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Why We Love Lincoln

<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII</h2> Lincoln’s tenderness of heart was one of his striking traits. The story of his life is full of touching incidents showing his pity for all living things in distress. As a boy he protected frogs and turtles from torture; as a frontiersman he returned young birds to their nests, and once rode back on his tracks over the prairie and dismounted to help a pig stuck in the mud; as President his habit of pardoning soldiers condemned to death excited the wrath of his generals. His heart melted at the sight of tears. It was hard for him to withstand a tale of woe. The shedding of blood stirred horror and grief in him. This extreme sensitiveness would have been an element of almost fatal weakness in the man upon whom events had so suddenly thrust the command of a great war, particularly a war between his own countrymen,135 but for the fact that reason and devotion to justice were the anchors of his nature. He could not be moved on a clear question of principle by either friendship, enmity or compassion. He appointed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War, in place of the discredited Simon Cameron, in spite of the fact that Stanton had treated him contemptuously in a law case on which they were engaged together, and had described him as a “long, lank creature from Illinois, wearing a dirty linen duster for a coat, on the back of which the perspiration had splotched wide stains that resembled a map of the continent.” He raised George B. McClellan to command the army, notwithstanding the circumstance that McClellan, as vice-president of the Illinois Central Railway, had once deeply wounded him by declining to pay his lawyer’s bill; and that, in 1858, while the Illinois Central refused Lincoln the most common courtesy, McClellan was accompanying136 his rival, Douglas, in a private car and special train. It was not chivalry, but patriotism, that inspired Lincoln to put these two Democrats in control of the armed forces of the nation. His own feelings were nothing; the fate of the Union was everything. Stanton had been an honest and masterful member of Buchanan’s Cabinet. McClellan had made a glorious answer to the Bull Run defeat by driving the Confederate troops out of West Virginia. The life of the nation was more important than party lines. Besides, Stanton and McClellan had the confidence of the Democrats, and it was essential, not only that the whole North should be held together, but that the loyal Democrats in the wavering border States should feel that there was no sectional or party prejudice in the government. Stanton tried to bully Lincoln and called him “the original gorilla,” and McClellan137 treated him with disdainful indifference. Neither could exhaust his patience. He mastered his lion-headed Secretary of War by gentle persistence. He endured McClellan’s months of inactivity after the Army of the Potomac had grown into a fighting force of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand magnificently trained men, and when the government was being openly sneered at for its hesitation to give battle. Great-hearted, patient Lincoln! He even consented to sit uncomplainingly in the waiting room of McClellan’s residence while the arrogant young general talked to others. “I will hold McClellan’s stirrup if he will only bring success,” he said. But, in the end, he wrote the orders which forced McClellan’s army against Richmond; and when Frémont, in the West, ignored the President’s orders to fight, Lincoln promptly removed him from command. To the newly assembled Congress he said: 138 “This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders.... It is now for them [the people] to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections.” To one of the many committees that went to the White House to complain that the war was not being pressed rapidly enough, he suggested a question and answer that were repeated all over the country. He was tired, pale, almost worn out. The ceaseless grind of work, the frightful139 and increasing responsibilities imposed by the war, the cruel jibes of critics all over the country, had deepened the furrows in his brow and wasted his homely face. Every mail brought threats of assassination. The far-away, rapt look in his eyes, the pitiful droop of his strong mouth, the pathetic sloping of his tall, black-clad figure, gave evidence of the strain upon him. “Gentlemen,” he said, with a smile that lit up his wonderful face, “suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin [the famous tight-rope walker] to carry across the Niagara River on a rope. Would you shake the cable, or keep shouting at him, ‘Blondin, stand up a little straighter—Blondin, stoop a little more—go a little faster—lean a little more to the north—lean a little more to the south’? No, you would hold your breath, as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over. The Government’s carrying140 an enormous weight. Untold treasures are in their hands. They are doing the best they can. Don’t badger them. Keep silence, and we will get you safe across.” Lincoln did not fight battles himself, but he searched patiently for generals who could, and then he trusted them, and kept the public off their backs. As he said to General Grant, “If a man can’t skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does.” Imagine Lincoln, in his black frock coat and high hat, stealing out of the White House in the morning to kneel in the grass on the Mall and practice at a sheet of note paper with newly-invented rifles till the indignant sentries dash up shouting, to see the long figure unfold itself upward and recognize in the disturber the President of the United States! Imagine him playing with his children on the White House lawn, “his coat-tails standing out straight and his black hair tousled141 this way and that” as he dashes about, chased by his shrieking playmates! Imagine him again and again asking little girls to kiss him, snatching them to his thin breast, fondling them with tears in his eyes! Imagine him watching through weary nights by his son’s deathbed, standing stricken beside the little coffin, and then, for the first time, turning to the Bible for consolation! Imagine him entertaining his log-cabin cousin, Dennis Hanks, in the White House, and, when that simple soul disapproves of Secretary Stanton’s arrogance and urges him to “kick the frisky little Yankee out,” patiently answering, “It would be difficult to find another man to fill his place”! Imagine him sitting in his nightshirt on the edge of young John Hay’s bed, night after night, reading doggerel verses from the newspapers, cracking jokes or reciting from Shakespeare! 142 Imagine him signing a pardon for a young soldier sentenced to be shot and hearing the sobs of that mother waiting outside, “Thank God! Thank Lincoln! Pardoned! Oh, my boy! my boy!” Imagine him facing the gray-haired father of another doomed soldier and saying, “If your son lives until I order him shot, he will live longer than ever Methuselah did”! Imagine him sitting at the table day after day, his face cold, abstracted, his gray eyes “seeing something in the air” and hardly touching his food! <div id="if_i_142" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 24em;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_142.jpg" width-obs="1533" height-obs="2203" alt="" /> <div class="captionl"> Life mask of Lincoln while President. Observe the wasted features, the kindly, humorous mouth, and the reverential indications of the high top head </div> </div> Imagine him on the night after the bloody loss of Chancellorsville—seventeen thousand killed, wounded and missing! Mr. Stoddard, sitting in the deserted White House, underneath Lincoln’s room, has helped our imagination: “But that sound, the slow, heavy, regular tread of the President’s feet, pacing up and down in his room and thinking of Chancellorsville! A man’s tread may well be heavy143 when there is such a load upon his shoulders as Lincoln is carrying.... He can hear, in his heart, the thunder of the Union and Confederate guns, and the shrieks and groans that rise on the lost battlefield.... Ten o’clock—and now and then there have been momentary breaks, as if he paused in turning at the wall; but no pause has lasted longer than for a few heart-beats.... Eleven o’clock—and it is as if a more silent kind of silence had been obtained, for the tread can be heard more distinctly, and a sort of thrill comes with it now and then.... There has been no sound from the President’s room for a number of minutes, and he may be resting in his chair or writing. No; there it comes again, that mournfully monotonous tread, with its turnings at the wall.... Two o’clock comes, without another break in the steady tramp of Lincoln’s lonely vigil. Three o’clock arrives, and your task is done, and you pass out almost stealthily ... and the last144 sound in your ears is the muffled beat of that footfall. Before eight o’clock of the morning you are once more at the White House ... look in at the President’s room.... He is still there, and there is nothing to indicate that he has been out of it.... There upon the table, beside his cup of coffee, lies the draft of his fresh instructions to General Hooker, bidding him to push forward without any reference to Chancellorsville.” These are but fragmentary glimpses of the savior of the Union in his many-sided life during the war. But they help us to understand him in that tragic stretch of time when he plodded wearily between the White House and the telegraph room in the War Department to learn, day by day, what his generals at the front had to say. It would be but vain repetition to picture him in silent, white-faced anguish, or in equally silent transports of joy and thanksgiving, all through the fighting days of145 Shiloh, Stone River, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Petersburg, when Americans reddened American soil with the blood of Americans, and the ordinary dress of women and children throughout the country turned to black. They said of him that he sometimes cracked jokes, Nero-like, while the continent shuddered at the slaughter of its bravest and best, and while the fate of the Union hung trembling in the balance. “I must laugh or I will surely die,” he explained to John Hay. <hr /> 146 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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