keys, as before
mentioned) were introduced as sort of compurgators, who swore that they
knew the doctor to be of good character for truth and veracity, and
generally of good character in every way.

Here the testimony ended, and the Trailors were discharged, Arch. and
William expressing both in word and manner their entire confidence that
Fisher would be found alive at the doctor’s by Galloway, Mallory, and
Myers, who a day before had been despatched for that purpose; which
Henry still protested that no power on earth could ever show Fisher
alive. Thus stands this curious affair. When the doctor’s story
was first made public, it was amusing to scan and contemplate the
countenances and hear the remarks of those who had been actively in
search for the dead body: some looked quizzical, some melancholy, and
some furiously angry. Porter, who had been very active, swore he always
knew the man was not dead, and that he had not stirred an inch to hunt
for him; Langford, who had taken the lead in cutting down Hickox’s
mill-dam, and wanted to hang Hickox for objecting, looked most
awfully woebegone: he seemed the “victim of unrequited affection,” as
represented in the comic almanacs we used to laugh over; and Hart, the
little drayman that hauled Molly home once, said it was too damned bad
to have so much trouble, and no hanging after all.

I commenced this letter on yesterday, since which I received yours of
the 13th. I stick to my promise to come to Louisville. Nothing new here
except what I have written. I have not seen ______ since my last trip,
and I am going out there as soon as I mail this letter.

Yours forever, LINCOLN.



STATEMENT ABOUT HARRY WILTON.


June 25, 1841

It having been charged in some of the public prints that Harry Wilton,
late United States marshal for the district of Illinois, had used his
office for political effect, in the appointment of deputies for the
taking of the census for the year 1840, we, the undersigned, were called
upon by Mr. Wilton to examine the papers in his possession relative
to these appointments, and to ascertain therefrom the correctness or
incorrectness of such charge. We accompanied Mr. Wilton to a room, and
examined the matter as fully as we could with the means afforded us. The
only sources of information bearing on the subject which were submitted
to us were the letters, etc., recommending and opposing the various
appointments made, and Mr. Wilton’s verbal statements concerning the
same. From these letters, etc., it appears that in some instances
appointments were made in accordance with the recommendations of leading
Whigs, and in opposition to those of leading Democrats; among which
instances the appointments at Scott, Wayne, Madison, and Lawrence are
the strongest. According to Mr. Wilton’s statement of the seventy-six
appointments we examined, fifty-four were of Democrats, eleven of Whigs,
and eleven of unknown politics.

The chief ground of complaint against Mr. Wilton, as we had understood
it, was because of his appointment of so many Democratic candidates for
the Legislature, thus giving them a decided advantage over their
Whig opponents; and consequently our attention was directed rather
particularly to that point. We found that there were many such
appointments, among which were those in Tazewell, McLean, Iroquois,
Coles, Menard, Wayne, Washington, Fayette, etc.; and we did not
learn that there was one instance in which a Whig candidate for the
Legislature had been appointed. There was no written evidence before
us showing us at what time those appointments were made; but Mr. Wilton
stated that they all with one exception were made before those
appointed became candidates for the Legislature, and the letters, etc.,
recommending them all bear date before, and most of them long before,
those appointed were publicly announced candidates.

We give the foregoing naked facts and draw no conclusions from them.

BEND. S. EDWARDS, A. LINCOLN.



TO MISS MARY SPEED—PRACTICAL SLAVERY


BLOOMINGTON, ILL., September 27, 1841.

Miss Mary Speed, Louisville, Ky.

MY FRIEND: By the way, a fine example was presented on board the boat
for contemplating the effect of condition upon human happiness. A
gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts of Kentucky,
and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six and
six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each,
and this fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient
distance from the others, so that the negroes were strung together
precisely like so many fish upon a trotline. In this condition they
were being separated forever from the scenes of their childhood, their
friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many
of them from their wives and children, and going into perpetual
slavery where the lash of the master is proverbially more ruthless
and unrelenting than any other; and yet amid all these distressing
circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and
apparently happy creatures on board. One, whose offence for which he
had been sold was an overfondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost
continually, and the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played
various games with cards from day to day. How true it is that ‘God
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ or in other words, that he renders
the worst of human conditions tolerable, while he permits the best to
be nothing better than tolerable. To return to the narrative: When we
reached Springfield I stayed but one day, when I started on this tedious
circuit where I now am. Do you remember my going to the city, while I
was in Kentucky, to have a tooth extracted, and making a failure of it?
Well, that same old tooth got to paining me so much that about a week
since I had it torn out, bringing with it a bit of the jawbone, the
consequence of which is that my mouth is now so sore that I can neither
talk nor eat.

Your sincere friend, A. LINCOLN.



1842



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED—ON MARRIAGE


January 30, 1842.

MY DEAR SPEED:—Feeling, as you know I do, the deepest solicitude for
the success of the enterprise you are engaged in, I adopt this as the
last method I can adopt to aid you, in case (which God forbid!) you
shall need any aid. I do not place what I am going to say on paper
because I can say it better that way than I could by word of mouth, but,
were I to say it orally before we part, most likely you would forget
it at the very time when it might do you some good. As I think it
reasonable that you will feel very badly some time between this and the
final consummation of your purpose, it is intended that you shall read
this just at such a time. Why I say it is reasonable that you will feel
very badly yet, is because of three special causes added to the general
one which I shall mention.

The general cause is, that you are naturally of a nervous temperament;
and this I say from what I have seen of you personally, and what you
have told me concerning your mother at various times, and concerning
your brother William at the time his wife died. The first special cause
is your exposure to bad weather on your journey, which my experience
clearly proves to be very severe on defective nerves. The second is the
absence of all business and conversation of friends, which might divert
your mind, give it occasional rest from the intensity of thought which
will sometimes wear the sweetest idea threadbare and turn it to the
bitterness of death. The third is the rapid and near approach of that
crisis on which all your thoughts and feelings concentrate.

If from all these causes you shall escape and go through triumphantly,
without another “twinge of the soul,” I shall be most happily but most
egregiously deceived. If, on the contrary, you shall, as I expect you
will at sometime, be agonized and distressed, let me, who have some
reason to speak with judgment on such a subject, beseech you to ascribe
it to the causes I have mentioned, and not to some false and ruinous
suggestion of the Devil.

“But,” you will say, “do not your causes apply to every one engaged in
a like undertaking?” By no means. The particular causes, to a greater
or less extent, perhaps do apply in all cases; but the general
one,—nervous debility, which is the key and conductor of all
the particular ones, and without which they would be utterly
harmless,—though it does pertain to you, does not pertain to one in a
thousand. It is out of this that the painful difference between you and
the mass of the world springs.

I know what the painful point with you is at all times when you are
unhappy; it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should.
What nonsense! How came you to court her? Was it because you thought she
deserved it, and that you had given her reason to expect it? If it was
for that why did not the same reason make you court Ann Todd, and at
least twenty others of whom you can think, and to whom it would apply
with greater force than to her? Did you court her for her wealth? Why,
you know she had none. But you say you reasoned yourself into it. What
do you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason
yourself out of it? Did you not think, and partly form the purpose, of
courting her the first time you ever saw her or heard of her? What had
reason to do with it at that early stage? There was nothing at that time
for reason to work upon. Whether she was moral, amiable, sensible,
or even of good character, you did not, nor could then know, except,
perhaps, you might infer the last from the company you found her in.

All you then did or could know of her was her personal appearance and
deportment; and these, if they impress at all, impress the heart, and
not the head.

Say candidly, were not those heavenly black eyes the whole basis of all
your early reasoning on the subject? After you and I had once been at
the residence, did you not go and take me all the way to Lexington and
back, for no other purpose but to get to see her again, on our return
on that evening to take a trip for that express object? What earthly
consideration would you take to find her scouting and despising you, and
giving herself up to another? But of this you have no apprehension; and
therefore you cannot bring it home to your feelings.

I shall be so anxious about you that I shall want you to write by every
mail.

Your friend, LINCOLN.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.


SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, February 3, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:—Your letter of the 25th January came to hand to-day. You
well know that I do not feel my own sorrows much more keenly than I do
yours, when I know of them; and yet I assure you I was not much hurt by
what you wrote me of your excessively bad feeling at the time you wrote.
Not that I am less capable of sympathizing with you now than ever, not
that I am less your friend than ever, but because I hope and believe
that your present anxiety and distress about her health and her life
must and will forever banish those horrid doubts which I know you
sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for her. If they can
once and forever be removed (and I almost feel a presentiment that the
Almighty has sent your present affliction expressly for that object),
surely nothing can come in their stead to fill their immeasurable
measure of misery. The death-scenes of those we love are surely painful
enough; but these we are prepared for and expect to see: they happen to
all, and all know they must happen. Painful as they are, they are not
an unlooked for sorrow. Should she, as you fear, be destined to an early
grave, it is indeed a great consolation to know that she is so well
prepared to meet it. Her religion, which you once disliked so much,
I will venture you now prize most highly. But I hope your melancholy
bodings as to her early death are not well founded. I even hope that
ere this reaches you she will have returned with improved and still
improving health, and that you will have met her, and forgotten the
sorrows of the past in the enjoyments of the present. I would say more
if I could, but it seems that I have said enough. It really appears
to me that you yourself ought to rejoice, and not sorrow, at this
indubitable evidence of your undying affection for her. Why, Speed, if
you did not love her although you might not wish her death, you would
most certainly be resigned to it. Perhaps this point is no longer
a question with you, and my pertinacious dwelling upon it is a rude
intrusion upon your feelings. If so, you must pardon me. You know the
hell I have suffered on that point, and how tender I am upon it. You
know I do not mean wrong. I have been quite clear of “hypo” since you
left, even better than I was along in the fall. I have seen ______ but
once. She seemed very cheerful, and so I said nothing to her about what
we spoke of.

Old Uncle Billy Herndon is dead, and it is said this evening that Uncle
Ben Ferguson will not live. This, I believe, is all the news, and enough
at that unless it were better. Write me immediately on the receipt of
this.

Your friend, as ever, LINCOLN.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED—ON DEPRESSION


SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, February 13, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:—Yours of the 1st instant came to hand three or four days
ago. When this shall reach you, you will have been Fanny’s husband
several days. You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting; that
I will never cease while I know how to do anything. But you will always
hereafter be on ground that I have never occupied, and consequently,
if advice were needed, I might advise wrong. I do fondly hope, however,
that you will never again need any comfort from abroad. But should I be
mistaken in this, should excessive pleasure still be accompanied with
a painful counterpart at times, still let me urge you, as I have ever
done, to remember, in the depth and even agony of despondency, that very
shortly you are to feel well again. I am now fully convinced that you
love her as ardently as you are capable of loving. Your ever being happy
in her presence, and your intense anxiety about her health, if there
were nothing else, would place this beyond all dispute in my mind. I
incline to think it probable that your nerves will fail you occasionally
for a while; but once you get them firmly guarded now that trouble is
over forever. I think, if I were you, in case my mind were not exactly
right, I would avoid being idle. I would immediately engage in some
business, or go to making preparations for it, which would be the same
thing. If you went through the ceremony calmly, or even with sufficient
composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond
question, and in two or three months, to say the most, will be the
happiest of men.

I would desire you to give my particular respects to Fanny; but perhaps
you will not wish her to know you have received this, lest she should
desire to see it. Make her write me an answer to my last letter to her;
at any rate I would set great value upon a note or letter from her.
Write me whenever you have leisure. Yours forever, A. LINCOLN. P. S.—I
have been quite a man since you left.



TO G. B. SHELEDY.


SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Feb. 16, 1842.

G. B. SHELEDY, ESQ.:

Yours of the 10th is duly received. Judge Logan and myself are doing
business together now, and we are willing to attend to your cases as you
propose. As to the terms, we are willing to attend each case you prepare
and send us for $10 (when there shall be no opposition) to be sent in
advance, or you to know that it is safe. It takes $5.75 of cost to
start upon, that is, $1.75 to clerk, and $2 to each of two publishers
of papers. Judge Logan thinks it will take the balance of $20 to carry
a case through. This must be advanced from time to time as the services
are performed, as the officers will not act without. I do not know
whether you can be admitted an attorney of the Federal court in your
absence or not; nor is it material, as the business can be done in our
names.

Thinking it may aid you a little, I send you one of our blank forms of
Petitions. It, you will see, is framed to be sworn to before the Federal
court clerk, and, in your cases, will have [to] be so far changed as to
be sworn to before the clerk of your circuit court; and his certificate
must be accompanied with his official seal. The schedules, too, must
be attended to. Be sure that they contain the creditors’ names, their
residences, the amounts due each, the debtors’ names, their residences,
and the amounts they owe, also all property and where located.

Also be sure that the schedules are all signed by the applicants as well
as the Petition. Publication will have to be made here in one paper,
and in one nearest the residence of the applicant. Write us in each case
where the last advertisement is to be sent, whether to you or to what
paper.

I believe I have now said everything that can be of any advantage. Your
friend as ever, A. LINCOLN.



TO GEORGE E. PICKETT—ADVICE TO YOUTH


February 22, 1842.

I never encourage deceit, and falsehood, especially if you have got a
bad memory, is the worst enemy a fellow can have. The fact is truth
is your truest friend, no matter what the circumstances are.
Notwithstanding this copy-book preamble, my boy, I am inclined to
suggest a little prudence on your part. You see I have a congenital
aversion to failure, and the sudden announcement to your Uncle Andrew of
the success of your “lamp rubbing” might possibly prevent your passing
the severe physical examination to which you will be subjected in order
to enter the Military Academy. You see I should like to have a perfect
soldier credited to dear old Illinois—no broken bones, scalp wounds,
etc. So I think it might be wise to hand this letter from me in to
your good uncle through his room-window after he has had a comfortable
dinner, and watch its effect from the top of the pigeon-house.

I have just told the folks here in Springfield on this 111th anniversary
of the birth of him whose name, mightiest in the cause of civil liberty,
still mightiest in the cause of moral reformation, we mention in solemn
awe, in naked, deathless splendor, that the one victory we can ever call
complete will be that one which proclaims that there is not one slave or
one drunkard on the face of God’s green earth. Recruit for this victory.

Now, boy, on your march, don’t you go and forget the old maxim that “one
drop of honey catches more flies than a half-gallon of gall.” Load your
musket with this maxim, and smoke it in your pipe.



ADDRESS BEFORE THE SPRINGFIELD WASHINGTONIAN TEMPERANCE SOCIETY,


FEBRUARY 22, 1842.

Although the temperance cause has been in progress for near twenty
years, it is apparent to all that it is just now being crowned with a
degree of success hitherto unparalleled.

The list of its friends is daily swelled by the additions of fifties, of
hundreds, and of thousands. The cause itself seems suddenly transformed
from a cold abstract theory to a living, breathing, active, and powerful
chieftain, going forth “conquering and to conquer.” The citadels of his
great adversary are daily being stormed and dismantled; his temple and
his altars, where the rites of his idolatrous worship have long been
performed, and where human sacrifices have long been wont to be made,
are daily desecrated and deserted. The triumph of the conqueror’s fame
is sounding from hill to hill, from sea to sea, and from land to land,
and calling millions to his standard at a blast.

For this new and splendid success we heartily rejoice. That that success
is so much greater now than heretofore is doubtless owing to rational
causes; and if we would have it continue, we shall do well to inquire
what those causes are.

The warfare heretofore waged against the demon intemperance has somehow
or other been erroneous. Either the champions engaged or the tactics
they adopted have not been the most proper. These champions for the most
part have been preachers, lawyers, and hired agents. Between these and
the mass of mankind there is a want of approachability, if the term
be admissible, partially, at least, fatal to their success. They are
supposed to have no sympathy of feeling or interest with those very
persons whom it is their object to convince and persuade.

And again, it is so common and so easy to ascribe motives to men of
these classes other than those they profess to act upon. The preacher,
it is said, advocates temperance because he is a fanatic, and desires a
union of the Church and State; the lawyer from his pride and vanity of
hearing himself speak; and the hired agent for his salary. But when one
who has long been known as a victim of intemperance bursts the fetters
that have bound him, and appears before his neighbors “clothed and in
his right mind,” a redeemed specimen of long-lost humanity, and stands
up, with tears of joy trembling in his eyes, to tell of the miseries
once endured, now to be endured no more forever; of his once naked and
starving children, now clad and fed comfortably; of a wife long weighed
down with woe, weeping, and a broken heart, now restored to health,
happiness, and a renewed affection; and how easily it is all done, once
it is resolved to be done; how simple his language! there is a logic and
an eloquence in it that few with human feelings can resist. They cannot
say that he desires a union of Church and State, for he is not a church
member; they cannot say he is vain of hearing himself speak, for his
whole demeanor shows he would gladly avoid speaking at all; they cannot
say he speaks for pay, for he receives none, and asks for none. Nor can
his sincerity in any way be doubted, or his sympathy for those he would
persuade to imitate his example be denied.

In my judgment, it is to the battles of this new class of champions
that our late success is greatly, perhaps chiefly, owing. But, had the
old-school champions themselves been of the most wise selecting, was
their system of tactics the most judicious? It seems to me it was
not. Too much denunciation against dram-sellers and dram-drinkers
was indulged in. This I think was both impolitic and unjust. It was
impolitic, because it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to
anything; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his
own business; and least of all where such driving is to be submitted
to at the expense of pecuniary interest or burning appetite. When the
dram-seller and drinker were incessantly told not in accents of entreaty
and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring
brother, but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation with
which the lordly judge often groups together all the crimes of the
felon’s life, and thrusts them in his face just ere he passes sentence
of death upon him that they were the authors of all the vice and misery
and crime in the land; that they were the manufacturers and material of
all the thieves and robbers and murderers that infest the earth; that
their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their persons
should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences—I
say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful
that they were slow to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations,
and to join the ranks of their denouncers in a hue and cry against
themselves.

To have expected them to do otherwise than they did to have expected
them not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimination with
crimination, and anathema with anathema—was to expect a reversal of
human nature, which is God’s decree and can never be reversed.

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind,
unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true
maxim that “a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him
that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches
his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his
reason; and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble
in convincing his judgment of the justice of your cause, if indeed that
cause really be a just one. On the contrary, assume to dictate to his
judgment, or to command his action, or to mark him as one to be shunned
and despised, and he will retreat within himself, close all the avenues
to his head and his heart; and though your cause be naked truth itself,
transformed to the heaviest lance, harder than steel, and sharper than
steel can be made, and though you throw it with more than herculean
force and precision, you shall be no more able to pierce him than to
penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise with a rye straw. Such is man,
and so must he be understood by those who would lead him, even to his
own best interests.

On this point the Washingtonians greatly excel the temperance advocates
of former times. Those whom they desire to convince and persuade are
their old friends and companions. They know they are not demons, nor
even the worst of men; they know that generally they are kind, generous,
and charitable even beyond the example of their more staid and sober
neighbors. They are practical philanthropists; and they glow with
a generous and brotherly zeal that mere theorizers are incapable of
feeling. Benevolence and charity possess their hearts entirely; and out
of the abundance of their hearts their tongues give utterance; “love
through all their actions runs, and all their words are mild.” In this
spirit they speak and act, and in the same they are heard and regarded.
And when such is the temper of the advocate, and such of the audience,
no good cause can be unsuccessful. But I have said that denunciations
against dramsellers and dram-drinkers are unjust, as well as impolitic.
Let us see. I have not inquired at what period of time the use of
intoxicating liquors commenced; nor is it important to know. It is
sufficient that, to all of us who now inhabit the world, the practice of
drinking them is just as old as the world itself that is, we have seen
the one just as long as we have seen the other. When all such of us as
have now reached the years of maturity first opened our eyes upon
the stage of existence, we found intoxicating liquor recognized by
everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody. It commonly entered
into the first draught of the infant and the last draught of the dying
man. From the sideboard of the parson down to the ragged pocket of the
houseless loafer, it was constantly found. Physicians proscribed it in
this, that, and the other disease; government provided it for soldiers
and sailors; and to have a rolling or raising, a husking or “hoedown,”
anywhere about without it was positively insufferable. So, too, it was
everywhere a respectable article of manufacture and merchandise. The
making of it was regarded as an honorable livelihood, and he who could
make most was the most enterprising and respectable. Large and small
manufactories of it were everywhere erected, in which all the earthly
goods of their owners were invested. Wagons drew it from town to town;
boats bore it from clime to clime, and the winds wafted it from nation
to nation; and merchants bought and sold it, by wholesale and retail,
with precisely the same feelings on the part of the seller, buyer, and
bystander as are felt at the selling and buying of ploughs, beef, bacon,
or any other of the real necessaries of life. Universal public opinion
not only tolerated but recognized and adopted its use.

It is true that even then it was known and acknowledged that many were
greatly injured by it; but none seemed to think the injury arose from
the use of a bad thing, but from the abuse of a very good thing. The
victims of it were to be pitied and compassionated, just as are the
heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases. Their failing was
treated as a misfortune, and not as a crime, or even as a disgrace. If,
then, what I have been saying is true, is it wonderful that some should
think and act now as all thought and acted twenty years ago? and is it
just to assail, condemn, or despise them for doing so? The universal
sense of mankind on any subject is an argument, or at least an
influence, not easily overcome. The success of the argument in favor
of the existence of an overruling Providence mainly depends upon that
sense; and men ought not in justice to be denounced for yielding to it
in any case, or giving it up slowly, especially when they are backed by
interest, fixed habits, or burning appetites.

Another error, as it seems to me, into which the old reformers fell, was
the position that all habitual drunkards were utterly incorrigible, and
therefore must be turned adrift and damned without remedy in order that
the grace of temperance might abound, to the temperate then, and to all
mankind some hundreds of years thereafter. There is in this some
thing so repugnant to humanity, so uncharitable, so cold-blooded and
feelingless, that it, never did nor ever can enlist the enthusiasm of a
popular cause. We could not love the man who taught it we could not hear
him with patience. The heart could not throw open its portals to it,
the generous man could not adopt it—it could not mix with his blood.
It looked so fiendishly selfish, so like throwing fathers and brothers
overboard to lighten the boat for our security, that the noble-minded
shrank from the manifest meanness of the thing. And besides this, the
benefits of a reformation to be effected by such a system were too
remote in point of time to warmly engage many in its behalf. Few can
be induced to labor exclusively for posterity, and none will do it
enthusiastically. —Posterity has done nothing for us; and, theorize on
it as we may, practically we shall do very little for it, unless we are
made to think we are at the same time doing something for ourselves.

What an ignorance of human nature does it exhibit to ask or to expect
a whole community to rise up and labor for the temporal happiness of
others, after themselves shall be consigned to the dust, a majority
of which community take no pains whatever to secure their own eternal
welfare at no more distant day! Great distance in either time or
space has wonderful power to lull and render quiescent the human mind.
Pleasures to be enjoyed, or pains to be endured, after we shall be dead
and gone are but little regarded even in our own cases, and much less
in the cases of others. Still, in addition to this there is something so
ludicrous in promises of good or threats of evil a great way off as to
render the whole subject with which they are connected easily turned
into ridicule. “Better lay down that spade you are stealing, Paddy; if
you don’t you’ll pay for it at the day of judgment.” “Be the powers, if
ye’ll credit me so long I’ll take another jist.”

By the Washingtonians this system of consigning the habitual drunkard
to hopeless ruin is repudiated. They adopt a more enlarged philanthropy;
they go for present as well as future good. They labor for all now
living, as well as hereafter to live. They teach hope to all-despair to
none. As applying to their cause, they deny the doctrine of
unpardonable sin; as in Christianity it is taught, so in this they
teach—“While—While the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may
return.” And, what is a matter of more profound congratulation, they, by
experiment upon experiment and example upon example, prove the maxim
to be no less true in the one case than in the other. On every hand we
behold those who but yesterday were the chief of sinners, now the chief
apostles of the cause. Drunken devils are cast out by ones, by sevens,
by legions; and their unfortunate victims, like the poor possessed who
were redeemed from their long and lonely wanderings in the tombs, are
publishing to the ends of the earth how great things have been done for
them.

To these new champions and this new system of tactics our late
success is mainly owing, and to them we must mainly look for the final
consummation. The ball is now rolling gloriously on, and none are so
able as they to increase its speed and its bulk, to add to its momentum
and its magnitude—even though unlearned in letters, for this task none
are so well educated. To fit them for this work they have been taught in
the true school. They have been in that gulf from which they would teach
others the means of escape. They have passed that prison wall which
others have long declared impassable; and who that has not shall dare to
weigh opinions with them as to the mode of passing?

But if it be true, as I have insisted, that those who have suffered by
intemperance personally, and have reformed, are the most powerful and
efficient instruments to push the reformation to ultimate success, it
does not follow that those who have not suffered have no part left them
to perform. Whether or not the world would be vastly benefited by a
total and final banishment from it of all intoxicating drinks seems
to me not now an open question. Three fourths of mankind confess the
affirmative with their tongues, and, I believe, all the rest acknowledge
it in their hearts.

Ought any, then, to refuse their aid in doing what good the good of the
whole demands? Shall he who cannot do much be for that reason excused
if he do nothing? “But,” says one, “what good can I do by signing the
pledge? I never drank, even without signing.” This question has already
been asked and answered more than a million of times. Let it be answered
once more. For the man suddenly or in any other way to break off from
the use of drams, who has indulged in them for a long course of years
and until his appetite for them has grown ten or a hundredfold stronger
and more craving than any natural appetite can be, requires a most
powerful moral effort. In such an undertaking he needs every moral
support and influence that can possibly be brought to his aid and thrown
around him. And not only so, but every moral prop should be taken from
whatever argument might rise in his mind to lure him to his backsliding.
When he casts his eyes around him, he should be able to see all that he
respects, all that he admires, all that he loves, kindly and anxiously
pointing him onward, and none beckoning him back to his former miserable
“wallowing in the mire.”

But it is said by some that men will think and act for themselves; that
none will disuse spirits or anything else because his neighbors do; and
that moral influence is not that powerful engine contended for. Let us
examine this. Let me ask the man who could maintain this position most
stiffly, what compensation he will accept to go to church some Sunday
and sit during the sermon with his wife’s bonnet upon his head? Not a
trifle, I’ll venture. And why not? There would be nothing irreligious
in it, nothing immoral, nothing uncomfortable—then why not? Is it not
because there would be something egregiously unfashionable in it? Then
it is the influence of fashion; and what is the influence of fashion
but the influence that other people’s actions have on our actions—the
strong inclination each of us feels to do as we see all our neighbors
do? Nor is the influence of fashion confined to any particular thing or
class of things; it is just as strong on one subject as another. Let us
make it as unfashionable to withhold our names from the temperance cause
as for husbands to wear their wives’ bonnets to church, and instances
will be just as rare in the one case as the other.

“But,” say some, “we are no drunkards, and we shall not acknowledge
ourselves such by joining a reformed drunkard’s society, whatever our
influence might be.” Surely no Christian will adhere to this objection.
If they believe as they profess, that Omnipotence condescended to take
on himself the form of sinful man, and as such to die an ignominious
death for their sakes, surely they will not refuse submission to the
infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal, and perhaps
eternal, salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their
fellow-creatures. Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment
such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more by the
absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those
who have. Indeed, I believe if we take habitual drunkards as a class,
their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with
those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness
in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice—the demon of
intemperance ever seems to have delighted in sucking the blood of genius
and of generosity. What one of us but can call to mind some relative,
more promising in youth than all his fellows, who has fallen a sacrifice
to his rapacity? He ever seems to have gone forth like the Egyptian
angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born
of every family. Shall he now be arrested in his desolating career? In
that arrest all can give aid that will; and who shall be excused that
can and will not? Far around as human breath has ever blown he keeps our
fathers, our brothers, our sons, and our friends prostrate in the chains
of moral death. To all the living everywhere we cry, “Come sound the
moral trump, that these may rise and stand up an exceeding great army.”
“Come from the four winds, O breath! and breathe upon these slain
that they may live.” If the relative grandeur of revolutions shall be
estimated by the great amount of human misery they alleviate, and the
small amount they inflict, then indeed will this be the grandest the
world shall ever have seen.

Of our political revolution of ‘76 we are all justly proud. It has given
us a degree of political freedom far exceeding that of any other nation
of the earth. In it the world has found a solution of the long-mooted
problem as to the capability of man to govern himself. In it was the
germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the
universal liberty of mankind. But, with all these glorious results,
past, present, and to come, it had its evils too. It breathed forth
famine, swam in blood, and rode in fire; and long, long after, the
orphan’s cry and the widow’s wail continued to break the sad silence
that ensued. These were the price, the inevitable price, paid for the
blessings it bought.

Turn now to the temperance revolution. In it we shall find a stronger
bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant deposed; in
it, more of want supplied, more disease healed, more sorrow assuaged.
By it no Orphans starving, no widows weeping. By it none wounded in
feeling, none injured in interest; even the drammaker and dram-seller
will have glided into other occupations so gradually as never to
have felt the change, and will stand ready to join all others in the
universal song of gladness. And what a noble ally this to the cause of
political freedom, with such an aid its march cannot fail to be on
and on, till every son of earth shall drink in rich fruition the
sorrow-quenching draughts of perfect liberty. Happy day when-all
appetites controlled, all poisons subdued, all matter subjected-mind,
all-conquering mind, shall live and move, the monarch of the world.
Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of fury! Reign of reason, all hail!

And when the victory shall be complete, when there shall be neither
a slave nor a drunkard on the earth, how proud the title of that land
which may truly claim to be the birthplace and the cradle of both
those revolutions that shall have ended in that victory. How nobly
distinguished that people who shall have planted and nurtured to
maturity both the political and moral freedom of their species.

This is the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the birthday of
Washington; we are met to celebrate this day. Washington is the
mightiest name of earth long since mightiest in the cause of civil
liberty, still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name no eulogy
is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun or glory to the
name of Washington is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn
awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor leave it
shining on.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.


SPRINGFIELD, February 25, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:—Yours of the 16th instant, announcing that Miss Fanny and
you are “no more twain, but one flesh,” reached me this morning. I
have no way of telling you how much happiness I wish you both, though I
believe you both can conceive it. I feel somewhat jealous of both of you
now: you will be so exclusively concerned for one another, that I shall
be forgotten entirely. My acquaintance with Miss Fanny (I call her this,
lest you should think I am speaking of your mother) was too short for me
to reasonably hope to long be remembered by her; and still I am sure I
shall not forget her soon. Try if you cannot remind her of that debt she
owes me—and be sure you do not interfere to prevent her paying it.

I regret to learn that you have resolved to not return to Illinois.
I shall be very lonesome without you. How miserably things seem to be
arranged in this world! If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and
if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the
loss. I did hope she and you would make your home here; but I own I have
no right to insist. You owe obligations to her ten thousand times
more sacred than you can owe to others, and in that light let them be
respected and observed. It is natural that she should desire to remain
with her relatives and friends. As to friends, however, she could not
need them anywhere: she would have them in abundance here.

Give my kind remembrance to Mr. Williamson and his family, particularly
Miss Elizabeth; also to your mother, brother, and sisters. Ask little
Eliza Davis if she will ride to town with me if I come there again. And
finally, give Fanny a double reciprocation of all the love she sent me.
Write me often, and believe me

Yours forever, LINCOLN.

P. S. Poor Easthouse is gone at last. He died awhile before day this
morning. They say he was very loath to die....

L.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED—ON MARRIAGE CONCERNS


SPRINGFIELD, February 25,1842.

DEAR SPEED:—I received yours of the 12th written the day you went down
to William’s place, some days since, but delayed answering it till I
should receive the promised one of the 16th, which came last night.
I opened the letter with intense anxiety and trepidation; so much so,
that, although it turned out better than I expected, I have hardly yet,
at a distance of ten hours, become calm.

I tell you, Speed, our forebodings (for which you and I are peculiar)
are all the worst sort of nonsense. I fancied, from the time I received
your letter of Saturday, that the one of Wednesday was never to come,
and yet it did come, and what is more, it is perfectly clear, both from
its tone and handwriting, that you were much happier, or, if you think
the term preferable, less miserable, when you wrote it than when you
wrote the last one before. You had so obviously improved at the
very time I so much fancied you would have grown worse. You say that
something indescribably horrible and alarming still haunts you. You will
not say that three months from now, I will venture. When your nerves
once get steady now, the whole trouble will be over forever. Nor should
you become impatient at their being even very slow in becoming steady.
Again you say, you much fear that that Elysium of which you have dreamed
so much is never to be realized. Well, if it shall not, I dare swear it
will not be the fault of her who is now your wife. I now have no doubt
that it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of
Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize. Far short
of your dreams as you may be, no woman could do more to realize them
than that same black-eyed Fanny. If you could but contemplate her
through my imagination, it would appear ridiculous to you that any one
should for a moment think of being unhappy with her. My old father
used to have a saying that “If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the
tighter”; and it occurs to me that if the bargain you have just closed
can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one
for applying that maxim to which my fancy can by any effort picture.

I write another letter, enclosing this, which you can show her, if she
desires it. I do this because she would think strangely, perhaps, should
you tell her that you received no letters from me, or, telling her you
do, refuse to let her see them. I close this, entertaining the confident
hope that every successive letter I shall have from you (which I here
pray may not be few, nor far between) may show you possessing a more
steady hand and cheerful heart than the last preceding it. As ever, your
friend, LINCOLN.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.


SPRINGFIELD, March 27, 1842

DEAR SPEED:—Yours of the 10th instant was received three or four days
since. You know I am sincere when I tell you the pleasure its contents
gave me was, and is, inexpressible. As to your farm matter, I have
no sympathy with you. I have no farm, nor ever expect to have, and
consequently have not studied the subject enough to be much interested
with it. I can only say that I am glad you are satisfied and pleased
with it. But on that other subject, to me of the most intense interest
whether in joy or sorrow, I never had the power to withhold my sympathy
from you. It cannot be told how it now thrills me with joy to hear you
say you are “far happier than you ever expected to be.” That much I know
is enough. I know you too well to suppose your expectations were not,
at least, sometimes extravagant, and if the reality exceeds them all, I
say, Enough, dear Lord. I am not going beyond the truth when I tell you
that the short space it took me to read your last letter gave me more
pleasure than the total sum of all I have enjoyed since the fatal 1st
of January, 1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely
happy, but for the never-absent idea that there is one still unhappy
whom I have contributed to make so. That still kills my soul. I cannot
but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise.
She accompanied a large party on the railroad cars to Jacksonville
last Monday, and on her return spoke, so that I heard of it, of having
enjoyed the trip exceedingly. God be praised for that.

You know with what sleepless vigilance I have watched you ever since the
commencement of your affair; and although I am almost confident it is
useless, I cannot forbear once more to say that I think it is even yet
possible for your spirits to flag down and leave you miserable. If they
should, don’t fail to remember that they cannot long remain so. One
thing I can tell you which I know you will be glad to hear, and that is
that I have seen—and scrutinized her feelings as well as I could, and
am fully convinced she is far happier now than she has been for the last
fifteen months past.

You will see by the last Sangamon Journal, that I made a temperance
speech on the 22d of February, which I claim that Fanny and you shall
read as an act of charity to me; for I cannot learn that anybody else
has read it, or is likely to. Fortunately it is not very long, and I
shall deem it a sufficient compliance with my request if one of you
listens while the other reads it.

As to your Lockridge matter, it is only necessary to say that there
has been no court since you left, and that the next commences to-morrow
morning, during which I suppose we cannot fail to get a judgment.

I wish you would learn of Everett what he would take, over and above a
discharge for all the trouble we have been at, to take his business out
of our hands and give it to somebody else. It is impossible to collect
money on that or any other claim here now; and although you know I am
not a very petulant man, I declare I am almost out of patience with Mr.
Everett’s importunity. It seems like he not only writes all the letters
he can himself, but gets everybody else in Louisville and vicinity to
be constantly writing to us about his claim. I have always said that
Mr. Everett is a very clever fellow, and I am very sorry he cannot be
obliged; but it does seem to me he ought to know we are interested to
collect his claim, and therefore would do it if we could.

I am neither joking nor in a pet when I say we would thank him to
transfer his business to some other, without any compensation for what
we have done, provided he will see the court cost paid, for which we are
security.

The sweet violet you inclosed came safely to hand, but it was so dry,
and mashed so flat, that it crumbled to dust at the first attempt
to handle it. The juice that mashed out of it stained a place in the
letter, which I mean to preserve and cherish for the sake of her who
procured it to be sent. My renewed good wishes to her in particular, and
generally to all such of your relations who know me.

As ever,

LINCOLN.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.


SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, July 4, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:—Yours of the 16th June was received only a day or two
since. It was not mailed at Louisville till the 25th. You speak of the
great time that has elapsed since I wrote you. Let me explain that. Your
letter reached here a day or two after I started on the circuit. I
was gone five or six weeks, so that I got the letters only a few weeks
before Butler started to your country. I thought it scarcely worth while
to write you the news which he could and would tell you more in detail.
On his return he told me you would write me soon, and so I waited for
your letter. As to my having been displeased with your advice, surely
you know better than that. I know you do, and therefore will not labor
to convince you. True, that subject is painful to me; but it is not your
silence, or the silence of all the world, that can make me forget it. I
acknowledge the correctness of your advice too; but before I resolve
to do the one thing or the other, I must gain my confidence in my own
ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability you know
I once prided myself as the only or chief gem of my character; that gem
I lost—how and where you know too well. I have not yet regained it; and
until I do, I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance. I
believe now that had you understood my case at the time as well as I
understand yours afterward, by the aid you would have given me I should
have sailed through clear, but that does not now afford me sufficient
confidence to begin that or the like of that again.

You make a kind acknowledgment of your obligations to me for your
present happiness. I am pleased with that acknowledgment. But a thousand
times more am I pleased to know that you enjoy a degree of happiness
worthy of an acknowledgment. The truth is, I am not sure that there was
any merit with me in the part I took in your difficulty; I was drawn to
it by a fate. If I would I could not have done less than I did. I always
was superstitious; I believe God made me one of the instruments of
bringing your Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt He had
fore-ordained. Whatever He designs He will do for me yet. “Stand still,
and see the salvation of the Lord” is my text just now. If, as you say,
you have told Fanny all, I should have no objection to her seeing this
letter, but for its reference to our friend here: let her seeing it
depend upon whether she has ever known anything of my affairs; and if
she has not, do not let her.

I do not think I can come to Kentucky this season. I am so poor and make
so little headway in the world, that I drop back in a month of idleness
as much as I gain in a year’s sowing. I should like to visit you again.
I should like to see that “sis” of yours that was absent when I was
there, though I suppose she would run away again if she were to hear I
was coming.

My respects and esteem to all your friends there, and, by your
permission, my love to your Fanny.

Ever yours,

LINCOLN.



A LETTER FROM THE LOST TOWNSHIPS


Article written by Lincoln for the Sangamon Journal in ridicule of James
Shields, who, as State Auditor, had declined to receive State Bank notes
in payment of taxes. The above letter purported to come from a poor
widow who, though supplied with State Bank paper, could not obtain a
receipt for her tax bill. This, and another subsequent letter by Mary
Todd, brought about the “Lincoln-Shields Duel.”



LOST TOWNSHIPS


August 27, 1842.

DEAR Mr. PRINTER:

I see you printed that long letter I sent you a spell ago. I ’m quite
encouraged by it, and can’t keep from writing again. I think the
printing of my letters will be a good thing all round—it will give
me the benefit of being known by the world, and give the world the
advantage of knowing what’s going on in the Lost Townships, and give
your paper respectability besides. So here comes another. Yesterday
afternoon I hurried through cleaning up the dinner dishes and stepped
over to neighbor S——— to see if his wife Peggy was as well as mout be
expected, and hear what they called the baby. Well, when I got there and
just turned round the corner of his log cabin, there he was, setting on
the doorstep reading a newspaper. “How are you, Jeff?” says I. He sorter
started when he heard me, for he hadn’t seen me before. “Why,” says he,
“I ’m mad as the devil, Aunt ’Becca!” “What about?” says I; “ain’t
its hair the right color? None of that nonsense, Jeff; there ain’t an
honester woman in the Lost Townships than....”—“Than who?” says he;
“what the mischief are you about?” I began to see I was running the
wrong trail, and so says I, “Oh! nothing: I guess I was mistaken a
little, that’s all. But what is it you ’re mad about?”

“Why,” says he, “I’ve been tugging ever since harvest, getting out wheat
and hauling it to the river to raise State Bank paper enough to pay my
tax this year and a little school debt I owe; and now, just as I ’ve got
it, here I open this infernal Extra Register, expecting to find it full
of ‘Glorious Democratic Victories’ and ‘High Comb’d Cocks,’ when, lo
and behold! I find a set of fellows, calling themselves officers of the
State, have forbidden the tax collectors, and school commissioners to
receive State paper at all; and so here it is dead on my hands. I don’t
now believe all the plunder I’ve got will fetch ready cash enough to pay
my taxes and that school debt.”

I was a good deal thunderstruck myself; for that was the first I had
heard of the proclamation, and my old man was pretty much in the same
fix with Jeff. We both stood a moment staring at one another without
knowing what to say. At last says I, “Mr. S——— let me look at that
paper.” He handed it to me, when I read the proclamation over.

“There now,” says he, “did you ever see such a piece of impudence and
imposition as that?” I saw Jeff was in a good tune for saying some
ill-natured things, and so I tho’t I would just argue a little on the
contrary side, and make him rant a spell if I could. “Why,” says I,
looking as dignified and thoughtful as I could, “it seems pretty tough,
to be sure, to have to raise silver where there’s none to be raised; but
then, you see, ‘there will be danger of loss’ if it ain’t done.”

“Loss! damnation!” says he. “I defy Daniel Webster, I defy King Solomon,
I defy the world—I defy—I defy—yes, I defy even you, Aunt ’Becca,
to show how the people can lose anything by paying their taxes in State
paper.”

“Well,” says I, “you see what the officers of State say about it, and
they are a desarnin’ set of men. But,” says I, “I guess you ’re mistaken
about what the proclamation says. It don’t say the people will lose
anything by the paper money being taken for taxes. It only says ‘there
will be danger of loss’; and though it is tolerable plain that the
people can’t lose by paying their taxes in something they can get easier
than silver, instead of having to pay silver; and though it’s just as
plain that the State can’t lose by taking State Bank paper, however low
it may be, while she owes the bank more than the whole revenue, and
can pay that paper over on her debt, dollar for dollar;—still there is
danger of loss to the ‘officers of State’; and you know, Jeff, we can’t
get along without officers of State.”

“Damn officers of State!” says he; “that’s what Whigs are always
hurrahing for.”

“Now, don’t swear so, Jeff,” says I, “you know I belong to the meetin’,
and swearin’ hurts my feelings.”

“Beg pardon, Aunt ’Becca,” says he; “but I do say it’s enough to make
Dr. Goddard swear, to have tax to pay in silver, for nothing only
that Ford may get his two thousand a year, and Shields his twenty-four
hundred a year, and Carpenter his sixteen hundred a year, and all
without ‘danger of loss’ by taking it in State paper. Yes, yes: it’s
plain enough now what these officers of State mean by ‘danger of loss.’
Wash, I s’pose, actually lost fifteen hundred dollars out of the three
thousand that two of these ‘officers of State’ let him steal from the
treasury, by being compelled to take it in State paper. Wonder if we
don’t have a proclamation before long, commanding us to make up this
loss to Wash in silver.”

And so he went on till his breath run out, and he had to stop. I
couldn’t think of anything to say just then, and so I begun to look over
the paper again. “Ay! here’s another proclamation, or something like
it.”

“Another?” says Jeff; “and whose egg is it, pray?”

I looked to the bottom of it, and read aloud, “Your obedient servant,
James Shields, Auditor.”

“Aha!” says Jeff, “one of them same three fellows again. Well read it,
and let’s hear what of it.”

I read on till I came to where it says, “The object of this measure is
to suspend the collection of the revenue for the current year.”

“Now stop, now stop!” says he; “that’s a lie a’ready, and I don’t want
to hear of it.”

“Oh, maybe not,” says I.

“I say it-is-a-lie. Suspend the collection, indeed! Will the collectors,
that have taken their oaths to make the collection, dare to end it?
Is there anything in law requiring them to perjure themselves at the
bidding of James Shields?

“Will the greedy gullet of the penitentiary be satisfied with swallowing
him instead of all of them, if they should venture to obey him? And
would he not discover some ‘danger of loss,’ and be off about the time
it came to taking their places?

“And suppose the people attempt to suspend, by refusing to pay; what
then? The collectors would just jerk up their horses and cows, and the
like, and sell them to the highest bidder for silver in hand, without
valuation or redemption. Why, Shields didn’t believe that story himself;
it was never meant for the truth. If it was true, why was it not writ
till five days after the proclamation? Why did n’t Carlin and Carpenter
sign it as well as Shields? Answer me that, Aunt ’Becca. I say it’s a
lie, and not a well told one at that. It grins out like a copper dollar.
Shields is a fool as well as a liar. With him truth is out of the
question; and as for getting a good, bright, passable lie out of him,
you might as well try to strike fire from a cake of tallow. I stick to
it, it’s all an infernal Whig lie!”

“A Whig lie! Highty tighty!”

“Yes, a Whig lie; and it’s just like everything the cursed British Whigs
do. First they’ll do some divilment, and then they’ll tell a lie to hide
it. And they don’t care how plain a lie it is; they think they can cram
any sort of a one down the throats of the ignorant Locofocos, as they
call the Democrats.”

“Why, Jeff, you ’re crazy: you don’t mean to say Shields is a Whig!”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why, look here! the proclamation is in your own Democratic paper, as
you call it.”

“I know it; and what of that? They only printed it to let us Democrats
see the deviltry the Whigs are at.”

“Well, but Shields is the auditor of this Loco—I mean this Democratic
State.”

“So he is, and Tyler appointed him to office.”

“Tyler appointed him?”

“Yes (if you must chaw it over), Tyler appointed him; or, if it was n’t
him, it was old Granny Harrison, and that’s all one. I tell you, Aunt
’Becca, there’s no mistake about his being a Whig. Why, his very looks
shows it; everything about him shows it: if I was deaf and blind, I
could tell him by the smell. I seed him when I was down in Springfield
last winter. They had a sort of a gatherin’ there one night among the
grandees, they called a fair. All the gals about town was there, and all
the handsome widows and married women, finickin’ about trying to look
like gals, tied as tight in the middle, and puffed out at both ends,
like bundles of fodder that had n’t been stacked yet, but wanted
stackin’ pretty bad. And then they had tables all around the house
kivered over with [———] caps and pincushions and ten thousand such
little knick-knacks, tryin’ to sell ’em to the fellows that were bowin’,
and scrapin’ and kungeerin’ about ’em. They would n’t let no Democrats
in, for fear they’d disgust the ladies, or scare the little gals, or
dirty the floor. I looked in at the window, and there was this same
fellow Shields floatin’ about on the air, without heft or earthly
substances, just like a lock of cat fur where cats had been fighting.

“He was paying his money to this one, and that one, and t’ other one,
and sufferin’ great loss because it was n’t silver instead of State
paper; and the sweet distress he seemed to be in,—his very features,
in the ecstatic agony of his soul, spoke audibly and distinctly, ‘Dear
girls, it is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know
how much you suffer; but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am
so handsome and so interesting.’

“As this last was expressed by a most exquisite contortion of his face,
he seized hold of one of their hands, and squeezed, and held on to it
about a quarter of an hour. ‘Oh, my good fellow!’ says I to myself, ‘if
that was one of our Democratic gals in the Lost Townships, the way you
’d get a brass pin let into you would be about up to the head.’ He a
Democrat! Fiddlesticks! I tell you, Aunt ’Becca, he’s a Whig, and no
mistake; nobody but a Whig could make such a conceity dunce of himself.”

“Well,” says I, “maybe he is; but, if he is, I ’m mistaken the worst
sort. Maybe so, maybe so; but, if I am, I’ll suffer by it; I’ll be a
Democrat if it turns out that Shields is a Whig, considerin’ you shall
be a Whig if he turns out a Democrat.”

“A bargain, by jingoes!” says he; “but how will we find out?”

“Why,” says I, “we’ll just write and ax the printer.”

“Agreed again!” says he; “and by thunder! if it does turn out that
Shields is a Democrat, I never will——”

“Jefferson! Jefferson!”

“What do you want, Peggy?”

“Do get through your everlasting clatter some time, and bring me a gourd
of water; the child’s been crying for a drink this livelong hour.”

“Let it die, then; it may as well die for water as to be taxed to death
to fatten officers of State.”

Jeff run off to get the water, though, just like he hadn’t been saying
anything spiteful, for he’s a raal good-hearted fellow, after all, once
you get at the foundation of him.

I walked into the house, and, “Why, Peggy,” says I, “I declare we like
to forgot you altogether.”

“Oh, yes,” says she, “when a body can’t help themselves, everybody soon
forgets ’em; but, thank God! by day after to-morrow I shall be well
enough to milk the cows, and pen the calves, and wring the contrary
ones’ tails for ’em, and no thanks to nobody.”

“Good evening, Peggy,” says I, and so I sloped, for I seed she was mad
at me for making Jeff neglect her so long.

And now, Mr. Printer, will you be sure to let us know in your next paper
whether this Shields is a Whig or a Democrat? I don’t care about it for
myself, for I know well enough how it is already; but I want to convince
Jeff. It may do some good to let him, and others like him, know who
and what these officers of State are. It may help to send the present
hypocritical set to where they belong, and to fill the places they now
disgrace with men who will do more work for less pay, and take fewer
airs while they are doing it. It ain’t sensible to think that the same
men who get us in trouble will change their course; and yet it’s pretty
plain if some change for the better is not made, it’s not long that
either Peggy or I or any of us will have a cow left to milk, or a calf’s
tail to wring.

Yours truly,

REBECCA ———.



INVITATION TO HENRY CLAY.


SPRINGFIELD, ILL., Aug 29, 1842.

HON. HENRY CLAY, Lexington, Ky.

DEAR SIR:—We hear you are to visit Indianapolis, Indiana, on the 5th Of
October next. If our information in this is correct we hope you will
not deny us the pleasure of seeing you in our State. We are aware of the
toil necessarily incident to a journey by one circumstanced as you are;
but once you have embarked, as you have already determined to do, the
toil would not be greatly augmented by extending the journey to our
capital. The season of the year will be most favorable for good roads,
and pleasant weather; and although we cannot but believe you would be
highly gratified with such a visit to the prairie-land, the pleasure it
would give us and thousands such as we is beyond all question. You have
never visited Illinois, or at least this portion of it; and should you
now yield to our request, we promise you such a reception as shall be
worthy of the man on whom are now turned the fondest hopes of a great
and suffering nation.

Please inform us at the earliest convenience whether we may expect you.

Very respectfully your obedient servants,

   A. G. HENRY, A. T. BLEDSOE,
   C. BIRCHALL, A. LINCOLN,
   G. M. CABANNISS, ROB’T IRWIN,
   P. A. SAUNDERS, J. M. ALLEN,
   F. N. FRANCIS.
   Executive Committee “Clay Club.”

(Clay’s answer, September 6, 1842, declines with thanks.)



CORRESPONDENCE ABOUT THE LINCOLN-SHIELDS DUEL.


TREMONT, September 17, 1842.

ABRA. LINCOLN, ESQ.:—I regret that my absence on public business
compelled me to postpone a matter of private consideration a little
longer than I could have desired. It will only be necessary, however, to
account for it by informing you that I have been to Quincy on business
that would not admit of delay. I will now state briefly the reasons of
my troubling you with this communication, the disagreeable nature of
which I regret, as I had hoped to avoid any difficulty with any one in
Springfield while residing there, by endeavoring to conduct myself in
such a way amongst both my political friends and opponents as to escape
the necessity of any. Whilst thus abstaining from giving provocation,
I have become the object of slander, vituperation, and personal abuse,
which were I capable of submitting to, I would prove myself worthy of
the whole of it.

In two or three of the last numbers of the Sangamon Journal, articles
of the most personal nature and calculated to degrade me have made their
appearance. On inquiring, I was informed by the editor of that paper,
through the medium of my friend General Whitesides, that you are the
author of those articles. This information satisfies me that I have
become by some means or other the object of your secret hostility. I
will not take the trouble of inquiring into the reason of all this;
but I will take the liberty of requiring a full, positive, and
absolute retraction of all offensive allusions used by you in these
communications, in relation to my private character and standing as a
man, as an apology for the insults conveyed in them.

This may prevent consequences which no one will regret more than myself.

Your obedient servant, JAS. SHIELDS.



TO J. SHIELDS.


TREMONT, September 17, 1842

JAS. SHIELDS, ESQ.:—Your note of to-day was handed me by General
Whitesides. In that note you say you have been informed, through the
medium of the editor of the Journal, that I am the author of certain
articles in that paper which you deem personally abusive of you; and
without stopping to inquire whether I really am the author, or to point
out what is offensive in them, you demand an unqualified retraction of
all that is offensive, and then proceed to hint at consequences.

Now, sir, there is in this so much assumption of facts and so much of
menace as to consequences, that I cannot submit to answer that note any
further than I have, and to add that the consequences to which I suppose
you allude would be matter of as great regret to me as it possibly could
to you.

Respectfully,

A. LINCOLN.



TO A. LINCOLN FROM JAS. SHIELDS


TREMONT, September 17, 1842.

ABRA. LINCOLN, ESQ.:—In reply to my note of this date, you intimate
that I assume facts and menace consequences, and that you cannot submit
to answer it further. As now, sir, you desire it, I will be a little
more particular. The editor of the Sangamon Journal gave me to
understand that you are the author of an article which appeared, I
think, in that paper of the 2d September instant, headed “The Lost
Townships,” and signed Rebecca or ’Becca. I would therefore take the
liberty of asking whether you are the author of said article, or any
other over the same signature which has appeared in any of the late
numbers of that paper. If so, I repeat my request of an absolute
retraction of all offensive allusions contained therein in relation to
my private character and standing. If you are not the author of any of
these articles, your denial will be sufficient. I will say further, it
is not my intention to menace, but to do myself justice.

Your obedient servant, JAS. SHIELDS.



MEMORANDUM OF INSTRUCTIONS TO E. H. MERRYMAN,


Lincoln’s Second,

September 19, 1842.

In case Whitesides shall signify a wish to adjust this affair without
further difficulty, let him know that if the present papers be
withdrawn, and a note from Mr. Shields asking to know if I am the author
of the articles of which he complains, and asking that I shall make him
gentlemanly satisfaction if I am the author, and this without menace, or
dictation as to what that satisfaction shall be, a pledge is made that
the following answer shall be given:

“I did write the ‘Lost Townships’ letter which appeared in the Journal
of the 2d instant, but had no participation in any form in any other
article alluding to you. I wrote that wholly for political effect—I had
no intention of injuring your personal or private character or standing
as a man or a gentleman; and I did not then think, and do not now think,
that that article could produce or has produced that effect against you;
and had I anticipated such an effect I would have forborne to write it.
And I will add that your conduct toward me, so far as I know, had always
been gentlemanly; and that I had no personal pique against you, and no
cause for any.”

If this should be done, I leave it with you to arrange what shall
and what shall not be published. If nothing like this is done, the
preliminaries of the fight are to be—

First. Weapons: Cavalry broadswords of the largest size, precisely
equal in all respects, and such as now used by the cavalry company at
Jacksonville.

Second. Position: A plank ten feet long, and from nine to twelve inches
broad, to be firmly fixed on edge, on the ground, as the line between
us, which neither is to pass his foot over upon forfeit of his life.
Next a line drawn on the ground on either side of said plank and
parallel with it, each at the distance of the whole length of the sword
and three feet additional from the plank; and the passing of his own
such line by either party during the fight shall be deemed a surrender
of the contest.

Third. Time: On Thursday evening at five o’clock, if you can get it so;
but in no case to be at a greater distance of time than Friday evening
at five o’clock.

Fourth. Place: Within three miles of Alton, on the opposite side of the
river, the particular spot to be agreed on by you.

Any preliminary details coming within the above rules you are at liberty
to make at your discretion; but you are in no case to swerve from these
rules, or to pass beyond their limits.



TO JOSHUA F. SPEED.


SPRINGFIELD, October 4, 1842.

DEAR SPEED:—You have heard of my duel with Shields, and I have now
to inform you that the dueling business still rages in this city. Day
before yesterday Shields challenged Butler, who accepted, and proposed
fighting next morning at sunrise in Bob Allen’s meadow, one hundred
yards’ distance, with rifles. To this Whitesides, Shields’s second, said
“No,” because of the law. Thus ended duel No. 2. Yesterday Whitesides
chose to consider himself insulted by Dr. Merryman, so sent him a kind
of quasi-challenge, inviting him to meet him at the Planter’s House in
St. Louis on the next Friday, to settle their difficulty. Merryman made
me his friend, and sent Whitesides a note, inquiring to know if he meant
his note as a challenge, and if so, that he would, according to the
law in such case made and provided, prescribe the terms of the meeting.
Whitesides returned for answer that if Merryman would meet him at the
Planter’s House as desired, he would challenge him. Merryman replied in
a note that he denied Whitesides’s right to dictate time and place, but
that he (Merryman) would waive the question of time, and meet him at
Louisiana, Missouri. Upon my presenting this note to Whitesides and
stating verbally its contents, he declined receiving it, saying he had
business in St. Louis, and it was as near as Louisiana. Merryman
then directed me to notify Whitesides that he should publish the
correspondence between them, with such comments as he thought fit. This
I did. Thus it stood at bedtime last night. This morning Whitesides, by
his friend Shields, is praying for a new trial, on the ground that
he was mistaken in Merryman’s proposition to meet him at Louisiana,
Missouri, thinking it was the State of Louisiana. This Merryman hoots
at, and is preparing his publication; while the town is in a ferment,
and a street fight somewhat anticipated.

But I began this letter not for what I have been writing, but to
say something on that subject which you know to be of such infinite
solicitude to me. The immense sufferings you endured from the first days
of September till the middle of February you never tried to conceal from
me, and I well understood. You have now been the husband of a lovely
woman nearly eight months. That you are happier now than the day you
married her I well know, for without you could not be living. But I have
your word for it, too, and the returning elasticity of spirits which is
manifested in your letters. But I want to ask a close question, “Are
you now in feeling as well as judgment glad that you are married as you
are?” From anybody but me this would be an impudent question, not to
be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it
quickly, as I am impatient to know. I have sent my love to your Fanny so
often, I fear she is getting tired of it. However, I venture to tender
it again.

Yours forever,

LINCOLN.



TO JAMES S. IRWIN.


SPRINGFIELD, November 2, 1842.

JAS. S. IRWIN ESQ.:

Owing to my absence, yours of the 22nd ult. was not received till this
moment. Judge Logan and myself are willing to attend to any business
in the Supreme Court you may send us. As to fees, it is impossible to
establish a rule that will apply in all, or even a great many cases.
We believe we are never accused of being very unreasonable in this
particular; and we would always be easily satisfied, provided we could
see the money—but whatever fees we earn at a distance, if not paid
before, we have noticed, we never hear of after the work is done. We,
therefore, are growing a little sensitive on that point.

Yours etc.,

A. LINCOLN.



1843



RESOLUTIONS AT A WHIG MEETING AT SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, MARCH 1, 1843.


The object of the meeting was stated by Mr. Lincoln of Springfield, who
offered the following resolutions, which were unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That a tariff of duties on imported goods, producing
sufficient revenue for the payment of the necessary expenditures of the
National Government, and so adjusted as to protect American industry, is
indispensably necessary to the prosperity of the American people.

Resolved, That we are opposed to direct taxation for the support of the
National Government.

Resolved, That a national bank, properly restricted, is highly necessary
and proper to the establishment and maintenance of a sound currency, and
for the cheap and safe collection, keeping, and disbursing of the public
revenue.

Resolved, That the distribution of the proceeds of the sales of the
public lands, upon the principles of Mr. Clay’s bill, accords with the
best interests of the nation, and particularly with those of the State
of Illinois.

Resolved, That we recommend to the Whigs of each Congressional district
of the State to nominate and support at the approaching election a
candidate of their own principles, regardless of the chances of success.

Resolved, That we recommend to the Whigs of all portions of the State
to adopt and rigidly adhere to the convention system of nominating
candidates.

Resolved, That we recommend to the Whigs of each Congressional district
to hold a district convention on or before the first Monday of May next,
to be composed of a number of delegates from each county equal to double
the number of its representatives in the General Assembly, provided,
each county shall have at least one delegate. Said delegates to be
chosen by primary meetings of the Whigs, at such times and places as
they in their respective counties may see fit. Said district conventions
each to nominate one candidate for Congress, and one delegate to
a national convention for the purpose of nominating candidates for
President and Vice-President of the United States. The seven delegates
so nominated to a national convention to have power to add two delegates
to their own number, and to fill all vacancies.

Resolved, That A. T. Bledsoe, S. T. Logan, and A. Lincoln be appointed a
committee to prepare an address to the people of the State.

Resolved, That N. W. Edwards, A. G. Henry, James H. Matheny, John
C. Doremus, and James C. Conkling be appointed a Whig Central State
Committee, with authority to fill any vacancy that may occur in the
committee.



CIRCULAR FROM WHIG COMMITTEE.


Address to the People of Illinois.

FELLOW-CITIZENS:—By a resolution of a meeting of such of the Whigs of
the State as are now at Springfield, we, the undersigned, were appointed
to prepare an address to you. The performance of that task we now
undertake.

Several resolutions were adopted by the meeting; and the chief object of
this address is to show briefly the reasons for their adoption.

The first of those resolutions declares a tariff of duties upon foreign
importations, producing sufficient revenue for the support of the
General Government, and so adjusted as to protect American industry, to
be indispensably necessary to the prosperity of the American people;
and the second declares direct taxation for a national revenue to
be improper. Those two resolutions are kindred in their nature, and
therefore proper and convenient to be considered together. The question
of protection is a subject entirely too broad to be crowded into a
few pages only, together with several other subjects. On that point we
therefore content ourselves with giving the following extracts from
the writings of Mr. Jefferson, General Jackson, and the speech of Mr.
Calhoun:

“To be independent for the comforts of life, we must fabricate them
ourselves. We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the
agriculturalist. The grand inquiry now is, Shall we make our own
comforts, or go without them at the will of a foreign nation? He,
therefore, who is now against domestic manufactures must be for reducing
us either to dependence on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in
skins and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of
those; experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary
to our independence as to our comfort.” Letter of Mr. Jefferson to
Benjamin Austin.

“I ask, What is the real situation of the agriculturalist? Where has the
American farmer a market for his surplus produce? Except for cotton, he
has neither a foreign nor a home market. Does not this clearly prove,
when there is no market at home or abroad, that there [is] too much
labor employed in agriculture? Common sense at once points out the
remedy. Take from agriculture six hundred thousand men, women, and
children, and you will at once give a market for more breadstuffs than
all Europe now furnishes. In short, we have been too long subject to the
policy of British merchants. It is time we should become a little
more Americanized, and instead of feeding the paupers and laborers
of England, feed our own; or else in a short time, by continuing our
present policy, we shall all be rendered paupers ourselves.”—General
Jackson’s Letter to Dr. Coleman.

“When our manufactures are grown to a certain perfection, as they soon
will be, under the fostering care of government, the farmer will find
a ready market for his surplus produce, and—what is of equal
consequence—a certain and cheap supply of all he wants; his prosperity
will diffuse itself to every class of the community.” Speech of Hon. J.
C. Calhoun on the Tariff.

The question of revenue we will now briefly consider. For several
years past the revenues of the government have been unequal to its
expenditures, and consequently loan after loan, sometimes direct and
sometimes indirect in form, has been resorted to. By this means a
new national debt has been created, and is still growing on us with
a rapidity fearful to contemplate—a rapidity only reasonably to be
expected in time of war. This state of things has been produced by a
prevailing unwillingness either to increase the tariff or resort to
direct taxation. But the one or the other must come. Coming expenditures
must be met, and the present debt must be paid; and money cannot always
be borrowed for these objects. The system of loans is but temporary in
its nature, and must soon explode. It is a system not only ruinous while
it lasts, but one that must soon fail and leave us destitute. As an
individual who undertakes to live by borrowing soon finds his original
means devoured by interest, and, next, no one left to borrow from, so
must it be with a government.

We repeat, then, that a tariff sufficient for revenue, or a direct tax,
must soon be resorted to; and, indeed, we believe this alternative is
now denied by no one. But which system shall be adopted? Some of our
opponents, in theory, admit the propriety of a tariff sufficient for
a revenue, but even they will not in practice vote for such a tariff;
while others boldly advocate direct taxation. Inasmuch, therefore, as
some of them boldly advocate direct taxation, and all the rest—or so
nearly all as to make exceptions needless—refuse to adopt the tariff,
we think it is doing them no injustice to class them all as advocates
of direct taxation. Indeed, we believe they are only delaying an open
avowal of the system till they can assure themselves that the people
will tolerate it. Let us, then, briefly compare the two systems. The
tariff is the cheaper system, because the duties, being collected in
large parcels at a few commercial points, will require comparatively few
officers in their collection; while by the direct-tax system the land
must be literally covered with assessors and collectors, going forth
like swarms of Egyptian locusts, devouring every blade of grass and
other green thing. And, again, by the tariff system the whole revenue is
paid by the consumers of foreign goods, and those chiefly the luxuries,
and not the necessaries, of life. By this system the man who contents
himself to live upon the products of his own country pays nothing at
all. And surely that country is extensive enough, and its products
abundant and varied enough, to answer all the real wants of its people.
In short, by this system the burthen of revenue falls almost entirely on
the wealthy and luxurious few, while the substantial and laboring many
who live at home, and upon home products, go entirely free. By the
direct-tax system none can escape. However strictly the citizen may
exclude from his premises all foreign luxuries,—fine cloths, fine
silks, rich wines, golden chains, and diamond rings,—still, for
the possession of his house, his barn, and his homespun, he is to be
perpetually haunted and harassed by the tax-gatherer. With these views
we leave it to be determined whether we or our opponents are the more
truly democratic on the subject.

The third resolution declares the necessity and propriety of a national
bank. During the last fifty years so much has been said and written both
as to the constitutionality and expediency of such an institution, that
we could not hope to improve in the least on former discussions of the
subject, were we to undertake it. We, therefore, upon the question of
constitutionality content ourselves with remarking the facts that the
first national bank was established chiefly by the same men who formed
the Constitution, at a time when that instrument was but two years old,
and receiving the sanction, as President, of the immortal Washington;
that the second received the sanction, as President, of Mr. Madison,
to whom common consent has awarded the proud title of “Father of the
Constitution”; and subsequently the sanction of the Supreme Court, the
most enlightened judicial tribunal in the world. Upon the question of
expediency, we only ask you to examine the history of the times during
the existence of the two banks, and compare those times with the
miserable present.

The fourth resolution declares the expediency of Mr. Clay’s land bill.
Much incomprehensible jargon is often used against the constitutionality
of this measure. We forbear, in this place, attempting an answer to it,
simply because, in our opinion, those who urge it are through party
zeal resolved not to see or acknowledge the truth. The question of
expediency, at least so far as Illinois is concerned, seems to us the
clearest imaginable. By the bill we are to receive annually a large sum
of money, no part of which we otherwise receive. The precise annual sum
cannot be known in advance; it doubtless will vary in different years.
Still it is something to know that in the last year—a year of almost
unparalleled pecuniary pressure—it amounted to more than forty thousand
dollars. This annual income, in the midst of our almost insupportable
difficulties, in the days of our severest necessity, our political
opponents are furiously resolving to take and keep from us. And for
what? Many silly reasons are given, as is usual in cases where a single
good one is not to be found. One is that by giving us the proceeds
of the lands we impoverish the national treasury, and thereby render
necessary an increase of the tariff. This may be true; but if so, the
amount of it only is that those whose pride, whose abundance of means,
prompt them to spurn the manufactures of our country, and to strut in
British cloaks and coats and pantaloons, may have to pay a few cents
more on the yard for the cloth that makes them. A terrible evil, truly,
to the Illinois farmer, who never wore, nor ever expects to wear, a
single yard of British goods in his whole life. Another of their reasons
is that by the passage and continuance of Mr. Clay’s bill, we prevent
the passage of a bill which would give us more. This, if it were sound
in itself, is waging destructive war with the former position; for if
Mr. Clay’s bill impoverishes the treasury too much, what shall be said
of one that impoverishes it still more? But it is not sound in itself.
It is not true that Mr. Clay’s bill prevents the passage of one more
favorable to us of the new States. Considering the strength and opposite
interest of the old States, the wonder is that they ever permitted one
to pass so favorable as Mr. Clay’s. The last twenty-odd years’ efforts
to reduce the price of the lands, and to pass graduation bills and
cession bills, prove the assertion to be true; and if there were no
experience in support of it, the reason itself is plain. The States
in which none, or few, of the public lands lie, and those consequently
interested against parting with them except for the best price, are
the majority; and a moment’s reflection will show that they must ever
continue the majority, because by the time one of the original new
States (Ohio, for example) becomes populous and gets weight in Congress,
the public lands in her limits are so nearly sold out that in every
point material to this question she becomes an old State. She does not
wish the price reduced, because there is none left for her citizens
to buy; she does not wish them ceded to the States in which they lie,
because they no longer lie in her limits, and she will get nothing
by the cession. In the nature of things, the States interested in
the reduction of price, in graduation, in cession, and in all similar
projects, never can be the majority. Nor is there reason to hope that
any of them can ever succeed as a Democratic party measure, because we
have heretofore seen that party in full power, year after year,
with many of their leaders making loud professions in favor of these
projects, and yet doing nothing. What reason, then, is there to believe
they will hereafter do better? In every light in which we can view this
question, it amounts simply to this: Shall we accept our share of the
proceeds under Mr. Clay’s bill, or shall we rather reject that and get
nothing?

The fifth resolution recommends that a Whig candidate for Congress be
run in every district, regardless of the chances of success. We are
aware that it is sometimes a temporary gratification, when a friend
cannot succeed, to be able to choose between opponents; but we believe
that that gratification is the seed-time which never fails to be
followed by a most abundant harvest of bitterness. By this policy we
entangle ourselves. By voting for our opponents, such of us as do it
in some measure estop ourselves to complain of their acts, however
glaringly wrong we may believe them to be. By this policy no one portion
of our friends can ever be certain as to what course another portion
may adopt; and by this want of mutual and perfect understanding our
political identity is partially frittered away and lost. And, again,
those who are thus elected by our aid ever become our bitterest
persecutors. Take a few prominent examples. In 1830 Reynolds was elected
Governor; in 1835 we exerted our whole strength to elect Judge Young
to the United States Senate, which effort, though failing, gave him the
prominence that subsequently elected him; in 1836 General Ewing, was so
elected to the United States Senate; and yet let us ask what three men
have been more perseveringly vindictive in their assaults upon all our
men and measures than they? During the last summer the whole State
was covered with pamphlet editions of misrepresentations against us,
methodized into chapters and verses, written by two of these same
men,—Reynolds and Young, in which they did not stop at charging us with
error merely, but roundly denounced us as the designing enemies of
human liberty, itself. If it be the will of Heaven that such men shall
politically live, be it so; but never, never again permit them to draw a
particle of their sustenance from us.

The sixth resolution recommends the adoption of the convention system
for the nomination of candidates. This we believe to be of the very
first importance. Whether the system is right in itself we do not stop
to inquire; contenting ourselves with trying to show that, while our
opponents use it, it is madness in us not to defend ourselves with
it. Experience has shown that we cannot successfully defend ourselves
without it. For examples, look at the elections of last year. Our
candidate for governor, with the approbation of a large portion of the
party, took the field without a nomination, and in open opposition to
the system. Wherever in the counties the Whigs had held conventions and
nominated candidates for the Legislature, the aspirants who were not
nominated were induced to rebel against the nominations, and to become
candidates, as is said, “on their own hook.” And, go where you would
into a large Whig county, you were sure to find the Whigs not contending
shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy, but divided into
factions, and fighting furiously with one another. The election came,
and what was the result? The governor beaten, the Whig vote being
decreased many thousands since 1840, although the Democratic vote
had not increased any. Beaten almost everywhere for members of the
Legislature,—Tazewell, with her four hundred Whig majority, sending a
delegation half Democratic; Vermillion, with her five hundred, doing
the same; Coles, with her four hundred, sending two out of three; and
Morgan, with her two hundred and fifty, sending three out of four,—and
this to say nothing of the numerous other less glaring examples; the
whole winding up with the aggregate number of twenty-seven Democratic
representatives sent from Whig counties. As to the senators, too, the
result was of the same character. And it is most worthy to be remembered
that of all the Whigs in the State who ran against the regular nominees,
a single one only was elected. Although they succeeded in defeating
the nominees almost by scores, they too were defeated, and the spoils
chucklingly borne off by the common enemy.

We do not mention the fact of many of the Whigs opposing the convention
system heretofore for the purpose of censuring them. Far from it.
We expressly protest against such a conclusion. We know they were
generally, perhaps universally, as good and true Whigs as we ourselves
claim to be.

We mention it merely to draw attention to the disastrous result it
produced, as an example forever hereafter to be avoided. That “union is
strength” is a truth that has been known, illustrated, and declared in
various ways and forms in all ages of the world. That great fabulist and
philosopher Aesop illustrated it by his fable of the bundle of sticks;
and he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers has declared
that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” It is to induce our
friends to act upon this important and universally acknowledged truth
that we urge the adoption of the convention system. Reflection will
prove that there is no other way of practically applying it. In its
application we know there will be incidents temporarily painful; but,
after all, those incidents will be fewer and less intense with than
without the system. If two friends aspire to the same office it is
certain that both cannot succeed. Would it not, then, be much less
painful to have the question decided by mutual friends some time before,
than to snarl and quarrel until the day of election, and then both be
beaten by the common enemy?

Before leaving this subject, we think proper to remark that we do not
understand the resolution as intended to recommend the application of
the convention system to the nomination of candidates for the small
offices no way connected with politics; though we must say we do not
perceive that such an application of it would be wrong.

The seventh resolution recommends the holding of district conventions
in May next, for the purpose of nominating candidates for Congress. The
propriety of this rests upon the same reasons with that of the sixth,
and therefore needs no further discussion.

The eighth and ninth also relate merely to the practical application of
the foregoing, and therefore need no discussion.

Before closing, permit us to add a few reflections on the present
condition and future prospects of the Whig party. In almost all the
States we have fallen into the minority, and despondency seems to
prevail universally among us. Is there just cause for this? In 1840 we
carried the nation by more than a hundred and forty thousand majority.
Our opponents charged that we did it by fraudulent voting; but whatever
they may have believed, we know the charge to be untrue. Where, now, is
that mighty host? Have they gone over to the enemy? Let the results of
the late elections answer. Every State which has fallen off from the
Whig cause since 1840 has done so not by giving more Democratic votes
than they did then, but by giving fewer Whig. Bouck, who was elected
Democratic Governor of New York last fall by more than 15,000 majority,
had not then as many votes as he had in 1840, when he was beaten by
seven or eight thousand. And so has it been in all the other States
which have fallen away from our cause. From this it is evident that tens
of thousands in the late elections have not voted at all. Who and what
are they? is an important question, as respects the future. They can
come forward and give us the victory again. That all, or nearly all, of
them are Whigs is most apparent. Our opponents, stung to madness by
the defeat of 1840, have ever since rallied with more than their usual
unanimity. It has not been they that have been kept from the polls.
These facts show what the result must be, once the people again rally
in their entire strength. Proclaim these facts, and predict this result;
and although unthinking opponents may smile at us, the sagacious ones
will “believe and tremble.” And why shall the Whigs not all rally again?
Are their principles less dear now than in 1840? Have any of their
doctrines since then been discovered to be untrue? It is true, the
victory of 1840 did not produce the happy results anticipated; but it
is equally true, as we believe, that the unfortunate death of General
Harrison was the cause of the failure. It was not the election of
General Harrison that was expected to produce happy effects, but the
measures to be adopted by his administration. By means of his death,
and the unexpected course of his successor, those measures were never
adopted. How could the fruits follow? The consequences we always
predicted would follow the failure of those measures have followed, and
are now upon us in all their horrors. By the course of Mr. Tyler the
policy of our opponents has continued in operation, still leaving them
with the advantage of charging all its evils upon us as the results of
a Whig administration. Let none be deceived by this somewhat plausible,
though entirely false charge. If they ask us for the sufficient and
sound currency we promised, let them be answered that we only promised
it through the medium of a national bank, which they, aided by Mr.
Tyler, prevented our establishing. And let them be reminded, too, that
their own policy in relation to the currency has all the time been, and
still is, in full operation. Let us then again come forth in our might,
and by a second victory accomplish that which death prevented in the
first. We can do it. When did the Whigs ever fail if they were fully
aroused and united? Even in single States, under such circumstances,
defeat seldom overtakes them. Call to mind the contested elections
within the last few years, and particularly those of Moore and Letcher
from Kentucky, Newland and Graham from North Carolina, and the famous
New Jersey case. In all these districts Locofocoism had stalked
omnipotent before; but when the whole people were aroused by its
enormities on those occasions, they put it down, never to rise again.

We declare it to be our solemn conviction, that the Whigs are always a
majority of this nation; and that to make them always successful needs
but to get them all to the polls and to vote unitedly. This is the great
desideratum. Let us make every effort to attain it. At every election,
let every Whig act as though he knew the result to depend upon his
action. In the great contest of 1840 some more than twenty one hundred
thousand votes were cast, and so surely as there shall be that many,
with the ordinary increase added, cast in 1844 that surely will a Whig
be elected President of the United States.

A. LINCOLN. S. T. LOGAN. A. T. BLEDSOE.

March 4, 1843.



TO JOHN BENNETT.


SPRINGFIELD, March 7, 1843.

FRIEND BENNETT:

Your letter of this day was handed me by Mr. Miles. It is too late now
to effect the object you desire. On yesterday morning the most of the
Whig members from this district got together and agreed to hold the
convention at Tremont in Tazewell County. I am sorry to hear that any
of the Whigs of your county, or indeed of any county, should longer
be against conventions. On last Wednesday evening a meeting of all the
Whigs then here from all parts of the State was held, and the question
of the propriety of conventions was brought up and fully discussed, and
at the end of the discussion a resolution recommending the system of
conventions to all the Whigs of the State was unanimously adopted.
Other resolutions were also passed, all of which will appear in the next
Journal. The meeting also appointed a committee to draft an address
to the people of the State, which address will also appear in the next
journal.

In it you will find a brief argument in favor of conventions—and
although I wrote it myself I will say to you that it is conclusive upon
the point and can not be reasonably answered. The right way for you to
do is hold your meeting and appoint delegates any how, and if there be
any who will not take part, let it be so. The matter will work so well
this time that even they who now oppose will come in next time.

The convention is to be held at Tremont on the 5th of April and
according to the rule we have adopted your county is to have
delegates—being double your representation.

If there be any good Whig who is disposed to stick out against
conventions get him at least to read the arguement in their favor in the
address.

Yours as ever,

A. LINCOLN.



JOSHUA F. SPEED.


SPRINGFIELD, March 24, 1843.

DEAR SPEED:—We had a meeting of the Whigs of the county here on last
Monday to appoint delegates to a district convention; and Baker beat me,
and got the delegation instructed to go for him. The meeting, in spite
of my attempt to decline it, appointed me one of the delegates; so that
in getting Baker the nomination I shall be fixed a good deal like a
fellow who is made a groomsman to a man that has cut him out and is
marrying his own dear “gal.” About the prospects of your having a
namesake at our town, can’t say exactly yet.

A. LINCOLN.



TO MARTIN M. MORRIS.


SPRINGFIELD, ILL., March 26, 1843.

FRIEND MORRIS:

Your letter of the a 3 d, was received on yesterday morning, and for
which (instead of an excuse, which you thought proper to ask) I tender
you my sincere thanks. It is truly gratifying to me to learn that, while
the people of Sangamon have cast me off, my old friends of Menard, who
have known me longest and best, stick to me. It would astonish, if
not amuse, the older citizens to learn that I (a stranger, friendless,
uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat at ten dollars per
month) have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and
aristocratic family distinction. Yet so, chiefly, it was. There was,
too, the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is
a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose, with few exceptions got all
that church. My wife has some relations in the Presbyterian churches,
and some with the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would
tell, I was set down as either the one or the other, while it was
everywhere contended that no Christian ought to go for me, because I
belonged to no church, was suspected of being a deist, and had talked
about fighting a duel. With all these things, Baker, of course, had
nothing to do. Nor do I complain of them. As to his own church going
for him, I think that was right enough, and as to the influences I
have spoken of in the other, though they were very strong, it would be
grossly untrue and unjust to charge that they acted upon them in a body
or were very near so. I only mean that those influences levied a tax
of a considerable per cent. upon my strength throughout the religious
controversy. But enough of this.

You say that in choosing a candidate for Congress you have an equal
right with Sangamon, and in this you are undoubtedly correct. In
agreeing to withdraw if the Whigs of Sangamon should go against me, I
did not mean that they alone were worth consulting, but that if she,
with her heavy delegation, should be against me, it would be impossible
for me to succeed, and therefore I had as well decline. And in relation
to Menard having rights, permit me fully to recognize them, and to
express the opinion that, if she and Mason act circumspectly, they will
in the convention be able so far to enforce their rights as to decide
absolutely which one of the candidates shall be successful. Let me show
the reason of this. Hardin, or some other Morgan candidate, will get
Putnam, Marshall, Woodford, Tazewell, and Logan—making sixteen. Then
you and Mason, having three, can give the victory to either side.

You say you shall instruct your delegates for me, unless I object. I
certainly shall not object. That would be too pleasant a compliment for
me to tread in the dust. And besides, if anything should happen (which,
however, is not probable) by which Baker should be thrown out of the
fight, I would be at liberty to accept the nomination if I could get
it. I do, however, feel myself bound not to hinder him in any way from
getting the nomination. I should despise myself were I to attempt it.
I think, then, it would be proper for your meeting to appoint three
delegates and to instruct them to go for some one as the first choice,
some one else as a second, and perhaps some one as a third; and if in
those instructions I were named as the first choice, it would gratify me
very much. If you wish to hold the balance of power, it is important for
you to attend to and secure the vote of Mason also: You should be sure
to have men appointed delegates that you know you can safely confide in.
If yourself and James Short were appointed from your county, all would
be safe; but whether Jim’s woman affair a year ago might not be in the
way of his appointment is a question. I don’t know whether you know it,
but I know him to be as honorable a man as there is in the world. You
have my permission, and even request, to show this letter to Short; but
to no one else, unless it be a very particular friend who you know will
not speak of it.

Yours as ever, A. LINCOLN.

P. S Will you write me again?



TO MARTIN M. MORRIS.


April 14, 1843.

FRIEND MORRIS:

I have heard it intimated that Baker has been attempting to get you or
Miles, or both of you, to violate the instructions of the meeting that
appointed you, and to go for him. I have insisted, and still insist,
that this cannot be true. Surely Baker would not do the like. As well
might Hardin ask me to vote for him in the convention. Again, it is said
there will be an attempt to get up instructions in your county requiring
you to go for Baker. This is all wrong. Upon the same rule, Why
might not I fly from the decision against me in Sangamon, and get up
instructions to their delegates to go for me? There are at least twelve
hundred Whigs in the county that took no part, and yet I would as soon
put my head in the fire as to attempt it. Besides, if any one should get
the nomination by such extraordinary means, all harmony in the district
would inevitably be lost. Honest Whigs (and very nearly all of them
are honest) would not quietly abide such enormities. I repeat, such an
attempt on Baker’s part cannot be true. Write me at Springfield how the
matter is. Don’t show or speak of this letter.

A. LINCOLN



TO GEN. J. J. HARDIN.


SPRINGFIELD, May 11, 1843.

FRIEND HARDIN:

Butler informs me that he received a letter from you, in which you
expressed some doubt whether the Whigs of Sangamon will support you
cordially. You may, at once, dismiss all fears on that subject. We
have already resolved to make a particular effort to give you the very
largest majority possible in our county. From this, no Whig of the
county dissents. We have many objects for doing it. We make it a matter
of honor and pride to do it; we do it because we love the Whig cause; we
do it because we like you personally; and last, we wish to convince you
that we do not bear that hatred to Morgan County that you people have so
long seemed to imagine. You will see by the journals of this week that
we propose, upon pain of losing a barbecue, to give you twice as great
a majority in this county as you shall receive in your own. I got up the
proposal.

Who of the five appointed is to write the district address? I did the
labor of writing one address this year, and got thunder for my reward.
Nothing new here.

Yours as ever, A. LINCOLN.

P. S.—I wish you would measure one of the largest of those swords we
took to Alton and write me the length of it, from tip of the point to
tip of the hilt, in feet and inches. I have a dispute about the length.

A. L.


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