Abraham Lincoln by George Haven Putnam (win 10 ebook reader txt) 📖
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Lincoln, coming from those whom he called the common people, feeling with their feelings, sympathetic with their needs and ideals, was able in the development of his powers to be accepted as the peer of the largest intellects in the land. While knowing what was needed by the poor whites of Kentucky, he could understand also the point of view of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. In place of emphasising antagonisms, he held consistently that the highest interest of one section of the country must be the real interest of the whole people, and that the ruler of the nation had upon him the responsibility of so shaping the national policy that all the people should recognise the government as their government. It was this large understanding and width of sympathy that made Lincoln in a sense which could be applied to no other ruler of this country, the people's President, and no other ruler in the world has ever been so sympathetically, so effectively in touch with all of the fellow-citizens for whose welfare he made himself responsible. The Latin writer, Aulus Gellius, uses for one of his heroes the term "a classic character." These words seem to me fairly to apply to Abraham Lincoln.
An appreciative Englishman, writing in the London Nation at the time of the Centennial commemoration, says of Lincoln:
The greatness of Lincoln was that of a common man raised to a high dimension. The possibility, still more the existence, of such a man is itself a justification of democracy. We do not say that so independent, so natural, so complete a man cannot in older societies come to wield so large a power over the affairs and the minds of men; we can only say that amid all the stirring movements of the nineteenth century he has not so done. The existence of what may be called a widespread commonalty explains the rarity of personal eminence in America. There has been and still remains a higher general level of personality than in any European country, and the degree of eminence is correspondingly reduced. It is just because America has stood for opportunity that conspicuous individuals have been comparatively rare. Strong personality, however, has not been rare; it is the abundance of such personality that has built up silently into the rising fabric of the American Commonwealth, pioneers, roadmakers, traders, lawyers, soldiers, teachers, toiling terribly over the material and moral foundation of the country, few of whose names have emerged or survived. Lincoln was of this stock, was reared among these rude energetic folk, had lived all those sorts of lives. He was no "sport"; his career is a triumphant refutation of the traditional views of genius. He had no special gift or quality to distinguish him; he was simply the best type of American at a historic juncture when the national safety wanted such a man. The confidence which all Americans express that their country will be equal to any emergency which may threaten it, is not so entirely superstitious as it seems at first sight. For the career of Lincoln shows how it has been done in a country where the "necessary man" can be drawn not from a few leading families, or an educated class, but from the millions.
Rabbi Schechter, in an eloquent address delivered at the Centennial celebration, speaks of Lincoln's personality as follows:
The half century that has elapsed since Lincoln's death has dispelled the mists that encompassed him on earth. Men now not only recognise the right which he championed, but behold in him the standard of righteousness, of liberty, of conciliation, and truth. In him, as it were personified, stands the Union, all that is best and noblest and enduring in its principles in which he devoutly believed and served mightily to save. When to-day, the world celebrates the century of his existence, he has become the ideal of both North and South, of a common country, composed not only of the factions that once confronted each other in war's dreadful array, but of the myriad thousands that have since found in the American nation the hope of the future and the refuge from age-entrenched wrong and absolutism. To them, Lincoln, his life, his history, his character, his entire personality, with all its wondrous charm and grace, its sobriety, patience, self-abnegation, and sweetness, has come to be the very prototype of a rising humanity.
Carl Schurz, himself a man of large nature and wide and sympathetic comprehension, says of Lincoln:
In the most conspicuous position of the period, Lincoln drew upon himself the scoffs of polite society; but even then he filled the souls of mankind with utterances of wonderful beauty and grandeur. It was distinctly the weird mixture in him of qualities and forces, 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, that gave him his singular power over minds and hearts, that fitted him to be the greatest leader in the greatest crisis of our national life.
He possessed the courage to stand alone—that courage which is the first requisite of leadership in a great cause. The charm of Lincoln's oratory flooded all the rare depth and genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings were the strongest element in his nature. He was one of the greatest Americans and the best of men.
The poet Whittier writes:
The weary form that rested not
Save in a martyr's grave;
The care-worn face that none forgot,
Turned to the kneeling slave.
We rest in peace where his sad eyes
Saw peril, strife, and pain;
His was the awful sacrifice,
And ours the priceless gain.
Says Bryant:
That task is done, the bound are free,
We bear thee to an honoured grave,
Whose noblest monument shall be
The broken fetters of the slave.
Pure was thy life; its bloody close
Hath blessed thee with the sons of light,
Among the noble host of those
Who perished in the cause of right.
Says Lowell:
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame;
New birth of our new soil, the first American.
Ordinary men die when their physical life is brought to a close, if perhaps not at once, yet in a brief space, with the passing of the little circle of those to whom they were dear.
The man of distinction lives for a time after death. His achievements and his character are held in appreciative remembrance by the community and the generation he has served. The waves of his influence ripple out in a somewhat wider circle before being lost in the ocean of time. We call that man great to whom it is given so to impress himself upon his fellow-men by deed, by creation, by service to the community, by character, by the inspiration from on high that has been breathed through his soul, that he is not permitted to die. Such a man secures immortality in this world. The knowledge and the influence of his life are extended throughout mankind and his memory gathers increasing fame from generation to generation.
It is thus that men are to-day honouring the memory of Abraham Lincoln. To-day, one hundred years after his birth, and nearly half a century since the dramatic close of his life's work, Lincoln stands enshrined in the thought and in the hearts of his countrymen. He is our "Father Abraham," belonging to us, his fellow-citizens, for ideals, for inspiration, and for affectionate regard; but he belongs now also to all mankind, for he has been canonised among the noblest of the world's heroes.
APPENDIX THE ADDRESS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Delivered at Cooper Institute, New York,
February 27, 1860.
With Introduction by Charles C. Nott; Historical and Analytical Notes by Charles C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, and with the Correspondence between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Nott as Representative of the Committee of the Young Men's Republican Union.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The address delivered by Lincoln at the Cooper Institute in February, 1860 in response to the invitation of certain representative New Yorkers, was, as well in its character as in its results, the most important of all of his utterances.
The conscientious study of the historical and constitutional record, and the arguments and conclusions based upon the analysis of this record, were accepted by the Republican leaders as constituting the principles and the policy to be maintained during the Presidential campaign of 1860, a campaign in which was involved not merely the election of a President, but the continued existence of the republic.
Under the wise counsels represented by the words of Lincoln, the election was fought out substantially on two contentions:
First, that the compact entered into by the Fathers and by their immediate successors should be loyally carried out, and that slavery should not be interfered with in the original slave States, or in the additional territory that had been conceded to it under the Missouri Compromise; and, secondly, that not a single further square mile of soil, that was still free, should be left available, or should be made available, for the incursion of slavery.
It was the conviction of Lincoln and of his associates, as it had been the conviction of the Fathers, that under such a restriction slavery must certainly in the near future come to an end. It was because these convictions, both in the debates with Douglas and in
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