Born in Hardin County, Ky., Feb. 12, 1809: died at Washington, D. C., April 15, 1865. The sixteenth President of the United States. He was descended from a Quaker family, of English origin, residing in the middle of the 18th century in Berks County, Pennsylvania. His grandfather emigrated from Virginia to Kentucky about 1780. His father, Thomas Lincoln, settled with his family in Indiana in 1816, and in Illinois in 1830. His mother was Nancy Hanks, Thomas Lincoln’s first wife. He left his father’s home soon after settling in Illinois, and after following various occupations, including those of a farm laborer, a salesman, a merchant, and a surveyor, was admitted to the bar in 1836, and began the practice of law at Springfield in 1837. He served first as a captain and afterward as a private in the Black Hawk war in 1832; was a Whig member of the Illinois State legislature 1834–42; and was a Whig member of Congress from Illinois 1847–1849. In 1858, as Republican candidate for United States senator, he held a series of joint discussions throughout Illinois with the Democratic candidate, Stephen A. Douglas, in which he took a pronounced stand against the institution of slavery. This debate attracted the attention of the country, and in 1860 he was nominated as candidate for President by the Republican party. The disunion of the Democratic party secured for him an easy victory. He received 180 electoral votes against 72 for John C. Breckenridge, candidate of the Southern Democrats; 39 for John Bell, candidate of the Constitutional Union party; and 12 for Stephen A. Douglas, candidate of the Northern Democrats; and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. His election was the signal for the secession, one after another, of the slave States of the South, and for the organization of the Confederate States. Hostilities began with an attack by the Secessionists of South Carolina on the Federal troops at Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861. The fort surrendered on the 13th. On the 15th a call was issued by the President for 75,000 volunteers, and the control of events passed from the cabinet to the camp. He proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports April 19, 1861; and Sept. 22, 1862, issued a proclamation emancipating all slaves in States or parts of States which should be in rebellion on Jan. 1, 1863. He was re-elected president by the Republican party in 1864, receiving 212 electoral votes against 21 for George B. McClellan, candidate for the Democratic party. He began his second term of office March 4, 1865. He entered Richmond with the Federal army April 4, 1865, two days after the flight of the Confederate government; and was occupied with plans for the reconstruction of the South when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, April 14, 1865, and died the following day. Numerous biographies of Lincoln have been published, the most comprehensive of which is that by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay (1890).

Personal

  In the course of a recent visit to the United States, the writer of this article had a short interview with President Lincoln, then just re-elected…. The president’s face and figure are well known by likenesses and caricatures. The large-boned and sinewy frame, six feet four inches in height, is probably that of the yeoman of the north of England—the district from which Lincoln’s name suggests that his fore-fathers came—made spare and gaunt by the climate of America. The face, in like manner, denotes an English yeoman’s solidity of character and good sense, with something super-added from the enterprising life and sharp habits of the Western Yankee. The brutal fidelity of the photograph, as usual, has given the features of the original, but left out the expression. It is one of kindness, and, except when specially moved to mirth, of seriousness and care. The manner and address are perfectly simple, modest, and unaffected, and therefore free from vulgarity in the eyes of all those who are not vulgar themselves.

  He bore the nation’s perils, and trials, and sorrows, ever on his mind. You know him, in a large degree, by the illustrative stories of which his memory and his tongue were so prolific, using them to point a moral, or to soften discontent at his decisions. But this was the mere badinage which relieved him for the moment from the heavy weight of public duties and responsibilities under which he often wearied. Those whom he admitted to his confidence, and with whom he conversed of his feelings, knew that his inner life was checkered with the deepest anxiety and most discomforting solicitude. Elated by victories for the cause which was ever in his thoughts, reverses to our arms cast a pall of depression over him. One morning over two years ago, calling upon him on business, I found him looking more than usually pale and careworn, and inquired the reason. He replied, with the bad news he had received at a late hour the previous night, which had not yet been communicated to the press—he had not closed his eyes or breakfasted; and, with an expression I shall never forget, he exclaimed, “How willingly would I exchange places to-day with the soldier who sleeps on the ground in the Army of the Potomac!”

  Upon thousands of hearts great sorrows and anxieties have rested, but not on one such, and in such measure, as upon that simple, truthful, noble soul, our faithful and sainted Lincoln. Never rising to the enthusiasm of more impassioned natures in hours of hope, and never sinking with the mercurial in hours of defeat to the depths of despondency, he held on with unmovable patience and fortitude, putting caution against hope that it might not be premature, and hope against caution that it might not yield to dread and danger. He wrestled ceaselessly, through four black and dreadful purgatorial years, wherein God was cleansing the sins of his people as by fire.

	O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
	The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
	The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
	While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
	But O heart! heart! heart!
	O the bleeding drops of red,
	Where on the deck my Captain lies,
	Fallen cold and dead.
	O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
	Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
	For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
	For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
	Here Captain! dear father!
	This arm beneath your head!
	It is some dream that on the deck,
	You’ve fallen cold and dead.
	My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
	My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
	The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
	From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
	Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
	But I with mournful tread,
	Walk the deck my Captain lies,
	Fallen cold and dead.

  It has been the business of my life to study the human face, and I have said repeatedly to friends that Mr. Lincoln had the saddest face I ever attempted to paint. During some of the dark days of the spring and summer of 1864, I saw him at times when his care-worn, troubled appearance was enough to bring tears of sympathy into the eyes of his most bitter opponents. I recall particularly one day, when, having occasion to pass through the main hall of the domestic apartments, I met him alone, pacing up and down a narrow passage, his hands behind him, his head bent forward upon his breast, heavy black rings under his eyes, showing sleepless nights—altogether such a picture of the effects of sorrow and care as I have never seen.

  Latterly Mr. Lincoln’s reading was with the humorous writers. He liked to repeat from memory whole chapters from these books; and on such occasions he always preserved his own gravity though his auditors might be convulsed with laughter. He said that he had a dread of people who could not appreciate the fun of such things; and he once instanced a member of his own Cabinet, of whom he quoted the saying of Sydney Smith, “that it required a surgical operation to get a joke into his head.” The light trifles spoken of diverted his mind, or, as he said of his theatre-going, gave him refuge from himself and his weariness. But he also was a lover of many philosophical books, and particularly liked Butler’s “Analogy of Religion,” Stuart Mill on Liberty, and he always hoped to get at President Edwards on the Will. These ponderous writers found a queer companionship in the chronicler of the Mackerel Brigade, Parson Nasby, and Private Miles O’Reilly. The Bible was a very familiar study with the President, whole chapters of Isaiah, the New Testament, and the Psalms being fixed in his memory, and he would sometimes correct a misquotation of Scripture, giving generally the chapter and verse where it could be found. He liked the Old Testament best, and dwelt on the simple beauty of the historical books.

	A laboring man, with horny hands,
	Who swung the axe, who tilled his lands,
	Who shrank from nothing new,
	But did as poor men do!
	One of the People! Born to be
	Their curious epitome;
	To share, yet rise above
	Their shifting hate and love.
	Common his mind (it seemed so then),
	His thoughts the thoughts of other men:
	Plain were his words, and poor—
	But now they will endure!

  In his character Lincoln was through and through an American…. The habits of his mind were those of meditation and inward thought, rather than of action. He delighted to express his opinons by an apothegm, illustrate them by a parable, or drive them home by a story. He was skilful in analysis, discerned with precision the central idea on which a question turned, and knew how to disengage it and present it by itself in a few homely, strong old English words that would be intelligible to all. He excelled in logical statement more than in executive ability. He reasoned clearly, his reflective judgment was good, and his purposes were fixed; but, like the Hamlet of his only poet, his will was tardy in action, and, for this reason, and not from humility or tenderness of feeling, he sometimes deplored that the duty which devolved on him had not fallen to the lot of another…. Lincoln was one of the most unassuming of men. In time of success, he gave credit for it to those whom he employed, to the people, and to the Providence of God. He did not know what ostentation is; when he became President he was rather saddened than elated, and his conduct and manners showed more than ever his belief that all men are born equal.

  He was no inspired Elijah or John Baptist, emerging from the awful desert sanctified by lonely fastings and wrestlings with Satan in prayer, to thrill loving, suppliant multitudes with unwonted fires of penitence and devotion; he was no royal singer of Israel, touching at will his harp and sweeping all the chords of emotion and aspiration in the general heart; he was simply a plain, true, earnest, patriotic man, gifted with eminent common-sense, which in its wide range gave a hand to shrewdness on the one hand, humor on the other, and which allied him intimately, warmly, with the masses of mankind. I doubt whether any woman, or child, white or black, bond or free, virtuous or vicious, accosted or reached forth a hand to Abraham Lincoln, and detected in his countenance or manner any repugnance or shrinking from the proffered contact, any assumption of superiority or betrayal of disdain. No one was ever more steeped in the spirit of that glorious lyric of the inspired Scotch ploughman—

A man’s a man, for a’ that.

… When I last saw him, some five or six weeks before his death, his face was haggard with care, and seamed with thought and trouble. It looked care-ploughed, tempest-tossed, and weather-beaten, as if he were some tough old mariner, who had for years been beating up against wind and tide, unable to make his port or find safe anchorage. Judging from that scathed, rugged countenance, I do not believe he could have lived out his second term had no felon hand been lifted against his priceless life…. He was not a born king of men, ruling by the resistless might of his natural superiority, but a child of the people, who made himself a great persuader, therefore a leader, by dint of firm resolve, and patient effort, and dogged perseverance. He slowly won his way to eminence and renown by ever doing the work that lay next to him—doing it with all his growing might—doing it as well as he could, and learning by his failure, when failure was encountered, how to do it better.

  Lincoln was himself a man of much quaint humour, curiously expressed in tales of Kentucky and Illinois life, told in their broadest form of American speech. These he brought into connection with events seeming to require a graver illustration, yet which could not really have been better illustrated. Of the six Presidents of the United States whom I have known, including Andrew Johnson, he seemed to me the only one gifted with this faculty. I recollect sitting with him and Mr. Seward over a log-fire in the White House (the Federal forts and General Lee’s dismantled villa seen from the windows across the Potomac), a few hours only after intelligence had been received of the first disastrous battle of Chattanooga. The conversation at first centred on this event; but the cheerful temperament of these two remarkable men gradually transferred it to other topics; and the President amused himself and us by some of those racy anecdotes which so often convey more of practical truth than any dry reasoning can afford—now and then stopping for a moment to put a fresh log on the fire. The possession of this simple and genial humour, not alloyed by any personal asperities, helped greatly that popularity which was mainly due to the honesty and consistency of the man, in times of unforeseen and perilous trial to his country.

  Surely if there were to be chosen a figure-head for America it must be this! There was something undeniably grotesque about the face (1858), and yet not a coarse line; it was battered and bronzed, but the light of an eye, both gentle and fiery, kept it from being hard. The nose was a good strong buttress—such as Bonaparte would have valued—to a solid brow; and the forehead rose to its greatest height in the region assigned to the benevolent and the conscientious organs, declining along those of firmness and self-esteem into what I should call a decidedly feeble occiput. But never was there a case in which the sage’s request—“Speak, that I may see you”—had more need to be repeated; for a voice more flexible, more attuned to every kind of expression, and to carry truth in every tone, was never allotted to mortal. Although he seemed to me oddly different from any other man whom I had seen, he seemed also related to them all, and to have lineaments characteristic of every section of the country; and this is why I thought he might well be taken as its figure-head. His manner of speaking in public was simple, direct, and almost religious; he was occasionally humorous, but rarely told anecdotes as he did in private conversation; and there was no sarcasm, no showing of the teeth. I had not listened to him long, on the occasion to which I refer, before I perceived that there was a certain artistic ability in him as a public speaker, which his audience would least recognise when it was most employed…. I have often wondered that Mr. Lincoln’s power as an orator—surpassed as it is by that of only one other American—is so little known or thought of in Europe; and I have even found the impression that he was, as a speaker, awkward, heavy, and ungrammatical. It is a singular misjudgment. For terse, well-pronounced, clear speech; for a careful and easy selection of the fit word for the right place; for perfect tones; for quiet, chaste, and dignified manner,—it would be hard to find the late President’s superior.

  Unassuming and unpretentious himself, Mr. Lincoln was the last person to wear borrowed honors. He was not afflicted with the petty jealousy of narrow minds, nor had he any apprehension that others would deprive him of just fame. He gave to Mr. Seward, as to each of his council, his generous confidence, and patiently listened if he did not always adopt or assent to the suggestions that were made. To those who knew Abraham Lincoln, or who were at all intimate with his Administration, the representation that he was subordinate to any member of his Cabinet, or that he was deficient in executive or administrative ability, is absurd.

  A man who was at home and welcome with the humblest, and with a spirit and a practical vein in the times of terror that commanded the admiration of the wisest. His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

  Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone—no ancestors, no fellows, and no successors. He had the advantage of living in a new country, of social equality, of personal freedom, of seeing in the horizon of his future the perpetual star of hope. He preserved his individuality and his self-respect. He knew and mingled with men of every kind; and, after all, men are the best books. He became acquainted with the ambitions and hopes of the heart, the means used to accomplish ends, the springs of action and the seeds of thought. He was familiar with nature, with actual things, with common facts. He loved and appreciated the poem of the year, the drama of the seasons…. Lincoln never finished his education. To the night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, a seeker after knowledge…. Wealth could not purchase, power could not awe, this divine, this loving man. He knew no fear except the fear of doing wrong. Hating slavery, pitying the master—seeking to conquer, not persons, but prejudices—he was the embodiment of the self-denial, the courage, the hope, and the nobility of a nation. He spoke, not to inflame, not to upbraid, but to convince. He raised his hands, not to strike, but in benediction. He longed to pardon. He loved to see the pearls of joy on the cheeks of a wife whose husband he had rescued from death. Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war. He is the gentlest memory of our world.

  If we gained nothing else by our long association with Mr. Lincoln, we hope at least that we acquired from him the habit of judging men and events with candor and impartiality.

  In determining Lincoln’s title to greatness we must not only keep in mind the times in which he lived, but we must, to a certain extent, measure him with other men. Many of our great men and our statesmen, it is true, have been self-made, rising gradually through struggles to the topmost round of the ladder; but Lincoln rose from a lower depth than any of them. His origin was in that unknown and sunless bog in which history never made a footprint.

  Mr. Lincoln’s nature was one of almost child-like sweetness. He did not “put you at your ease” when you came into his presence. You felt at your ease without being put there. He never assumed superiority over anybody in the ordinary intercourse of life.

	Close to the ground what if his life began,
	In rude bucolic self-denial keyed,
	Fed on realities, yet hearing Pan
	Along the brookside blow a charmèd reed!
	O flocks of Hardin, you remember well
	The awkward child, and had he not a look
	Of one forechosen of grand destiny?
	In field or forest dell
	Did he not prophesy to bird and brook,
	And shape vague runes of what was yet to be?

  Joined to these strong mental and moral qualities was that power of immediate action which so often explains why one man succeeds in life while another of equal intelligence and uprightness fails. As soon as Lincoln saw a thing to do he did it. He wants to know, here is a book—it may be a biography, a volume of dry statutes, a collection of verse; no matter, he reads and ponders it until he has absorbed all it has for him. He is eager to see the world; a man offers him a position as a “hand” on a Mississippi flatboat; he takes it without a moment’s hesitation over the toil and exposure it demands. John Calhoun is willing to make him deputy surveyor; he knows nothing of the science; in six weeks he has learned enough to begin his labors. Sangamon County must have representatives; why not he? And his circular goes out. Ambition alone will not explain this power of instantaneous action. It comes largely from that active imagination which, when a new relation or position opens, seizes on all its possibilities and from them creates a situation so real that one enters with confidence upon what seems to the unimaginative the rashest undertaking. Lincoln saw the possibilities in things, and immediately appropriated them.

  While he was great in genius, in character, and in opportunities, he was even greater in sanity of heart and elevation of spirit. While he was entirely human, there was no mean fiber in his composition, no base, petty, selfish impulse in his soul.

  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 that 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…. 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.

Statesman

	Our hearts lie buried in the dust
	With him so true and tender,
	The patriot’s stay, the people’s trust,
	The shield of the offender.

  With the least possible personal hatred; with too little sectional bitterness, often forgetting justice in mercy; tender-hearted to any misery his own eyes saw; and in any deed which needed his actual sanction, if his sympathy had limits,—recollect he was human, and that he welcomed light more than most men, was more honest than his fellows, and with a truth to his own convictions such as few politicians achieve. With all his shortcomings, we point proudly to him as the natural growth of democratic institutions. Coming time will put him in that galaxy of Americans which makes our history the day-star of the nations.

  The results of the policy pursued by Mr. Lincoln during his administration thus far are its own best justification. The verdict of the future is not to be foreshown. But there can be little doubt that history will record the name of Abraham Lincoln as that of a pure and disinterested patriot. She may find in his course many errors; she may point out in his character many defects; she will speak of him as a man who had to contend against the disadvantages of imperfect culture, of self-education, and of little intercourse with men of high-breeding. But she will speak also of the virtues which the hard experience of early life had strengthened in him; of his homely sincerity and simplicity; of his manly frankness and self-respect; of his large, humane, and tender sympathies; of his self-control and good temper; of his truthfulness and sturdy honesty. She will represent him as actuated by an abiding sense of duty, as striving to be faithful in his service of God and of man, as possessed with deep moral earnestness, and as endowed with vigorous common-sense and faculty for dealing with affairs. She will tell of his confidence in the people, and she will recount with approval their confidence in him. And when she has told all this, may she conclude her record by saying that to Abraham Lincoln more than to any other man is due the success which crowned the efforts of the American people to maintain the Union and the institutions of their country, to widen and confirm the foundations of justice and liberty, on which those institutions rest, and to establish inviolable and eternal peace within the borders of their land.

	“Forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
	He said, and so went shriven to his fate,—
	Unknowing went, that generous heart and true.
	Even while he spoke the slayer lay in wait,
	And when the morning opened Heaven’s gate
	There passed the whitest soul a nation knew.
	Henceforth all thoughts of pardon are too late;
	They, in whose cause that arm its weapon drew,
	Have murdered Mercy. Now alone shall stand
	Blind Justice, with the sword unsheathed she wore.
	Hark, from the eastern to the western strand,
	The swelling thunder of the people’s roar:
	What words they murmur,—Fetter not her hand!
	So let it smite, such deeds shall be no more!

  In one respect President Lincoln achieved a wonderful success. He maintained, through the terrible trials of his Administration, a reputation with the great body of the people, for unsullied integrity of purpose and of conduct, which even Washington did not surpass, and which no President since Washington has equalled. He had command of an army greater than that of any living monarch; he wielded authority less restricted than that conferred by any other constitutional government; he disbursed sums of money equal to the exchequer of any nation in the world; yet no man, of any party, believes him in any instance to have aimed at his own aggrandizement, to have been actuated by personal ambition, or to have consulted any other interest than the welfare of his country, and the perpetuity of its Republican form of government.

  A character so unique that he stood alone without a model in history, or a parallel among men…. He was one of the few great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power, and whose spirit grew gentler and tenderer as his triumphs were multiplied. This was the man, and these his associates, who look down upon us from the canvas.

  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 then 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.

	Chained by stern duty to the rock of State,
	His spirit armed in mail of rugged mirth,
	Ever above, though ever near to earth,
	Yet felt his heart the cruel tongues that sate
	Base appetites, and foul with slander, wait
	Till the keen lightnings bring the awful hour
	When wounds and suffering shall give them power.
	Most was he like to Luther, gay and great,
	Solemn and mirthful, strong of heart and limb.
	Tender and simple too; he was so near
	To all things human that he cast out fear,
	And, ever simpler, like a little child,
	Lived in unconscious nearness unto Him
	Who always on earth’s little ones hath smiled.

  Tested by the standard of many other great men, Lincoln was not great, but tested by the only true standard of his own achievements, he may justly appear in history as one of the greatest of American statesmen. Indeed, in some most essential attributes of greatness I doubt whether any of our public men ever equaled him. We have had men who could take a higher intellectual grasp of any abstruse problem of statesmanship, but few have ever equaled, and none excelled, Lincoln in the practical common-sense, and successful solution of the gravest problems ever presented in American history. He possessed a peculiarly receptive and analytical mind. He sought information from every attainable source. He sought it persistently, weighed it earnestly, and in the end reached his own conclusions. When he had once reached a conclusion as to a public duty, there was no human power equal to the task of changing his purpose. He was self-reliant to an uncommon degree, and yet as entirely free from arrogance of opinion as any public man I have ever known.

  His greatest, his most distinctive, and most abiding trait was his humanness of nature; he was the expression of his people; at some periods of his life and in some ways it may be that he expressed them in their uglier forms, but generally he displayed them in their noblest and most beautiful developments; yet, for worse or for better, one is always conscious of being in close touch with him as a fellow-man. People often call him the greatest man who ever lived; but, in fact, he was not properly to be compared with any other. One may set up a pole and mark notches upon it, and label them with the names of Julius Cæsar, William of Orange, Cromwell, Napoleon, even Washington, and may measure these men against each other, and dispute and discuss their respective places. But Lincoln cannot be brought to this pole, he cannot be entered in any such competition.

  Whether it was in the small things or in the great things with which he had to deal, he was equally matchless. And all this was born in him. Neither education nor experience nor example had anything to do with the production of this great central, controlling force in the greatest of all the crises that ever came upon the nation. His development kept pace with the multiplying exigencies which confronted him, and he was never found wanting.

  It requires the most gracious pages in the world’s history to record what one American achieved. The story of this simple life is the story of a plain, honest, manly citizen, true patriot, and profound statesman, who believing with all the strength of his mighty soul in the institutions of his country, won because of them the highest place in its government—then fell a precious sacrifice to the Union he held so dear, which Providence had spared his life long enough to save…. What were the traits of character which made Abraham Lincoln prophet and master, without a rival, in the greatest crisis in our history? What gave him such mighty power? To me the answer is simple: Lincoln had sublime faith in the people. He walked with and among them. He recognized the importance and power of an enlightened public sentiment and was guided by it. Even amid the vicissitudes of war, he concealed little from public review and inspection. In all he did, he invited, rather than evaded, examination and criticism. He submitted his plans and purposes, as far as practicable, to public consideration with perfect frankness and sincerity. There was such homely simplicity in his character that it could not be hedged in by the pomp of place, nor the ceremonials of high official station. He was so accessible to the public that he seemed to take the whole people into his confidence.

General

  Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently our representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement that comes of settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows not what rhetoric means. There has been nothing of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the public utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the intelligence of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their ignorance.

  That he is something more than a boor his address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg will in itself be sufficient to prove…. There are one or two phrases here, such as “dedicated to the proposition,” which betray a hand untrained in fine writing, and are proofs that the composition is Lincoln’s own. But, looking to the substance, it may be doubted whether any king in Europe would have expressed himself more royally than the peasant’s son. And, even as to the form, we cannot help remarking that simplicity of structure and pregnancy of meaning are the true characteristics of the classical style. Is it easy to believe that the man who had the native good taste to produce this address would be capable of committing gross indecencies—that he would call for comic songs to be sung over soldiers’ graves?

  His finest effort, the immortal Gettysburg speech,—which brief as it is, will be read and remembered long after Edward Everett’s ambitious oration, which occupied hours in the delivery, shall have been forgotten,—was prepared with extraordinary care. According to the statement of Mr. Noah Brooks, his friend, it was written and re-written many times.

  Lincoln excelled in the art of putting things aptly and concisely, and, like many old Romans, would place his whole argument in a brief droll narrative, the point of which would render his whole meaning clear to the dullest intellect. In their way, these were like the illustrated proverbs known as fables. Menenius Agrippa and Lincoln would have been congenial spirits.

  The contrast between these two well-known funeral orations could not have been more marked. Everett’s was long, Lincoln’s short; Everett’s drew allusions from classic history, Lincoln’s went no farther back than the record of American nationality; Everett’s displayed the culture of the Boston university man and the European resident; Lincoln’s was the plain speech of an unlettered native of Kentucky and citizen of Illinois. The range and ultimate direction of American literature—to which both orations clearly belong—could not have been better illustrated than by their various methods and similar results…. There are, however, manifest advantages in that simple method illustrated by President Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which the newer school of orators may well make a model for imitation.

  Though anything but a literary man, was among America’s history-makers, and whose inaugural and farewell addresses, and commemorative speech at Gettysburg, are unsurpassed for dignity, simplicity and lofty and manly sentiment.

  Each of Lincoln’s paragraphs is an organism. Each is knit together by perfect logical sequence, perfect unity. There is no modulation of emphasis, for by the nature of the subject there can be none. The letter is a challenge. Each sentence is meant to go home like a shot. The whole appeal is to the will, and in cases of this sort it may be of the very essence of style to eschew the fine shades of meaning that should exist in an intellectual type of discourse.

  Perhaps no point in the career of Abraham Lincoln has excited more surprise or comment than his remarkable power of literary expression. It is a constant puzzle to many men of letters how a person growing up without the advantages of schools and books could have acquired the art which enabled him to write the Gettysburg address and the second inaugural. At first view, indeed, the question appears to be an educational one; and when men who devote their days and nights to rules, theories, and text-books find themselves baffled in such an acquirement, they naturally wonder how a laboring frontiersman could have gained it.

  In prose the chief productions inspired by the war were, without question, two or three addresses delivered by President Lincoln. His address at the dedication of the National Cemetery on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Nov. 19, 1863, and his second inaugural address, delivered March 4, 1865, stand with the great orations of the century…. His oratory is in marked contrast with that of Webster and Everett and the early school of orators; it has no studied periods and elaborately wrought climaxes; it has little of ornament or of inspiration; it is simply the words of a man whose heart was deeply stirred, who, speaking as Whittier sang, without a thought of art or of effect, poured out words that are unsurpassed in simple beauty, dignity, and even grandeur…. Lincoln’s orations are short when compared with the labored efforts of a Webster or a Choate, and they were not written with literary intent, yet few productions in American literature are more certain of immortality.

  The second of the American statesmen holding high rank as a man of letters was Abraham Lincoln, whose later state papers are models, not only in insight and in tact but in expression also. His masterpiece is the short speech delivered on the battlefield of Gettysburg at the dedication of the national cemetery in November, 1863. Lofty in thought, deep in feeling, simple in language, this speech has a Greek perfection of form.

  Lincoln had humor and pathos and Douglas possessed neither. Lincoln’s faculty of being at once at home with his audience in the easy familiarity which makes them both friendly and receptive was the genius of popular oratory. But with these elements he had a singularly lucid power of statement and was master of logic. Unlike Douglas, he was weak unless he knew he was right. His whole nature must be stirred with the justice of his cause for him to rise above the commonplace. But once convinced that he was battling for right and truth and he was irresistible. He became logical, epigrammatic and eloquent. Convincing as was his speech to those who listened, it was more powerful when read in cold type…. The great-hearted, broad-souled, wise-brained man of love and charity.

  The flawless sublimity of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address comes not merely from its concentrated truth, its crystal clarity, its involuntary rhythm of emotion, the moral intensity of every syllable, but from the silence of that sleeping battle-host. The Scriptural cadences of the Second Inaugural are weighted with a nation’s agony and upborne upon a nation’s faith.

  Mr. Lincoln had a style—a distinctive, individual, characteristic form of expression. In his own way he gained an insight into the structure of English, and a freedom and skill in the selection and combination of words, which not only made him the most convincing speaker of his time, but which have secured for his speeches a permanent place in literature. One of those speeches is already known wherever the English language is spoken; it is a classic by virtue not only of its unique condensation of the sentiment of a tremendous struggle into the narrow compass of a few brief paragraphs, but by virtue of that instinctive felicity of style which gives to the largest thought the beauty of perfect simplicity. The two Inaugural Addresses are touched by the same deep feeling, the same large vision, the same clear, expressive, and persuasive eloquence; and these qualities are found in a great number of speeches, from Mr. Lincoln’s first appearance in public life. In his earliest expressions of his political views there is less range; but there is the structural order, clearness, sense of proportion, ease, and simplicity which give classic quality to the latter utterances. Few speeches have so little of what is commonly regarded as oratorical quality; few have approached so constantly the standards and character of literature.

  A great debater, as his campaign struggle with Stephen A. Douglas proved, has left one masterpiece of brief, pregnant political oratory, in the purest English, his address at the dedication of the Gettysburg monument.