A well-worn copy of Shakespeare was also his constant companion.

He rose rapidly in the profession; and this in spite of his incorrigible lack of system. The mechanical side of the lawyer's task, now, as in the days with Logan, annoyed him; he left the preparation of papers to his junior partner, as formerly he left it to his senior partner. But the situation had changed in a very important way. In Herndon, Lincoln had for a partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not disturbed by his grotesque or absurd sides.

"He was proverbially careless as to his habits," Herndon writes. "In a letter to a fellow lawyer in another town, apologizing for his failure to answer sooner, he explains: 'First, I have been very busy in the United States Court; second, when I received the letter, I put it in my old hat, and buying a new one the next day, the old one was set aside, so the letter was lost sight of for the time.' This hat of Lincoln's—a silk plug—was an extraordinary receptacle. It was his desk and his memorandum book. In it he carried his bank-book and the bulk of his letters. Whenever in his reading or researches, he wished to preserve an idea, he jotted it down on an envelope or stray piece of paper and placed it inside the lining; afterwards, when the memorandum was needed, there was only one place to look for it." Herndon makes no bones about confessing that their office was very dirty. So neglected was it that a young man of neat habits who entered the office as a law student under Lincoln could not refrain from cleaning it up, and the next visitor exclaimed in astonishment, "What's happened here!"(3)

"The office," says that same law student, "was on the second floor of a brick building on the public square opposite the courthouse. You went up a flight of stairs and then passed along a hallway to the rear office which was a medium sized room. There was one long table in the center of the room, and a shorter one running in the opposite direction forming a T and both were covered with green baize. There were two windows which looked into the back yard. In one corner was an old-fashioned secretary with pigeonholes and a drawer; and here Mr. Lincoln and his partner kept their law papers. There was also a bookcase containing about two hundred volumes of law and miscellaneous books." The same authority adds, "There was no order in the office at all." Lincoln left all the money matters to Herndon. "He never entered an item on the account book. If a fee was paid to him and Herndon was not there, he would divide the money, wrap up one part in paper and place it in his partner's desk with the inscription, 'Case of Roe versus Doe, Herndon's half.' He had an odd habit of reading aloud much to his partner's annoyance. He talked incessantly; a whole forenoon would sometimes go by while Lincoln occupied the whole time telling stories."(4)

On the circuit, his story-telling was an institution. Two other men, long since forgotten, vied with him as rival artists in humorous narrative. These three used to hold veritable tournaments. Herndon has seen "the little country tavern where these three were wont to meet after an adjournment of court, crowded almost to suffocation, with an audience of men who had gathered to witness the contest among the members of the strange triumvirate. The physicians of the town, all the lawyers, and not infrequently a preacher, could be found in the crowd that filled the doors and windows. The yarns they spun and the stories they told would not bear repetition here, but many of them had morals which, while exposing the weakness of mankind, stung like a whiplash. Some were, no doubt, a thousand years old, with just enough of verbal varnish and alterations of names and date to make them new and crisp. By virtue of the last named application, Lincoln was enabled to draw from Balzac a 'droll story' and locating it 'in Egypt' (Southern Illinois) or in Indiana, pass it off for a purely original conception. . . I have seen Judge Treat, who was the very impersonation of gravity itself, sit up till the last and laugh until, as he often expressed it, 'he almost shook his ribs loose.' The next day he would ascend the bench and listen to Lincoln in a murder trial with all the seeming severity of an English judge in wig and gown."(5)

Lincoln enjoyed the life on the circuit. It was not that he was always in a gale of spirits; a great deal of the time he brooded. His Homeric nonsense alternated with fits of gloom. In spite of his late hours, whether of study or of story-telling, he was an early riser. "He would sit by the fire having uncovered the coals, and muse and ponder and soliloquize."(6) Besides his favorite Shakespeare, he had a fondness for poetry of a very different sort—Byron, for example. And he never tired of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"(7)

The hilarity of the circuit was not by any means the whole of its charm for him. Part of that charm must have been the contrast with his recent failure at Washington. This world he could master. Here his humor increased his influence; and his influence grew rapidly. He was a favorite of judges, jury and the bar. Then, too, it was a man's world. Though Lincoln had a profound respect for women, he seems generally to have been ill at ease in their company. In what his friends would have called "general society" he did not shine. He was too awkward, too downright, too lacking in the niceties. At home, though he now owned a house and was making what seemed to him plenty of money, he was undoubtedly a trial to Mrs. Lincoln's sense of propriety. He could not rise with his wife, socially. He was still what he had become so long before, the favorite of all the men—good old Abe Lincoln that you could tie to though it rained cats and dogs. But as to the ladies! Fashionable people calling on Mrs. Lincoln, had been received by her husband in his shirt-sleeves, and he totally unabashed, as oblivious of discrepancy as if he were a nobleman and not a nobody.(8) The dreadful tradition persists that he had been known at table to put his own knife into the butter.

How safe to assume that many things were said commiserating poor Mrs. Lincoln who had a bear for a husband. And some people noticed that Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he might. Perhaps it meant something; perhaps it did not. But there could be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life for him—at least in the early 'fifties. That it was, and also that he was becoming known as a lawyer, is evinced by his refusal of a flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm in Chicago.

Out of all this came a deepening of his power to reach and impress men through words. The tournament of the story-tellers was a lawyers' tournament. The central figure was reading, studying, thinking, as never in his life before. Though his fables remained as broad as ever, the merely boisterous character ceased to predominate. The ethical bent of his mind came to the surface. His friends were agreed that what they remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics of the art of fable-making.

His ethical sense of things, his companionableness, the utterly non-censorious cast of his mind, his power to evolve yarns into parables—all these made him irresistible with a jury. It was a saying of his: "If I can divest this case of technicalities and swing it to the jury, I'll win it."(10)

But there was not a trace in him of that unscrupulousness usually attributed to the "jury lawyer." Few things show more plainly the central unmovableness of his character than his immunity to the lures of jury speaking. To use his power over an audience for his own enjoyment, for an interested purpose, for any purpose except to afford pleasure, or to see justice done, was for him constitutionally impossible. Such a performance was beyond the reach of his will. In a way, his nature, mysterious as it was, was also the last word for simplicity, a terrible simplicity. The exercise of his singular powers was irrevocably conditioned on his own faith in the moral justification of what he was doing. He had no patience with any conception of the lawyer's function that did not make him the devoted instrument of justice. For the law as a game, for legal strategy, he felt contempt. Never under any conditions would he attempt to get for a client more than he was convinced the client in justice ought to have. The first step in securing his services was always to persuade him that one's cause was just He sometimes threw up a case in open court because the course of it had revealed deception on the part of the client. At times he expressed his disdain of the law's mere commercialism in a stinging irony.

"In a closely contested civil suit," writes his associate, Ward Hill Lamon, "Lincoln proved an account for his client, who was, though he did not know it at the time, a very slippery fellow. The opposing attorney then proved a receipt clearly covering the entire cause of action. By the time he was through Lincoln was missing. The court sent for him to the hotel. 'Tell the Judge,' said he, 'that I can't come; my hands are dirty and I came over to clean them.'"(11)

"Discourage litigation," he wrote. "Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser, in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a Superior Opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough."(12)

He held his moral and professional views with the same inflexibility with which he held his political views. Once he had settled upon a conviction or an opinion, nothing could move him. He was singularly stubborn, and yet, in all the minor matters of life, in all his merely personal concerns, in everything except his basal ideas, he was pliable to a degree. He could be talked into almost any concession of interest. He once told Herndon he thanked God that he had not been born a woman because he found it so hard to refuse any request made of him. His outer easiness, his lack of self-assertion,—as most people understand self-assertion,—persist in an amusing group of anecdotes of the circuit. Though he was a favorite with the company at every tavern, those little demagogues, the tavern-keepers, quickly found out that he could be safely put upon. In the minute but important favoritism of tavern life, in the choice of rooms, in the assignment of seats at table, in the distribution of delicacies, easy-going Lincoln was ever the first one to be ignored. "He never complained of the food, bed, or lodgings," says a judge of the circuit, David Davis. "If every other fellow grumbled at the bill of fare which greeted us at many of the dingy taverns, Lincoln said nothing."(13)

But his complacency was of the surface only. His ideas were his own. He held to them with dogged tenacity. Herndon was merely the first of several who discerned on close familiarity Lincoln's inward inflexibility. "I was never conscious," he writes, "of having made much of an impression on Mr. Lincoln, nor do I believe I ever changed his views. I will go further and say that from the profound nature of his conclusions and the labored method by which he arrived at them, no man is entitled to the credit of having either changed or greatly modified them."(14)

In these years of the early 'fifties, Herndon had much occasion to test his partner's indifference to other men's views, his tenacious adherence to his own. Herndon had become an Abolitionist. He labored to convert Lincoln; but it was a lost labor. The Sphinx in a glimmer of sunshine was as unassailable as the cheery, fable-loving, inflexible Lincoln. The younger man would work himself up, and, flushed with ardor, warn Lincoln against his apparent conservatism when the needs of the hour were so great; but his only answer would be, "Billy, you are too rampant and spontaneous."(15)

Nothing could move him from his fixed conviction that the temper of Abolitionism made it pernicious. He persisted in classifying it with slavery,—both of equal danger to free institutions. He took occasion to reassert this belief in the one important utterance of a political nature that commemorates this period. An oration on the death of Henry Clay, contains the sentence: "Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply sealed, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself."(16)

It will be remembered that the Abolitionists were never strongly national in sentiment. In certain respects they remind one of the extreme "internationals" of to-day. Their allegiance was not first of all to Society, nor to governments, but to abstract ideas. For all such attitudes in political science, Lincoln had an instinctive aversion. He was permeated always, by his sense of the community, of the obligation to work in terms of the community. Even the prejudices, the shortsightedness of the community were things to be considered, to be dealt with tenderly. Hence his unwillingness to force reforms upon a community not ripe to receive them. In one of his greatest speeches occurs the dictum: "A universal feeling whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded."(17) Anticipating such ideas, he made in his Clay oration, a startling denunciation of both the extreme factions of

"Those (Abolitionists) who would shiver into fragments the union of these States, tear to tatters its now 'venerated Constitution, and even burn the last copy of the Bible rather than slavery should continue a single hour; together with all their more halting sympathizers, have received and are receiving their just execration; and the name and opinion and influence of Mr. Clay are fully and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly arrayed against them. But I would also if I could, array his name, opinion and influence against the opposite extreme, against a few, but increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.'"(18)

In another passage he stated what he conceived to be the central inspiration of Clay. Had he been thinking of himself, he could not have foreshadowed more exactly the basal drift of all his future as a statesman:

"He loved his country partly because it was his own country, and mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity, and glory, because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human right and human nature."(19)



VIII. A RETURN TO POLITICS

Meanwhile, great things were coming forward at Washington. They centered about a remarkable man with whom Lincoln had hitherto formed a curious parallel, by whom hitherto he had been completely overshadowed. Stephen Arnold Douglas was prosecuting attorney at Springfield when Lincoln began the practice of law. They were in the Legislature together. Both courted Mary Todd. Soon afterward, Douglas had distanced his rival. When Lincoln went to the House of Representatives as a Whig, Douglas went to the Senate as a Democrat. While Lincoln was failing at Washington, Douglas was building a national reputation. In the hubbub that followed the Compromise of 1850, while Lincoln, abandoning politics, immersed himself in the law, Douglas rendered a service to the country by defeating a movement in Illinois to reject the Compromise. When the Democratic National Convention assembled in 1852, he was sufficiently prominent to obtain a considerable vote for the presidential nomination.

The dramatic contrast of these two began with their physical appearance. Douglas was so small that he had been known to sit on a friend's knee while arguing politics. But his energy of mind, his indomitable force of character, made up for his tiny proportions. "The Little Giant" was a term of endearment applied to him by his followers. The mental contrast was equally marked. Scarcely a quality in Lincoln that was not reversed in Douglas—deliberation, gradualness, introspection, tenacity, were the characteristics of Lincoln's mind. The mind of Douglas was first of all facile. He was extraordinarily quick. In political Strategy he could sense a new situation, wheel to meet it, throw overboard well-established plans, devise new ones, all in the twinkle of an eye. People who could not understand such rapidity of judgment pronounced him insincere, or at least, an opportunist. That he did not have the deep inflexibility of Lincoln may be assumed; that his convictions, such as they were, did not have an ethical cast may be safely asserted. Nevertheless, he was a great force, an immense human power, that did not change its course without good reason of its own sort. Far more than a mere opportunist. Politically, he summed up a change that was coming over the Democratic party. Janus-like, he had two faces, one for his constituents, one for his colleagues. To the voter he was still a Jeffersonian, with whom the old phraseology of the party, liberty, equality, and fraternity, were still the catch-words. To his associates in the Senate he was essentially an aristocrat, laboring to advance interests that were careless of the rights of man. A later age has accused the Senate of the United States of being the citadel of Big Business. Waiving the latter view, the historian may assert that something suggestive of Big Business appeared in our politics in the 'fifties, and was promptly made at home in the Senate. Perhaps its first definite manifestation was a new activity on the part of the great slave-holders. To invoke again the classifications of later points of view, certain of our historians to-day think they can see in the 'fifties a virtual slavery trust, a combine of slave interests controlled by the magnates of the institution, and having as real, though informal, an existence as has the Steel Trust or the Beef Trust in our own time. This powerful interest allied itself with the capitalists of the Northeast. In modern phraseology, they aimed to "finance" the slave interest from New York. And for a time the alliance succeeded in doing this. The South went entirely upon credit. It bought and borrowed heavily in the East New York furnished the money.

Had there been nothing further to consider, the invasion of the Senate by Big Business in the 'fifties might not have taken place. But there was something else. Slavery's system of agriculture was excessively wasteful. To be highly profitable it required virgin soil, and the financial alliance demanded high profits. Early in the 'fifties, the problem of Big Business was the acquisition of fresh soil for slavery. The problem entered politics with the question how could this be brought about without appearing to contradict democracy? The West also had its incipient Big Business. It hinged upon railways. Now that California had been acquired, with a steady stream of migration westward, with all America dazzled more or less by gold-mines and Pacific trade, a transcontinental railway was a Western dream. But what course should it take, what favored regions were to become its immediate beneficiaries? Here was a chance for great jockeying among business interests in Congress, for slave-holders, money-lenders, railway promoters to manipulate deals to their hearts' content. They had been doing so amid a high complication of squabbling, while Douglas was traveling in Europe during 1853. When he returned late in the year, the unity of the Democratic machine in Congress was endangered by these disputes. Douglas at once attacked the problem of party harmony. He threw himself into the task with all his characteristic quickness, all his energy and resourcefulness.

By this time the problem contained five distinct factors: The upper Northeast wanted a railroad starting at Chicago. The Central West wanted a road from St. Louis. The Southwest wanted a road from New Orleans, or at least, the frustration of the two Northern schemes. Big Business wanted new soil for slavery. The Compromise of 1850 stood in the way of the extension of slave territory.

If Douglas had had any serious convictions opposed to slavery the last of the five factors would have brought him to a standstill. Fortunately for him as a party strategist, he was indifferent. Then, too, he firmly believed that slavery could never thrive in the West because of climatic conditions. "Man might propose, but physical geography would dispose."(1) On both counts it seemed to him immaterial what concessions be made to slavery extension northwestward. Therefore, he dismissed this consideration and applied himself to the harmonization of the four business factors involved. The result was a famous compromise inside a party. His Kansas-Nebraska Bill created two new territories, one lying westward from Chicago; one lying westward from St. Louis. It also repealed the Missouri Compromise and gave the inhabitants of each territory the right to decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be permitted in their midst. That is to say, both to the railway promoter and the slavery financier, it extended equal governmental protection, but it promised favors to none, and left each faction to rise or fall in the free competition of private enterprise. Why—was not this, remembering Douglas's assumptions, a master-stroke?

He had expected, of course, denunciation by the Abolitionists. He considered it immaterial. But he was not in the least prepared for what happened. A storm burst. It was fiercest in his own State. "Traitor," "Arnold," "Judas," were the pleasant epithets fired at him in a bewildering fusillade. He could not understand it. Something other than mere Abolitionism had been aroused by his great stroke. But what was it? Why did men who were not Abolitionists raise a hue and cry? Especially, why did many Democrats do so? Amazed, puzzled, but as always furiously valiant, Douglas hurried home to join battle with his assailants. He entered on a campaign of speech-making. On October 3, 1854, he spoke at Springfield. His enemies, looking about for the strongest popular speaker they could find, chose Lincoln. The next day he replied to Douglas.

The Kansas-Nebraska Bill had not affected any change in Lincoln's thinking. His steady, consistent development as a political thinker had gone on chiefly in silence ever since his Protest seventeen years before. He was still intolerant of Abolitionism, still resolved to leave slavery to die a natural death in the States where it was established. He defended the measure which most offended the Abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Law. He had appeared as counsel for a man who claimed a runaway slave as his property.(2) None the less, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had brought him to his feet, wheeled him back from law into politics, begun a new chapter. The springs of action in is case were the factor which Douglas had overlooked, which in all his calculations he had failed to take into account, which was destined to destroy him.

Lincoln, no less than Douglas, had sensed the fact that money was becoming a power in American politics. He saw that money and slavery tended to become allies with the inevitable result of a shift of gravity in the American social system. "Humanity" had once been the American shibboleth; it was giving place to a new shibboleth-"prosperity." And the people who were to control and administer prosperity were the rich. The rights of man were being superseded by the rights of wealth. Because of its place in this new coalition of non-democratic influences, slavery, to Lincoln's mind, was assuming a new role, "beginning," as he had said, in the Clay oration, "to assail and ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.'"

That phrase, "the white man's charter of freedom," had become Lincoln's shibboleth. Various utterances and written fragments of the summer of 1854, reveal the intensity of his preoccupation.

"Equality in society beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort"(3)

"If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslave B, why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may enslave A? You say A is white and B is black. It is color then; the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own. But, you say, it is a question of interest, and if you make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you."(4)

Speaking of slavery to a fellow lawyer, he said: "It is the most glittering, ostentatious, and displaying property in the world; and now, if a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady love owns. The love of slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth, but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labor."(5)

It was because of these views, because he saw slavery allying itself with the spread of plutocratic ideals, that Lincoln entered the battle to prevent its extension. He did so in his usual cool, determined way.

Though his first reply to Douglas was not recorded, his second, made at Peoria twelve days later, still exists.(6) It is a landmark in his career. It sums up all his long, slow development in political science, lays the abiding foundation of everything he thought thereafter. In this great speech, the end of his novitiate, he rings the changes on the white man's charter of freedom. He argues that the extension of slavery tends to discredit republican institutions, and to disappoint "the Liberal party throughout the world." The heart of his argument is:

"Whether slavery shall go into Nebraska or other new Territories is not a matter of exclusive concern to the people who may go there. The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these Territories. We want them for homes for free white people. This they can not be to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them. Slave States are places for poor white people to remove from, not remove to. New Free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition. For this use the nation needs these Territories."

The speech was a masterpiece of simplicity, of lucidity. It showed the great jury; lawyer at his best. Its temper was as admirable as its logic; not a touch of anger nor of vituperation.

"I have no prejudice against the Southern people," said he. "They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses North and South.

"When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution."

His instinctive aversion to fanaticism found expression in a plea for the golden mean in politics.

"Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration lest they be thrown in company with the Abolitionists. Will they allow me as an old Whig, to tell them good-humoredly that I think this is very silly. Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand with the Abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise, and stand against him when he attempts to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. In the latter case you stand with the Southern dis-unionist. What of that? You are still right. In both cases you are right. In both cases you expose the dangerous extremes. In both you stand on middle ground and hold the ship level and steady. In both you are national, and nothing less than national. This is the good old Whig ground. To desert such ground because of any company is to be less than a Whig-less than a man-less than an American."

These two speeches against Douglas made an immense impression Byron-like, Lincoln waked up and found himself famous. Thereupon, his ambition revived. A Senator was to be chosen that autumn. Why might not this be the opportunity to retrieve his failure in Congress? Shortly after the Peoria speech, he was sending out notes like this to prominent politicians:

"Dear Sir: You used to express a good deal of partiality for me, and if you are still so, now is the time. Some friends here are really for me for the United States Senate, and I should be very grateful if you could make a mark for me among your members (of the Legislature)."(7)

When the Legislature assembled, it was found to comprise four groups: the out-and-out Democrats who would stand by Douglas through thick and thin, and vote only for his nominee; the bolting Democrats who would not vote for a Douglas man, but whose party rancor was so great that they would throw their votes away rather than give them to a Whig; such enemies of Douglas as were willing to vote for a Whig; the remainder.

The Democrats supported Governor Matteson; the candidate of the second group was Lyman Trumbull; the Whigs supported Lincoln. After nine exciting ballots, Matteson had forty-seven votes, Trumbull thirty-five, Lincoln fifteen. As the bolting Democrats were beyond compromise, Lincoln determined to sacrifice himself in order to defeat Matteson. Though the fifteen protested against deserting him, he required them to do so. On the tenth ballot, they transferred their votes to Trumbull and he was elected.(8)

Douglas had met his first important defeat. His policy had been repudiated in his own State. And it was Lincoln who had formulated the argument against him, who had held the balance of power, and had turned the scale.



IX. THE LITERARY STATESMAN

Lincoln had found at last a mode and an opportunity for concentrating all his powers in a way that could have results. He had discovered himself as a man of letters. The great speeches of 1854 were not different in a way from the previous speeches that were without results. And yet they were wholly different. Just as Lincoln's version of an old tale made of that tale a new thing, so Lincoln's version of an argument made of it a different thing from other men's versions. The oratory of 1854 was not state-craft in any ordinary sense. It was art Lincoln the artist, who had slowly developed a great literary faculty, had chanced after so many rebuffs on good fortune. His cause stood in urgent need of just what he could give. It was one of those moments when a new political force, having not as yet any opening for action, finds salvation in the phrase-maker, in the literary artist who can embody it in words.

During the next five years and more, Lincoln was the recognized offset to Douglas. His fame spread from Illinois in both directions. He was called to Iowa and to Ohio as the advocate of all advocates who could undo the effect of Douglas. His fame traveled eastward. The culmination of the period of literary leadership was his famous speech at Cooper Union in February, 1860.

It was inevitable that he should go along with the antislavery coalition which adopted the name of the Republican party. But his natural deliberation kept him from being one of its founders. An attempt of its founders to appropriate him after the triumph at Springfield, in October, 1854, met with a rebuff.(1) Nearly a year and a half went by before he affiliated himself with the new party. But once having made up his mind, he went forward wholeheartedly. At the State Convention of Illinois Republicans in 1856 he made a speech that has not been recorded but which is a tradition for moving oratory. That same year a considerable number of votes were cast for Lincoln for Vice-President in the Republican National Convention.

But all these were mere details. The great event of the years between 1854 and 1860 was his contest with Douglas. It was a battle of wits, a great literary duel. Fortunately for Lincoln, his part was played altogether on his own soil, under conditions in which he was entirely at his ease, where nothing conspired with his enemy to embarrass him.

Douglas had a far more difficult task. Unforeseen complications rapidly forced him to change his policy, to meet desertion and betrayal in his own ranks. These were terrible years when fierce events followed one another in quick succession—the rush of both slave-holders and abolitionists into Kansas; the cruel war along the Wakarusa River; the sack of Lawrence by the pro-slavery party; the massacre by John Brown at Pottawatomie; the diatribes of Sumner in the Senate; the assault on Sumner by Brooks. In the midst of this carnival of ferocity came the Dred Scott decision, cutting under the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, denying to the people of a Territory the right to legislate on slavery, and giving to all slave-holders the right to settle with their slaves anywhere they pleased outside a Free State. This famous decision repudiated Douglas's policy of leaving all such questions to local autonomy and to private enterprise. For a time Douglas made no move to save his policy. But when President Buchanan decided to throw the influence of the Administration on the side of the pro-slavery party in Kansas, Douglas was up in arms. When it was proposed to admit Kansas with a constitution favoring slavery, but which had not received the votes of a majority of the inhabitants, Douglas voted with the Republicans to defeat admission. Whereupon the Democratic party machine and the Administration turned upon him without mercy. He stood alone in a circle of enemies. At no other time did he show so many of the qualities of a great leader. Battling with Lincoln in the popular forum on the one hand, he was meeting daily on the other assaults by a crowd of brilliant opponents in Congress. At the same time he was playing a consummate game of political strategy, struggling against immense odds to recover his hold on Illinois. The crisis would come in 1858 when he would have to go before the Legislature for reelection. He knew well enough who his opponent would be. At every turn there fell across his path the shadow of a cool sinister figure, his relentless enemy. It was Lincoln. On the struggle with Lincoln his whole battle turned.

Abandoned by his former allies, his one hope was the retention of his constituency. To discredit Lincoln, to twist and discredit all his arguments, was for Douglas a matter of life and death. He struck frequently with great force, but sometimes with more fury than wisdom. Many a time the unruffled coolness of Lincoln brought to nothing what was meant for a deadly thrust. Douglas took counsel of despair and tried to show that Lincoln was preaching the amalgamation of the white and black races. "I protest," Lincoln replied, "against the counterfeit logic which says that because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal and the equal of all others."(2) Any false move made by Douglas, any rash assertion, was sure to be seized upon by that watchful enemy in Illinois. In attempting to defend himself on two fronts at once, defying both the Republicans and the Democratic machine, Douglas made his reckless declaration that all he wanted was a fair vote by the people of Kansas; that for himself he did not care how they settled the matter, whether slavery was voted up or voted down. With relentless skill, Lincoln developed the implications of this admission, drawing forth from its confessed indifference to the existence of slavery, a chain of conclusions that extended link by link to a belief in reopening the African slave trade. This was done in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Senate. In the same speech he restated his general position in half a dozen sentences that became at once a classic statement for the whole Republican party: "A house divided against itself can not stand. I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."(3)

The great duel was rapidly approaching its climax. What was in reality no more than the last round has appropriated a label that ought to have a wider meaning and is known as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The two candidates made a joint tour of the State, debating their policies in public at various places during the summer and autumn of 1858.

Properly considered, these famous speeches closed Lincoln's life as an orator. The Cooper Union speech was an isolated aftermath in alien conditions, a set performance not quite in his true vein. His brief addresses of the later years were incidental; they had no combative element. Never again was he to attempt to sway an audience for an immediate stake through the use of the spoken word. "A brief description of Mr. Lincoln's appearance on the stump and of his manner when speaking," as Herndon aptly remarks, "may not be without interest. When standing erect, he was six feet four inches high. He was lean in flesh and ungainly in figure. Aside from his sad, pained look, due to habitual melancholy, his face had no characteristic or fixed expression. He was thin through the chest and hence slightly stoop-shouldered. . . . At first he was very awkward and it seemed a real labor to adjust himself to his surroundings. He struggled for a time under a feeling of apparent diffidence and sensitiveness, and these only added to his awkwardness.... When he began speaking his voice was shrill, piping and unpleasant. His manner, his attitude, his dark yellow face, wrinkled and dry, his oddity of pose, his diffident movements; everything seemed to be against him, but only for a short time. . . . As he proceeded, he became somewhat more animated. . . . He did not gesticulate as much with his hands as with his head. He used the latter frequently, throwing it with him, this way and that. . . . He never sawed the air nor rent space into tatters and rags, as some orators do. He never acted for stage effect. He was cool, considerate, reflective—in time, self-possessed and self-reliant. . . . As he moved along in his speech he became freer and less uneasy in his movements; to that extent he was graceful. He had a perfect naturalness, a strong individuality, and to that extent he was dignified. . . . He spoke with effectiveness—and to move the judgment as well as the emotion of men. There was a world of meaning and emphasis in the long, bony finger of the right hand as he dotted the ideas on the minds of his hearers. . . . He always stood squarely on his feet. . . . He neither touched nor leaned on anything for support. He never ranted, never walked backward and forward on the platform. . . . As he proceeded with his speech, the exercise of his vocal organs altered somewhat the pitch of his voice. It lost in a measure its former acute and shrilling pitch and mellowed into a more harmonious and pleasant sound. His form expanded, and notwithstanding the sunken breast, he rose up a splendid and imposing figure. . . . His little gray eyes flashed in a face aglow with the fire of his profound thoughts; and his uneasy movements and diffident manner sunk themselves beneath the wave of righteous indignation that came sweeping over him."(4)

A wonderful dramatic contrast were these two men, each in his way so masterful, as they appeared in the famous debates. By good fortune we have a portrait of Douglas the orator, from the pen of Mrs. Stowe, who had observed him with reluctant admiration from the gallery of the Senate. "This Douglas is the very ideal of vitality. Short, broad, thick-set, every inch of him has its own alertness and motion. He has a good head, thick black hair, heavy black brows, and a keen face. His figure would be an unfortunate one were it not for the animation that constantly pervades it. As it is it rather gives poignancy to his peculiar appearance; he has a small handsome hand, moreover, and a graceful as well as forcible mode of using it. . . . He has two requisites of a debater, a melodious voice and clear, sharply defined enunciation. His forte in debating is his power of mystifying the point. With the most offhand assured airs in the world, and a certain appearance of honest superiority, like one who has a regard for you and wishes to set you right on one or two little matters, he proceeds to set up some point which is not that in question, but only a family connection of it, and this point he attacks with the very best of logic and language; he charges upon it, horse and foot, runs it down, tramples it in the dust, and then turns upon you with 'See, there is your argument. Did I not tell you so? You see it is all stuff.' And if you have allowed yourself to be so dazzled by his quickness as to forget that the routed point is not, after all, the one in question, you suppose all is over with it. Moreover, he contrives to mingle up so many stinging allusions, so many piquant personalities, that by the time he has done his mystification, a dozen others are ready and burning to spring on their feet to repel some direct or indirect attack all equally wide of the point."

The mode of travel of the two contestants heightened the contrast. George B. McClellan, a young engineer officer who had recently resigned from the army and was now general superintendent of the Illinois Central Railroad, gave Douglas his private car and a special train. Lincoln traveled any way he could-in ordinary passenger trains, or even in the caboose of a freight train. A curious symbolization of Lincoln's belief that the real conflict was between the plain people and organized money!

The debates did not develop new ideas. It was a literary duel, each leader aiming to restate himself in the most telling, popular way. For once that superficial definition of art applied: "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Nevertheless the debates contained an incident that helped to make history. Though Douglas was at war with the Administration, it was not certain that the quarrel might not be made up. There was no other leader who would be so formidable at the head of a reunited Democratic party. Lincoln pondered the question, how could the rift between Douglas and the Democratic machine be made irrevocable? And now a new phase of Lincoln appeared. It was the political strategist He saw that if he would disregard his own chance of election-as he had done from a simpler motive four years before—he could drive Douglas into a dilemma from which there was no real escape. He confided his purpose to his friends; they urged him not to do it. But he had made up his mind as he generally did, without consultation, in the silence of his own thoughts, and once having made it up, he was inflexible.

At Freeport, Lincoln made the move which probably lost him the Senatorship. He asked a question which if Douglas answered it one way would enable him to recover the favor of Illinois but would lose him forever the favor of the slave-holders; but which, if he answered it another way might enable him to make his peace at Washington but would certainly lose him Illinois. The question was: "Can the people of a United States Territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?"(5) In other words, is the Dred Scott decision good law? Is it true that a slave-holder can take his slaves into Kansas if the people of Kansas want to keep him out?

Douglas saw the trap. With his instantaneous facility he tried to cloud the issue and extricate himself through evasion in the very manner Mrs. Stowe has described. While dodging a denial of the court's authority, he insisted that his doctrine of local autonomy was still secure because through police regulation the local legislature could foster or strangle slavery, just as they pleased, no matter "what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution."

As Lincoln's friends had foreseen, this matchless performance of carrying water on both shoulders caught the popular fancy; Douglas was reelected to the Senate. As Lincoln had foreseen, it killed him as a Democratic leader; it prevented the reunion of the Democratic party. The result appeared in 1860 when the Republicans, though still a minority party, carried the day because of the bitter divisions among the Democrats. That was what Lincoln foresaw when he said to his fearful friends while they argued in vain to prevent his asking the question at Free-port. "I am killing larger game; the great battle of 1860 is worth a thousand of this senatorial race."(6)



X. THE DARK HORSE

One of the most curious things in Lincoln is the way his confidence in himself came and went. He had none of Douglas's unwavering self-reliance. Before the end, to be sure, he attained a type of self-reliance, higher and more imperturbable. But this was not the fruit of a steadfast unfolding. Rather, he was like a tree with its alternating periods of growth and pause, now richly in leaf, now dormant. Equally applicable is the other familiar image of the successive waves.

The clue seems to have been, in part at least, a matter of vitality. Just as Douglas emanated vitality—so much so that his aura filled the whole Senate chamber and forced an unwilling response in the gifted but hostile woman who watched him from the gallery—Lincoln, conversely, made no such overpowering impression. His observers, however much they have to say about his humor, his seasons of Shakespearian mirth, never forget their impression that at heart he is sad. His fondness for poetry in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud."

It is impossible to discover any law governing the succession of his lapses in self-reliance. But they may be related very plausibly to his sense of failure or at least to his sense of futility. He was one of those intensely sensitive natures to whom the futilities of this world are its most discouraging feature. Whenever such ideas were brought home to him his energy flagged; his vitality, never high, sank. He was prone to turn away from the outward life to lose himself in the inner. All this is part of the phenomena which Herndon perceived more clearly than he comprehended it, which led him to call Lincoln a fatalist.

A humbler but perhaps more accurate explanation is the reminder that he was son to Thomas the unstable. What happened in Lincoln's mind when he returned defeated from Washington, that ghost-like rising of the impulses of old Thomas, recurred more than once thereafter. In fact there is a period well-defined, a span of thirteen years terminating suddenly on a day in 1862, during which the ghost of old Thomas is a thing to be reckoned with in his son's life. It came and went, most of the time fortunately far on the horizon. But now and then it drew near. Always it was lurking somewhere, waiting to seize upon him in those moments when his vitality sank, when his energies were in the ebb, when his thoughts were possessed by a sense of futility.

The year 1859 was one of his ebb tides. In the previous year the rising tide, which had mounted high during his success on the circuit, reached its crest The memory of his failure at Washington was effaced. At Freeport he was a more powerful genius, a more dominant personality, than he had ever been. Gradually, in the months following, the high wave subsided. During 1859 he gave most of his attention to his practice. Though political speech-making continued, and though he did not impair his reputation, he did nothing of a remarkable sort. The one literary fragment of any value is a letter to a Boston committee that had invited him to attend a "festival" in Boston on Jefferson's birthday. He avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the principles of Jefferson "the definitions and axioms of free society." Without conditions he identified his own cause with the cause of Jefferson, "the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."(1)

While the Boston committee were turning their eyes toward this great new phrase-maker of the West, several politicians in Illinois had formed a bold resolve. They would try to make him President. The movement had two sources—the personal loyalty of his devoted friends of the circuit, the shrewdness of the political managers who saw that his duel with Douglas had made him a national figure. As one of them said to him, "Douglas being so widely known, you are getting a national reputation through him." Lincoln replied that he did not lack the ambition but lacked altogether the confidence in the possibility of success.(2)

This was his attitude during most of 1859. The glow, the enthusiasm, of the previous year was gone. "I must in candor say that I do not think myself fit for the Presidency," he wrote to a newspaper editor in April. He used the same words to another correspondent in July. As late as November first, he wrote, "For my single self, I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause, and for this object I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position."(3)

Meanwhile, both groups of supporters had labored unceasingly, regardless of his approval. In his personal following, the companionableness of twenty years had deepened into an almost romantic loyalty. The leaders of this enthusiastic attachment, most of them lawyers, had no superiors for influence in Illinois. The man who had such a following was a power in politics whether he would or no. This the mere politicians saw. They also saw that the next Republican nomination would rest on a delicate calculation of probabilities. There were other Republicans more conspicuous than Lincoln—Seward in New York, Sumner in Massachusetts, Chase in Ohio—but all these had inveterate enemies. Despite their importance would it be safe to nominate them? Would not the party be compelled to take some relatively minor figure, some essentially new man? In a word, what we know as a "dark horse." Believing that this would happen, they built hopefully on their faith in Lincoln.

Toward the end of the year he was at last persuaded to take his candidacy seriously. The local campaign for his nomination had gone so far that a failure to go further would have the look of being discarded as the local Republican leader. This argument decided him. Before the year's end he had agreed to become a candidate before the convention. In his own words, "I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates."(4)

It was shortly after this momentous decision that he went to New York by invitation and made his most celebrated, though not in any respect his greatest, oration.(5) A large audience filled Cooper Union, February 27, 1860. William Cullen Bryant presided. David Dudley Field escorted Lincoln to the platform. Horace Greeley was in the audience. Again, the performance was purely literary. No formulation of new policies, no appeal for any new departure. It was a masterly restatement of his position; of the essence of the debates with Douglas. It cleansed the Republican platform of all accidental accretions, as if a ship's hull were being scraped of barnacles preparatory to a voyage; it gave the underlying issues such inflexible definition that they could not be juggled with. Again he showed a power of lucid statement not possessed by any of his rivals. An incident of the speech was his unsparing condemnation of John Brown whose raid and death were on every tongue. "You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves," said he, apostrophizing the slave-holders. "We deny it, and what is your proof? 'Harper's Ferry; John Brown!' John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in this Harper's Ferry enterprise. . .

"John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves with all their ignorance saw plainly enough that it could not succeed. That affair in its philosophy corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of the people until he fancies himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things."

The Cooper Union speech received extravagant praise from all the Republican newspapers. Lincoln's ardent partisans assert that it took New York "by storm." Rather too violent a way of putting it! But there can be no doubt that the speech made a deep impression. Thereafter, many of the Eastern managers were willing to consider Lincoln as a candidate, should factional jealousies prove uncompromising. Any port in a storm, you know. Obviously, there could be ports far more dangerous than this "favorite son" of Illinois.

Many national conventions in the United States have decided upon a compromise candidate, "a dark horse," through just such reasoning. The most noted instance is the Republican Convention of 1860. When it assembled at Chicago in June, the most imposing candidate was the brilliant leader of the New York Republicans, Seward. But no man in the country had more bitter enemies. Horace Greeley whose paper The Tribune was by far the most influential Republican organ, went to Chicago obsessed by one purpose: because of irreconcilable personal quarrels he would have revenge upon Seward. Others who did not hate Seward were afraid of what Greeley symbolized. And all of them knew that whatever else happened, the West must be secured.

The Lincoln managers played upon the Eastern jealousies and the Eastern fears with great skill. There was little sleep among the delegates the night previous to the balloting. At just the right moment, the Lincoln managers, though their chief had forbidden them to do so, offered promises with regard to Cabinet appointments.(6) And they succeeded in packing the galleries of the Convention Hall with a perfectly organized claque-"rooters," the modern American would say.

The result on the third ballot was a rush to Lincoln of all the enemies of Seward, and Lincoln's nomination amid a roaring frenzy of applause.



XI. SECESSION

After twenty-three years of successive defeats, Lincoln, almost fortuitously, was at the center of the political maelstrom. The clue to what follows is in the way he had developed during that long discouraging apprenticeship to greatness. Mentally, he had always been in isolation. Socially, he had lived in a near horizon. The real tragedy of his failure at Washington was in the closing against him of the opportunity to know his country as a whole. Had it been Lincoln instead of Douglas to whom destiny had given a residence at Washington during the 'fifties, it is conceivable that things might have been different in the 'sixties. On the other hand, America would have lost its greatest example of the artist in politics.

And without that artist, without his extraordinary literary gift, his party might not have consolidated in 1860. A very curious party it was. It had sprung to life as a denial, as a device for halting Douglas. Lincoln's doctrine of the golden mean, became for once a political power. Men of the most diverse views on other issues accepted in their need the axiom: "Stand with anybody so long as he stands right." And standing right, for that moment in the minds of them all, meant keeping slavery and the money power from devouring the territories.

The artist of the movement expressed them all in his declaration that the nation needed the Territories to give home and opportunity to free white people. Even the Abolitionists, who hitherto had refused to make common cause with any other faction, entered the negative coalition of the new party. So did Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats, as well as other factions then obscure which we should now label Socialists and Labormen.

However, this coalition, which in origin was purely negative, revealed, the moment it coalesced, two positive features. To the man of the near horizon in 1860 neither of these features seemed of first importance. To the man outside that horizon, seeing them in perspective as related to the sum total of American life, they had a significance he did not entirely appreciate.

The first of these was the temper of the Abolitionists. Lincoln ignored it. He was content with his ringing assertion of the golden mean. But there spoke the man of letters rather than the statesman. Of temper in politics as an abstract idea, he had been keenly conscious from the first; but his lack of familiarity with political organizations kept him from assigning full value to the temper of any one factor as affecting the joint temper of the whole group. It was appointed for him to learn this in a supremely hard way and to apply the lesson with wonderful audacity. But in 1860 that stern experience still slept in the future. He had no suspicion as yet that he might find it difficult to carry out his own promise to stand with the Abolitionists in excluding slavery from the Territories, and to stand against them in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. He did not yet see why any one should doubt the validity of this promise; why any one should be afraid to go along with him, afraid that the temper of one element would infect the whole coalition.

But this fear that Lincoln did not allow for, possessed already a great many minds. Thousands of Southerners, of the sort whom Lincoln credited with good intentions about slavery, feared the Abolitionists Not because the Abolitionists wanted to destroy slavery, but because they wanted to do so fiercely, cruelly. Like Lincoln, these Southerners who were liberals in thought and moderates in action, did not know what to do about slavery. Like Lincoln, they had but one fixed idea with regard to it,—slavery must not be terminated violently. Lincoln, despite his near horizon, sensed them correctly as not being at one with the great plutocrats who wished to exploit slavery. But when the Abolitionist poured out the same fury of vituperation on every sort of slave-holder; when he promised his soul that it should yet have the joy of exulting in the ruin of all such, the moderate Southerners became as flint. When the Abolitionists proclaimed their affiliation with the new party, the first step was taken toward a general Southern coalition to stop the Republican advance.

There was another positive element blended into the negative coalition. In 1857, the Republicans overruling the traditions of those members who had once been Democrats, set their faces toward protection. To most of the Northerners the fatefulness of the step was not obvious. Twenty years had passed since a serious tariff controversy had shaken the North. Financial difficulties in the 'fifties were more prevalent in the North than in the South. Business was in a quandary. Labor was demanding better opportunities. Protection as a solution, or at least as a palliative, seemed to the mass of the Republican coalition, even to the former Democrats for all their free trade traditions, not outrageous. To the Southerners it was an alarm bell. The Southern world was agricultural; its staple was cotton; the bulk of its market was in England. Ever since 1828, the Southern mind had been constantly on guard with regard to tariff, unceasingly fearful that protection would be imposed on it by Northern and Western votes. To have to sell its cotton in England at free trade values, but at the same time to have to buy its commodities at protected values fixed by Northern manufacturers—what did that mean but the despotism of one section over another? When the Republicans took up protection as part of their creed, a general Southern coalition was rendered almost inevitable.

This, Lincoln {Missing text}. Again it is to be accounted for in part by his near horizon. Had he lived at Washington, had he met, frequently, Southern men; had he passed those crucial years of the 'fifties in debates with political leaders rather than in story-telling tournaments on the circuit; perhaps all this would have been otherwise. But one can not be quite sure. Finance never appealed to him. A wide application may be given to Herndon's remark that "he had no money sense." All the rest of the Republican doctrine finds its best statement in Lincoln. On the one subject of its economic policy he is silent. Apparently it is to be classified with the routine side of the law. To neither was he ever able to give more than a perfunctory attention. As an artist in politics he had the defect of his qualities.

What his qualities showed him were two things: the alliance of the plutocratic slave power with the plutocratic money power, and the essential rightness in impulse of the bulk of the Southern people. Hence his conclusion which became his party's conclusion: that, in the South, a political-financial ring was dominating a leaderless people, This was not the truth. Lincoln's defects in 1860 limited his vision. Nevertheless, to the solitary distant thinker, shut in by the near horizon of political Springfield, there was every excuse for the error. The palpable evidence all confirmed it. What might have contradicted it was a cloud of witnesses, floating, incidental, casual, tacit. Just what a nature like Lincoln's, if only he could have met them, would have perceived and comprehended; what a nature like Douglas's, no matter how plainly they were presented to him, could neither perceive nor comprehend. It was the irony of fate that an opportunity to fathom his time was squandered upon the unseeing Douglas, while to the seeing Lincoln it was denied. In a word, the Southern reaction against the Republicans, like the Republican movement itself, had both a positive and a negative side. It was the positive side that could be seen and judged at long range. And this was what Lincoln saw, which appeared to him to have created the dominant issue in 1860.

The negative side of the Southern movement he did not see. He was too far away to make out the details of the picture. Though he may have known from the census of 1850 that only one-third of the Southern whites were members of slave-holding families, he could scarcely have known that only a small minority of the Southern families owned as many as five slaves; that those who had fortunes in slaves were a mere handful—just as today those who have fortunes in steel or beef are mere handfuls. But still less did he know how entirely this vast majority which had so little, if any, interest in slavery, had grown to fear and distrust the North. They, like him, were suffering from a near horizon. They, too, were applying the principle "Stand with anybody so long as he stands right" But for them, standing right meant preventing a violent revolution in Southern life. Indifferent as they were to slavery, they were willing to go along with the "slave-barons" in the attempt to consolidate the South in a movement of denial—a denial of the right of the North, either through Abolitionism or through tariff, to dominate the South.

If only Lincoln with his subtle mind could have come into touch with the negative side of the Southern agitation! It was the other side, the positive side, that was vocal. With immense shrewdness the profiteers of slavery saw and developed their opportunity. They organized the South. They preached on all occasions, in all connections, the need of all Southerners to stand together, no matter how great their disagreements, in order to prevent the impoverishment of the South by hostile economic legislation. During the late 'fifties their propaganda for an all-Southern policy, made slow but constant headway. But even in 1859 these ideas were still far from controlling the South.

And then came John Brown. The dread of slave insurrection was laid deep in Southern recollection. Thirty years before, the Nat Turner Rebellion had filled a portion of Virginia with burned plantation houses amid whose ruins lay the dead bodies of white women. A little earlier, a negro conspiracy at Charleston planned the murder of white men and the parceling out of white women among the conspirators. And John Brown had come into Virginia at the head of a band of strangers calling upon the slaves to rise and arm.

Here was a supreme opportunity. The positive Southern force, the slave profiteers, seized at once the attitude of champions of the South. It was easy enough to enlist the negative force in a shocked and outraged denunciation of everything Northern. And the Northern extremists did all that was in their power to add fuel to the flame. Emerson called Brown "this new saint who had made the gallows glorious as the cross." The Southerners, hearing that, thought of the conspiracy to parcel out the white women of Charleston. Early in 1860 it seemed as if the whole South had but one idea-to part company with the North.

No wonder Lincoln threw all his influence into the scale to discredit the memory of Brown. No wonder the Republicans in their platform carefully repudiated him. They could not undo the impression made on the Southern mind by two facts: the men who lauded Brown as a new saint were voting the Republican ticket; the Republicans had committed themselves to the anti-Southern policy of protection.

And yet, in spite of all the labors of pro-slavery extremists, the movement for a breach with the North lost ground during 1860. When the election came, the vote for President revealed a singular and unforeseen situation. Four candidates were in the field. The Democrats, split into two by the issue of slavery expansion, formed two parties. The slave profiteers secured the nomination by one faction of John C. Breckinridge. The moderate Democrats who would neither fight nor favor slavery, nominated Douglas. The most peculiar group was the fourth. They included all those who would not join the Republicans for fear of the temper of the Abolition-members, but who were not promoters of slavery, and who distrusted Douglas. They had no program but to restore the condition of things that existed before the Nebraska Bill. About four million five hundred thousand votes were cast. Lincoln had less than two million, and all but about twenty-four thousand of these were in the Free States. However, the disposition of Lincoln's vote gave him the electoral college. He was chosen President by the votes of a minority of the nation. But there was another minority vote which as events turned out, proved equally significant. Breckinridge, the symbol of the slave profiteers, and of all those whom they had persuaded to follow them, had not been able to carry the popular vote of the South. They were definitely in the minority in their own section. The majority of the Southerners had so far reacted from the wild alarms of the beginning of the year that they refused to go along with the candidates of the extremists. They were for giving the Union another trial. The South itself had repudiated the slave profiteers.

This was the immensely significant fact of November, 1860. It made a great impression on the whole country. For the moment it made the fierce talk of the Southern extremists inconsequential. Buoyant Northerners, such as Seward, felt that the crisis was over; that the South had voted for a reconciliation; that only tact was needed to make everybody happy. When, a few weeks after the election, Seward said that all would be merry again inside of ninety days, his illusion had for its foundation the Southern rejection of the slave profiteers.

Unfortunately, Seward did not understand the precise significance of the thought of the moderate South. He did not understand that while the South had voted to send Breckinridge and his sort about their business, it was still deeply alarmed, deeply fearful that after all it might at any minute be forced to call them back, to make common cause with them against what it regarded as an alien and destructive political power, the Republicans. This was the Southern reservation, the unspoken condition of the vote which Seward—and for that matter, Lincoln, also,—failed to comprehend. Because of these cross-purposes, because the Southern alarm was based on another thing than the standing or falling of slavery, the situation called for much more than tact, for profound psychological statesmanship.

And now emerges out of the complexities of the Southern situation a powerful personality whose ideas and point of view Lincoln did not understand. Robert Barnwell Rhett had once been a man of might in politics. Twice he had very nearly rent the Union asunder. In 1844, again in 1851, he had come to the very edge of persuading South Carolina to secede. In each case he sought to organize the general discontent of the South,—its dread of a tariff, and of Northern domination. After his second failure, his haughty nature took offense at fortune. He resigned his seat in the Senate and withdrew to private life. But he was too large and too bold a character to attain obscurity. Nor would his restless genius permit him to rust in ease. During the troubled 'fifties, he watched from a distance, but with ever increasing interest, that negative Southern force which he, in the midst of it, comprehended, while it drifted under the wing of the extremists. As he did so, the old arguments, the old ambitions, the old hopes revived. In 1851 his cry to the South was to assert itself as a Separate nation—not for any one reason, but for many reasons—and to lead its own life apart from the North. It was an age of brilliant though ill-fated revolutionary movements in Europe. Kossuth and the gallant Hungarian attempt at independence had captivated the American imagination. Rhett dreamed of seeing the South do what Hungary had failed to do. He thought of the problem as a medieval knight would have thought, in terms of individual prowess, with the modern factors, economics and all their sort, left on one side. "Smaller nations (than South Carolina)," he said in 1851, "have striven for freedom against greater odds."

In 1860 he had concluded that his third chance had come. He would try once more to bring about secession. To split the Union, he would play into the hands of the slave-barons. He would aim to combine with their movement the negative Southern movement and use the resulting coalition to crown with success his third attempt. Issuing from his seclusion, he became at once the overshadowing figure in South Carolina. Around him all the elements of revolution crystallized. He was sixty years old; seasoned and uncompromising in the pursuit of his one ideal, the independence of the South. His arguments were the same which he had used in 1844, in 1851: the North would impoverish the South; it threatens to impose a crushing tribute in the shape of protection; it seeks to destroy slavery; it aims to bring about economic collapse; in the wreck thus produced, everything that is beautiful, charming, distinctive in Southern life will be lost; let us fight! With such a leader, the forces of discontent were quickly, effectively, organized. Even before the election of Lincoln, the revolutionary leaders in South Carolina were corresponding with men of like mind in other Southern States, especially Alabama, where was another leader, Yancey, only second in intensity to Rhett.

The word from these Alabama revolutionists to South Carolina was to dare all, to risk seceding alone, confident that the other States of the South would follow. Rhett and his new associates took this perilous advice. The election was followed by the call of a convention of delegates of the people of South Carolina. This convention, on the twentieth of December, 1860, repealed the laws which united South Carolina with the other States and proclaimed their own independent.



XII. THE CRISIS

Though Seward and other buoyant natures felt that the crisis had passed with the election, less volatile people held the opposite view. Men who had never before taken seriously the Southern threats of disunion had waked suddenly to a terrified consciousness that they were in for it. In their blindness to realities earlier in the year, they were like that brilliant host of camp followers which, as Thackeray puts it, led the army of Wellington dancing and feasting to the very brink of Waterloo. And now the day of reckoning had come. An emotional reaction carried them from one extreme to the other; from self-sufficient disregard of their adversaries to an almost self-abasing regard.

The very type of these people and of their reaction was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—to roll off a log. A few days after the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing in panic. He began to scream editorially. The Southern extremists were terribly in earnest; if they wanted to go, go they would, and go they should. But foolish Northerners would be sure to talk war and the retaining of the South in the Union by force: it must not be; what was the Union compared with bloodshed? There must be no war—no war. Such was Greeley's terrified—appeal to the North. A few weeks after the election he printed his famous editorial denouncing the idea of a Union pinned together by bayonets. He followed up with another startling concession to his fears: the South had as good cause for leaving the Union as the colonies had for leaving the British Empire. A little later, he formulated his ultimate conclusion,—which like many of his ultimates proved to be transitory,—and declared that if any group of Southern States "choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so," and pledging himself and his followers to do "our best to forward their views."

Greeley wielded through The Tribune more influence, perhaps, than was possessed by any other Republican with the single exception of Lincoln. His newspaper constituency was enormous, and the relation between the leader and the led was unusually close. He was both oracle and barometer. As a symptom of the Republican panic, as a cause increasing that panic, he was of first importance.

Meanwhile Congress had met. And at once, the most characteristic peculiarity of the moment was again made emphatic. The popular majorities and the political machines did not coincide. Both in the North and in the South a minority held the situation in the hollow of its hand. The Breckinridge Democrats, despite their repudiation in the presidential vote, included so many of the Southern politicians, they were so well organized, they had scored such a menacing victory with the aid of Rhett in South Carolina, they had played so skilfully on the fears of the South at large, their leaders were such skilled managers, that they were able to continue for the moment the recognized spokesmen of the South at Washington. They lost no time defining their position. If the Union were not to be sundered, the Republicans must pledge themselves to a new and extensive compromise; it must be far different from those historic compromises that had preceded it. Three features must characterize any new agreement: The South must be dealt with as a unit; it must be given a "sphere of influence"—to use our modern term—which would fully satisfy all its impulses of expansion; and in that sphere, every question of slavery must be left entirely, forever, to local action. In a word, they demanded for the South what today would be described as a "dominion" status. Therefore, they insisted that the party which had captured the Northern political machine should formulate its reply to these demands. They gave notice that they would not discuss individual schemes, but only such as the victorious Republicans might officially present. Thus the national crisis became a party crisis. What could the Republicans among themselves agree to propose?

The central figure of the crisis seemed at first to be the brilliant Republican Senator from New York. Seward thought he understood the South, and what was still more important, human nature. Though he echoed Greeley's cry for peace—translating his passionate hysteria into the polished cynicism of a diplomat who had been known to deny that he was ever entirely serious—he scoffed at Greeley's fears. If the South had not voted lack of confidence in the Breckinridge crowd, what had it voted? If the Breckinridge leaders weren't maneuvering to save their faces, what could they be accused of doing? If Seward, the Republican man of genius, couldn't see through all that, couldn't devise a way to help them save their faces, what was the use in being a brilliant politician?

Jauntily self-complacent, as confident of himself as if Rome were burning and he the garlanded fiddler, Seward braced himself for the task of recreating the Union.

But there was an obstacle in his path. It was Lincoln. Of course, it was folly to propose a scheme which the incoming President would not sustain. Lincoln and Seward must come to an understanding. To bring that about Seward despatched a personal legate to Springfield. Thurlow Weed, editor, man of the world, political wire-puller beyond compare, Seward's devoted henchman, was the legate. One of the great events of American history was the conversation between Weed and Lincoln in December, 1860. By a rare propriety of dramatic effect, it occurred probably, on the very day South Carolina brought to an end its campaign of menace and adopted its Ordinance of Secession, December twentieth.(1)

Weed had brought to Springfield a definite proposal. The Crittenden compromise was being hotly discussed in Congress and throughout the country. All the Northern advocates of conciliation were eager to put it through. There was some ground to believe that the Southern machine at Washington would accept it. If Lincoln would agree, Seward would make it the basis of his policy.

This Compromise would have restored the old line of the Missouri Compromise and would have placed it under the protection of a constitutional amendment. This, together with a guarantee against congressional interference with slavery in the States where it existed, a guarantee the Republicans had already offered, seemed to Seward, to Weed, to Greeley, to the bulk of the party, a satisfactory means of preserving the Union. What was it but a falling back on the original policy of the party, the undoing of those measures of 1854 which had called the party into being? Was it conceivable that Lincoln would balk the wishes of the party by obstructing such a natural mode of extrication? But that was what Lincoln did. His views had advanced since 1854. Then, he was merely for restoring the old duality of the country, the two "dominions," Northern and Southern, each with its own social order. He had advanced to the belief that this duality could not permanently continue. Just how far Lincoln realized what he was doing in refusing to compromise will never be known. Three months afterward, he took a course which seems to imply that his vision during the interim had expanded, had opened before him a new revelation of the nature of his problem. At the earlier date Lincoln and the Southern people—not the Southern machine—were looking at the one problem from opposite points of view, and were locating the significance of the problem in different features. To Lincoln, the heart of the matter was slavery. To the Southerners, including the men who had voted lack of confidence in Breckinridge, the heart of the matter was the sphere of influence. What the Southern majority wanted was not the policy of the slave profiteers but a secure future for expansion, a guarantee that Southern life, social, economic, cultural, would not be merged with the life of the opposite section: in a word, preservation of "dominion" status. In Lincoln's mind, slavery being the main issue, this "dominion" issue was incidental—a mere outgrowth of slavery that should begin to pass away with slavery's restriction. In the Southern mind, a community consciousness, the determination to be a people by themselves, nation within the nation, was the issue, and slavery was the incident. To repeat, it is impossible to say what Lincoln would have done had he comprehended the Southern attitude. His near horizon which had kept him all along from grasping the negative side of the Southern movement prevented his perception of this tragic instance of cross-purposes.

Lacking this perception, his thoughts had centered themselves on a recent activity of the slave profiteers. They had clamored for the annexation of new territory to the south of us. Various attempts had been made to create an international crisis looking toward the seizure of Cuba. Then, too, bold adventurers had staked their heads, seeking to found slave-holding communities in Central America. Why might not such attempts succeed? Why might not new Slave States be created outside the Union, eventually to be drawn in? Why not? said the slave profiteer, and gave money and assistance to the filibusters in Nicaragua. Why not? said Lincoln, also. What protection against such an extension of boundaries? Was the limitation of slave area to be on one side only, the Northern side? And here at last, for Lincoln, was what appeared to be the true issue of the moment. To dualize the Union, assuming its boundaries to be fixed, was one thing. To dualize the Union in the face of a movement for extension of boundaries was another. Hence it was now vital, as Lincoln reasoned, to give slavery a fixed boundary on all sides. Silently, while others fulminated, or rhapsodized, or wailed, he had moved inexorably to a new position which was nothing but a logical development of the old. The old position was—no extension of slave territory; the new position was—no more Slave States.(2) Because Crittenden's Compromise left it possible to have a new Slave State in Cuba, a new Slave State in Nicaragua, perhaps a dozen such new States, Lincoln refused to compromise.(3)

It was a terrible decision, carrying within it the possibility of civil war. But Lincoln could not be moved. This was the first acquaintance of the established political leaders with his inflexible side. In the recesses of his own thoughts the decision had been reached. It was useless to argue with him. Weed carried back his ultimatum. Seward abandoned Crittenden's scheme. The only chance for compromise passed away. The Southern leaders set about their plans for organizing a Southern Confederacy.



XIII. ECLIPSE

Lincoln's ultimatum of December twentieth contained three proposals that might be made to the Southern leaders:

That the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law which hitherto had been left to State authorities should be taken over by Congress and supported by the Republicans.

That the Republicans to the extent of their power should work for the repeal of all those "Personal Liberty Laws" which had been established in certain Northern States to defeat the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law.

That the Federal Union must be preserved.(1)

In presenting these proposals along with a refusal to consider the Crittenden Compromise, Seward tampered with their clear-cut form. Fearful of the effect on the extremists of the Republican group, he withheld Lincoln's unconditional promise to maintain the Fugitive Slave Law and instead of pledging his party to the repeal of Personal Liberty Laws he promised only to have Congress request the States to repeal them. He suppressed altogether the assertion that the Union must be preserved.(2) About the same time, in a public speech, he said he was not going to be "humbugged" by the bogy of secession, and gave his fatuous promise that all the trouble would be ended inside ninety days. For all his brilliancy of a sort, he was spiritually obtuse. On him, as on Douglas, Fate had lavished opportunities to see life as it is, to understand the motives of men; but it could not make him use them. He was incorrigibly cynical. He could not divest himself of the idea that all this confusion was hubbub, was but an ordinary political game, that his only cue was to assist his adversaries in saving their faces. In spite of his rich experience,—in spite of being an accomplished man of the world,—at least in his own estimation—he was as blind to the real motives of that Southern majority which had rejected Breckinridge as was the inexperienced Lincoln. The coolness with which he modified Lincoln's proposals was evidence that he considered himself the great Republican and Lincoln an accident. He was to do the same again—to his own regret.

When Lincoln issued his ultimatum, he was approaching the summit, if not at the very summit, of another of his successive waves of vitality, of self-confidence. That depression which came upon him about the end of 1858, which kept him undecided, in a mood of excessive caution during most of 1859, had passed away. The presidential campaign with its thrilling tension, its excitement, had charged him anew with confidence. Although one more eclipse was in store for him—the darkest eclipse of all—he was very nearly the definitive Lincoln of history. At least, he had the courage which that Lincoln was to show.

He was now the target for a besieging army of politicians clamoring for "spoils" in the shape of promises of preferment. It was a miserable and disgraceful assault which profoundly offended him.(3) To his mind this was not the same thing as the simple-hearted personal politics of his younger days—friends standing together and helping one another along—but a gross and monstrous rapacity. It was the first chill shadow that followed the election day.

There were difficult intrigues over the Cabinet. Promises made by his managers at Chicago were presented for redemption. Rival candidates bidding for his favor, tried to cut each other's throats. For example, there was the intrigue of the War Department. The Lincoln managers had promised a Cabinet appointment to Pennsylvania; the followers of Simon Cameron were a power; it had been necessary to win them over in order to nominate Lincoln; they insisted that their leader was now entitled to the Pennsylvania seat in the Cabinet; but there was an anti-Cameron faction almost as potent in Pennsylvania as the Cameron faction. Both sent their agents to Springfield to lay siege to Lincoln. In this duel, the Cameron forces won the first round. Lincoln offered him the Secretaryship. Subsequently, his enemies made so good a case that Lincoln was convinced of the unwisdom of his decision and withdrew the offer. But Cameron had not kept the offer confidential. The withdrawal would discredit him politically and put a trump card into the hands of his enemies. A long dispute followed. Not until Lincoln had reached Washington, immediately before the inauguration, was the dispute ended, the withdrawal withdrawn, and Cameron appointed.(4)

It was a dreary winter for the President-elect. It was also a brand-new experience. For the first time he was a dispenser of favor on a grand scale. Innumerable men showed their meanest side, either to advance themselves or to injure others. As the weeks passed and the spectacle grew in shamelessness, his friends became more and more conscious of his peculiar melancholy. The elation of the campaign subsided into a deep unhappiness over the vanity of this world. Other phases of the shadowy side of his character also asserted themselves. Conspicuous was a certain trend in his thinking that was part of Herndon's warrant for calling him a fatalist. Lincoln's mysticism very early had taken a turn toward predestination, coupled with a belief in dreams.(5) He did not in any way believe in magic; he never had any faith in divinations, in the occult, in any secret mode of alluring the unseen powers to take one's side. Nevertheless, he made no bones about being superstitious. And he thought that coming events cast their shadows before, that something, at least, of the future was sometimes revealed through dreams. "Nature," he would say, "is the workshop of the Almighty, and we form but links in the chain of intellectual and material life."(6) Byron's Dream was one of his favorite poems. He pondered those ancient, historical tales which make free use of portents. There was a fascination for him in the story of Caracalla—how his murder of Geta was foretold, how he was upbraided by the ghosts of his father and brother. This dream-faith of his was as real as was a similar faith held by the authors of the Old Testament. He had his theory of the interpretation of dreams. Because they were a universal experience—as he believed, the universal mode of communication between the unseen and the seen—his beloved "plain people," the "children of Nature," the most universal types of humanity, were their best interpreters. He also believed in presentiment. As faithfully as the simplest of the brood of the forest—those recreated primitives who regulated their farming by the brightness or the darkness of the moon, who planted corn or slaughtered hogs as Artemis directed—he trusted a presentiment if once it really took possession of him. A presentiment which had been formed before this time, we know not when, was clothed with authority by a dream, or rather a vision, that came to him in the days of melancholy disillusion during the last winter at Springfield. Looking into a mirror, he saw two Lincolns,—one alive, the other dead. It was this vision which clenched his pre-sentiment that he was born to a great career and to a tragic end. He interpreted the vision that his administration would be successful, but that it would close with his death.(7)

The record of his inner life during the last winter at Springfield is very dim. But there can be no doubt that a desolating change attacked his spirit. As late as the day of his ultimatum he was still in comparative sunshine, or, at least his clouds were not close about him. His will was steel, that day. Nevertheless, a friend who visited him in January, to talk over their days together, found not only that "the old-time zest" was lacking, but that it was replaced by "gloom and despondency."(8) The ghosts that hovered so frequently at the back of his mind, the brooding tendencies which fed upon his melancholy and made him at times irresolute, were issuing from the shadows, trooping forward, to encompass him roundabout.

In the midst of this spiritual reaction, he was further depressed by the stern news from the South and from Washington. His refusal to compromise was beginning to bear fruit. The Gulf States seceded. A Southern Confederacy was formed. There is no evidence that he lost faith in his course, but abundant evidence that he was terribly unhappy. He was preyed upon by his sense of helplessness, while Buchanan through his weakness and vacillation was "giving away the case." "Secession is being fostered," said he, "rather than repressed, and if the doctrine meets with general acceptance in the Border States, it will be a great blow to the government."(9) He did not deceive himself upon the possible effect of his ultimatum, and sent word to General Scott to be prepared to hold or to "retake" the forts garrisoned by Federal troops in the Southern States.(10)

All the while his premonition of the approach of doom grew more darkly oppressive. The trail of the artist is discernible across his thoughts. In his troubled imagination he identified his own situation with that of the protagonist in tragedies on the theme of fate. He did not withhold his thoughts from the supreme instance. That same friend who found him possessed of gloom preserved these words of his: "I have read on my knees the story of Gethsemane, when the Son of God prayed in vain that the cup of bitterness might pass from him. I am in the Garden of Gethsemane now and my cup of bitterness is full and overflowing now."(11)

"Like some strong seer in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance, With a glassy countenance,"

he faced toward Washington, toward the glorious terror promised him by his superstitions.

The last days before the departure were days of mingled gloom, desperation, and the attempt to recover hope. He visited his old stepmother and made a pilgrimage to his father's grave. His thoughts fondly renewed the details of his past life, lingered upon this and that, as if fearful that it was all slipping away from him forever. And then he roused himself as if in sudden revolt against the Fates. The day before he left Springfield forever Lincoln met his partner for the last time at their law office to wind up the last of their unsettled business. "After those things were all disposed of," says Herndon, "he crossed to the opposite side of the room and threw himself down on the old office sofa. . . . He lay there for some moments his face to the ceiling without either of us speaking. Presently, he inquired: 'Billy'—he always called me by that name—'how long have we been together?' 'Over sixteen years,' I answered. 'We've never had a cross word during all that time, have we?' . . . He gathered a bundle of papers and books he wished to take with him and started to go, but before leaving, he made the strange request that the sign board which swung on its rusty hinges at the foot of the stairway would remain. 'Let it hang there undisturbed,' he said, with a significant lowering of the voice. 'Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln & Herndon. If I live, I am coming back some time, and then we'll go right on practising law as if nothing had happened.' He lingered for a moment as if to take a last look at the old quarters, and then passed through the door into the narrow hallway."(12)

On a dreary day with a cold rain falling, he set forth. The railway station was packed with friends. He made his way through the crowd slowly, shaking hands. "Having finally reached the train, he ascended the rear platform, and, facing about to the throng which had closed about him, drew himself up to his full height, removed his hat and stood for several seconds in profound silence. His eyes roved sadly over that sea of upturned faces. . . There was an unusual quiver on his lips and a still more unusual tear on his shriveled cheek. His solemn manner, his long silence, were as full of melancholy eloquence as any words he could have uttered."(13) At length, he spoke: "My friends, no one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I can not succeed. With that assistance, I can not fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."(14)