Read The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Online
Authors: Abraham Lincoln
The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (112 page)
Now, if we reject and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We, in effect, say to the white man: You are worthless or worse; we will neither help you, nor be helped by you. To the blacks we say: This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how. If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have so far been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize and sustain the new government of Louisiana, the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts and nerve the arms of the 12,000 to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man, too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is
only what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
Again, if we reject Louisiana we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national Constitution. To meet this proposition it has been argued that no more than three-fourths of those States which have not attempted secession are necessary to validly ratify the amendment. I do not commit myself against this further than to say that such a ratification would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned, while a ratification by three-fourths of all the States would be unquestioned and unquestionable. I repeat the question: Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State government? What has been said of Louisiana will apply generally to other States. And yet so great peculiarities pertain to each State, and such important and sudden changes occur in the same State, and withal so new and unprecedented is the whole case that no exclusive and inflexible plan can safely be prescribed as to details and collaterals. Such exclusive and inflexible plan would surely become a new entanglement. Important principles may and must be inflexible. In the present situation, as the phrase goes, it may be my duty to make some new announcement to the people of the South. I am considering, and shall not fail to act when satisfied that action will be proper.
A few moments before the Presidential carriage left the White House on the fatal evening of April 14 to go to Ford’s Theater, George Ashmun, Congressman from Massachusetts and chairman of the 1860 National Republican Convention that had nominated Lincoln, asked for an interview with the President. There was no time to go into the matter about which he wished to speak—a
cotton claim which one of his clients had against the Government—so Lincoln wrote out this pass to admit Ashmun to the White House in the morning. The carriage then drove off to the theater. There were to be no more tomorrows for the man who had laid down his pen for the last time.
April 14, 1865
A
LLOW
Mr. Ashmun and friend to come in at 9
A. M.
tomorrow.
A. L
INCOLN
1
Lincoln refers here to the shooting of Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the abolitionist
Alton Observer.
Lovejoy had had three printing presses thrown into the river. He was killed by a pro-slavery mob while trying to defend the fourth one. Owen Lovejoy, brother of Elijah, played an important part in Lincoln’s political career. See Lincoln’s letter to James Lemen, March 2, 1857, in which he refers to Lovejoy’s murder as “the most important single event that ever happened in the new world.” The reference to Lovejoy’s death, which occurred on November 7, 1837, correctly dates this speech as having been delivered in 1838. Many editions of Lincoln’s writings have wrongly dated it January 27, 1837.
2
This evidently refers to Lincoln’s favorite poem, “Mortality” by William Knox, beginning “Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”
3
This was an error which Lincoln later corrected. The prohibition of slavery in ceding the Virginia territory was not a condition of the deed.—E
D
.
4
It was signed by President Pierce on May 30, 1854.
5
The African slave trade had been forbidden by law in 1808.
6
An emigrant aid society had been established in New England to give financial assistance to Free State men who were willing to settle in the Kansas-Nebraska Territory.
7
The only man actually put to death under this law was Nathaniel Gordon, who was hanged in 1862 during Lincoln’s administration.
8
John Pettit, Senator from Indiana.
9
This is the birth of one of the major themes to be used by Lincoln in his formal debates with Douglas.
10
California’s application for admission to the Union as a free state was the issue that had brought on the series of compromises in 1850, in which the South was given certain privileges in exchange for letting California be added to the free-state group. Among these privileges was the right of Utah and New Mexico to enter as slave or free states when either was ready to be admitted to the Union.
11
In the October elections just held in these states the people had voted heavily against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
12
The Missouri Compromise.
13
Stephen A. Douglas.
14
Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger B. Taney, James Buchanan.
15
Dissenting justices in the Dred Scott decision.
16
A German political club had just marched into the crowd.
17
The word “grocery” in those days meant a store where liquor was sold.
18
The Rev. Dr. Frederick A. Ross was a Presbyterian minister who, in 1856, had attacked abolitionist agitation as atheistic and anarchical.
19
Senator Hammond of South Carolina had referred in a speech to a building he had erected on swampy ground using “mud-sills” sunk by his slaves. This was the kind of work that made slavery necessary, he said, rough work directed by men of intelligence. He said further that the “hireling system” of the North did the same thing. This aroused much resentment. At the Galesburg debate with Douglas, Lincoln’s followers had brought in a banner with the words: “Small-fisted farmers, mud-sills of society, greasy mechanics, for A. Lincoln.”
20
Modern research indicates that he was probably killed in the spring of 1786.
20a
The connection has been definitely established by more recent genealogical research.
21
Hinton Rowan Helper’s
The Impending Crisis of the South.
22
In the Dred Scott decision.
23
1786.
24
At the Republican State Convention in Decatur on May 9, John Hanks had brought in two fence rails that Lincoln had split in 1830. They bore a placard reading: “Abraham Lincoln, The Rail Candidate for President in 1860.”
25
The Know-Nothings.
26
The book containing the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
27
Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4, 1826.
28
James Monroe, who died on July 4, 1831.
29
During the draft riots in July, 1863.
OMMENTARY
WILLIAM HERNDON
ALFRED BEVERIDGE
CARL SANDBURG
J. G. RANDALL
BENJAMIN P. THOMAS
STEFAN LORENT
William Herndon (1818–1891) was a personal friend and law partner of Lincoln, and one of his early biographers. Herndon played a large role in Lincoln’s early political career, managing the 1858 race against Stephen Douglas. After the President was assassinated, Herndon collected reminiscences of Lincoln’s boyhood and adolescence from various people who had known him and with Jesse Weik wrote
Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life
(1889).
N
O FEATURE
of his backwoods life pleased Abe so well as going to mill. It released him from a day’s work in the woods, besides affording him a much desired opportunity to watch the movement of the mill’s primitive and cumbersome machinery. In later years Mr. Lincoln related the following reminiscence of his experience as a miller in Indiana: One day, taking a bag of corn, he mounted the old flea-bitten gray mare and rode leisurely to Gordon’s mill. Arriving somewhat late, his turn did not come till almost sundown. In obedience to the custom requiring each man to furnish his own power he hitched the old mare to the arm, and as the animal moved round, the machinery responded with equal speed. Abe was mounted on the arm, and at frequent intervals made use of his whip to urge the animal on to better speed. With a careless “Get up, you old hussy,” he applied the lash at each revolution of the arm. In the midst of the exclamation, or just as half of it had escaped through his teeth, the old jade, resenting the continued use of
the goad, elevated her shoeless hoofs and striking the young engineer in the forehead, sent him sprawling to the earth. Miller Gordon hurried in, picked up the bleeding, senseless boy, whom he took for dead, and at once sent for his father. Old Thomas Lincoln came—came as soon as embodied list-lessness could move—loaded the lifeless boy in a wagon and drove home. Abe lay unconscious all night, but towards break of day the attendants noticed signs of returning consciousness. The blood beginning to flow normally, his tongue struggled to loosen itself, his frame jerked for an instant, and he awoke, blurting out the words “you old hussy,” or the latter half of the sentence interrupted by the mare’s heel at the mill.
Mr. Lincoln considered this one of the remarkable incidents of his life. He often referred to it, and we had many discussions in our law office over the psychological phenomena involved in the operation. Without expressing my own views I may say that his idea was that the latter half of the expression, “Get up, you old hussy,” was cut off by a suspension of the normal flow of his mental energy, and that as soon as life’s forces returned he unconsciously ended the sentence; or, as he in a plainer figure put it: “Just before I struck the old mare my will through the mind had set the muscles of my tongue to utter the expression, and when her heels came in contact with my head the whole thing stopped half-cocked, as it were, and was only fired off when mental energy or force returned.”
From
Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life: A Selection.
Alfred Beveridge (1862–1927) was a historian and a politician (U.S. Senator from Indiana) who remains well known today for his expansionist views, supporting economic imperialism and calling for the United States’s annexation of the Philippines, and for his leadership in the Progressive movement. In addition to his biography of
Lincoln, which he left uncompleted at his death, he wrote a well-received biography of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, and numerous other books, including
The Russian Advance
(1903)
, Young Man and the World
(1905)
, Americans of Tomorrow and Today
(1908)
, What Is Back of the War
(1915), and
The State and the Nation
(1924).
O
NE LAW
[enacted in Lincoln’s first term in the General Assembly of Illinois in 1834–35] was of much importance and weighty influence on Lincoln’s approaching career as a lawyer and legislator; of great effect, too, in the development of his economic and political opinions. This was the law, for which Lincoln voted, incorporating a new State Bank to be located at Springfield, an institution of which he was soon to become the stoutest champion and defender. Also the charter of the Bank of Illinois at Shawneetown was extended; and several acts, creating new judicial districts, directing the election of judges by the Legislature, providing for appeals and times of holding court, were passed.
But, vital and pressing as were State problems and necessities, national politics also deeply interested the legislators. From the foundation of the Government a National Bank had been a source of sharp dispute among statesmen; and the people had divided on the issue, the commercial classes ardently favoring such an institution, while the farming and laboring classes were unfriendly to it. The first Bank of the United States, ably and honestly conducted as the fiscal agent of the Government, had been denied a recharter in 1811, partly because of Jefferson’s hostility to it, but chiefly by the opposition of those who wished to establish and operate state banks without competition; and the second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816, had had a stormy and variegated career. After a period of bad management, it, too, was successful and business had come to depend upon it for a trustworthy currency and the maintenance of stable conditions.
Soon after the election of Andrew Jackson, however, differences between the Bank and the President developed which speedily grew into hostility on both sides. The Bank was accused of subsidizing the press, buying influential politicians, corrupting Congress—worse still, of manipulating credits for its own advantage.
But the Bank was supported by the business interests of the country and Clay, Webster, and other powerful men in the National Senate and House were its determined champions. Influenced by hatred of the administration as much as by devotion to the Bank, these men had induced the Bank to apply formally to Congress in 1832 for a renewal of its charter which was to expire in 1836. This maladroit gesture was interpreted by Jackson as a move against him, the President accepted the challenge, and thus the Presidential campaign of 1832 had been fought largely on the issue of Bank or no Bank.
