The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Complete

A >> Abraham Lincoln >> The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Complete


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.