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Why We Love Lincoln

<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV</h2> Wearying of McClellan’s delays and excuses for not fighting, Lincoln removed him and put Burnside in command of the Army of the Potomac. When Burnside fought at Fredericksburg the President appeared at the War Department telegraph office in carpet slippers and dressing gown, and waited all day without food for the shocking news of defeat that did not come until four o’clock the next morning—ten thousand dead and wounded. The President calmly endured the general abuse that followed this disaster. Then he removed Burnside and put General Hooker in his place, writing to him these characteristic words: “I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army159 and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” Lincoln went to Hooker’s army and reviewed it. As the hundred thousand men marched by they watched him eagerly as he sat on his horse, tall, angular and in black frock coat, among the glittering generals. Seymour Dodd has described the scene: “None of us to our dying day can forget that countenance! From its presence we marched directly onward toward our camp, and as soon as route step was ordered and the men were free to talk, they spoke thus to each other: ‘Did you ever see such a look on any man’s face?’ ‘He is bearing the burdens of the nation.’ ‘It is an awful load; it is killing him.’ ‘Yes, that is so; he is not long for this world!’ 160 “Concentrated in that one great, strong, yet tender face, the agony of the life or death struggle of the hour was revealed as we had never seen it before. With new understanding we knew why we were soldiers.” A month later came the dispatch announcing the slaughter and defeat of Chancellorsville. Noah Brooks read it to Lincoln: “The appearance of the President, as I read aloud these fateful words was piteous. Never, as long as I knew him, did he seem to be so broken up, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room saying, ‘My God! My God! What will the country say? What will the country say?’” Not that Lincoln feared criticism or even denunciation. He does not know the greatest and noblest American who thinks that. No, it was the torturing, intolerable thought that it might be his dreadful fate to be the last President of the United States, the161 haunting idea which, a generation later, was written by the loyal, iron-souled Grant on his deathbed: “Anything that could have prolonged the war a year beyond the time that it did finally close would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest and agreed to a separation.” The shedding of blood grieved Lincoln. Even when Grant won Vicksburg, and Lee’s gallant army was defeated in the three days’ battle at Gettysburg, his joy was overcast by the thought of the dead and dying on both sides. All through the bloodiest days of the war he went to the hospitals in Washington. His heart was with the common soldiers. And he was tender to the Confederate wounded. He never could forget that they were his countrymen. Nor could he withstand an appeal to pardon a young soldier sentenced to death. Again and again he left his bed, after a day and evening of exhausting toil, to save the life of some distant162 wretched youth condemned to die at daybreak. Is there anything in the whole range of English literature more solemnly beautiful and heart-moving than the note he wrote to the widow Bixby, of Boston? <div class="blockquot"> “Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously in the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that 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 lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have163 laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln.” </div> But in his determination to save the Republic no horror could shake his resolution. It is no small part of his title to the love of the nation to-day that one so merciful and tender-hearted could suffer the frightful shocks of years of slaughter and waste without wavering from his duty. His sense of nationality, his refusal to consider the American people save as a whole, was expressed in that immortal speech at the dedication of the cemetery on the Gettysburg battlefield in November, 1863. Edward Everett, who was looked upon as the most eloquent of living Americans, was the orator of the occasion. The invitation to Lincoln was an afterthought. Yet who can remember anything of the two hours’ polished speech of Everett, and164 who can forget a sentence of the two hundred and sixty-five words which Lincoln spoke almost before his hundred thousand listeners realized the dignity and imperishable beauty of his utterance? “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon 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 are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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 consecrated165 it far above our 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 the 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 the nation shall, under God, 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.” Even after that Lincoln offered pardon to every one who would return to the old allegiance, save the leaders of the rebellion. His heart cried out to the bleeding South. Yet his head was steady, and when he put the sword of the nation into the hands of166 Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan to help him; when the army swept all before it, and when, after reviewing Grant’s forces in front of grim Petersburg, Lincoln called for half a million fresh soldiers, he had the wit and shrewdness to silence Horace Greeley’s senseless clamor for peace negotiations by writing to the officious editor: “If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you; and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall at the least have safe conduct with the paper (and without publicity if he chooses) to the point where you shall have met him. The same if there be two or more persons.” <div id="if_i_166" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 25em;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i_166.jpg" width-obs="1562" height-obs="2198" alt="" /> <div class="caption">One of the last photographs of Lincoln. The picture shows plainly the cares of office</div> </div> After his second election to the Presidency, and while pressing his generals on to the end, Lincoln continued to show how free167 was his soul from bitterness toward the South. The climax came in his second inaugural speech, when a million soldiers were executing his orders in the field. It was the last, supreme outpouring of his great and gentle soul before peace came in the surrender at Appomattox, to be followed by his own bloody death at the hands of a fanatic. Those who saw him on the day of his second inauguration say that he was thinner and more wrinkled than ever. His face had a ghastly, gray pallor. There was an expression of indescribable mourning in his eyes. After speaking for some time to the crowd there came a strangely beautiful look into his wasted features as he drew himself to his full height and raised his hands high. Then came that matchless outburst which is repeated by hundreds of thousands of American schoolboys every year: “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may168 speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” After he was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s theater on April 14, 1865, Lincoln never spoke again. He had seen the stars and stripes raised in Richmond. He had seen the end of human slavery on the American169 continent. The nation was one again. But he was to speak no deathbed message. It was all in that last great speech: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.” For hours they stood about him as he lay moaning or struggling for breath, his wife, his Cabinet officers, his pastor, secretary and doctors. At daybreak the troubled look vanished from his face. There was absolute stillness, followed by a trembling prayer by the pastor. “Now he belongs to the ages,” said the deep voice of Secretary Stanton. <div class="tb">* * * * *</div> No, while Lincoln lives in the heart of the nation, it is idle to think that the Republic can be corrupt or cowardly. There were less than nine millions of Americans when he was born. These have become almost ninety millions. The national wealth has grown to more than a hundred billions of dollars. The flag he170 defended now flies over the Philippines, Hawaii and Porto Rico. The law-resisting millionaire, the “captain of industry” and the “tariff baron” have taken the place of the slaveholder. Yet the love of Lincoln deepens with increasing years; and a century after his birth in a Kentucky log cabin, and nearly forty-four years after his martyrdom, the American people answered the charge that they had outlived their early ideals by the tribute they paid to the memory of their humblest-born, plainest, most beloved leader and President. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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