The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Complete

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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."