Lincoln, the unknown Read online

  In 1839 the American Anti-Slavery Society issued a booklet entitled "American Slavery As It Is—The Testimony of 1,000 Witnesses." In this pamphlet, eye-witnesses related specific instances of cruelties they had observed: slaves had had their hands plunged into boiling water, they had been branded with red-hot irons, their teeth had been knocked out, they had been stabbed with knives, their flesh had been torn by bloodhounds, they had been whipped until they died, had been burned at the stake. Shrieking mothers had had their children torn from them forever and sold in the slave-pen and on the auction-block. Women were whipped because they did not bear more children, and strong white men with big bones and large muscles were offered twenty-five dollars for cohabiting with black women, since light-colored children sold for more money, especially if they were girls.

  The favorite and most flaming indictment of the Abolitionist was miscegenation. Southern men were accused of cherishing negro slavery because of their love of "unbridled licentiousness."

  "The South," cried Wendell Phillips, "is one great brothel where half a million women are flogged to prostitution."

  Tales of sensuality so revolting that they could not be reprinted now, were broadcast in Abolition pamphlets then. Slaveowners were accused of violating their own mulatto daughters and selling them to be the mistresses of other men.

  Stephen S. Foster declared that the Methodist Church in the South had fifty thousand black female members who were forced with whips to lead immoral lives, and he declared that the sole reason why Methodist preachers of that region favored slavery was because they wanted concubines for themselves.

  Lincoln himself, during his debates with Douglas, declared that in 1850 there were 405,751 mulattoes in the United States, and that nearly all had sprung from black slaves and white masters.

  Because the Constitution protected the rights of slave-owners, the Abolitionists cursed it as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell."

  As a climax to all Abolition literature, the wife of a poverty-stricken professor of theology sat down at her dining-room table and wrote a book which she called "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Sobbing as she wrote, she told her story in a storm of feeling. Finally she said God was writing the story. It dramatized and made real the tragedies of slavery as nothing else had ever done. It stirred the emotions of millions of readers and achieved a greater sale and exerted a more profound influence than any other novel that has ever been written.

  When Lincoln was introduced to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author, he called her the little woman that started the big war.

  And what was the result of this well-meant but fanatical campaign of overstatement waged by the Abolitionists of the North? Did it convince the Southerners that they were wrong? Far from it. The effect was such as might have been expected. The hatred stirred up by the Abolitionists did what hatred always does: it bred hatred in return. It made the South wish to part company with its insolent, meddlesome critics. Truth seldom flourishes in an atmosphere of politics or of emotion, and on both sides of the Mason and Dixon's Line tragic error had grown to its bloody blossom time.

  When the "black Republicans" elected Lincoln in 1860, the Southerners were firmly convinced that slavery was doomed, and that they had to choose at once between abolition and secession. So why not secede? Didn't they have a right to?

  That question had been hotly debated back and forth for half

  a century, and various States at one time or another had threatened to leave the Union. For example: during the War of 1812 the New England States talked very seriously of forming a separate nation; and the Connecticut Legislature passed a resolution declaring that "the state of Connecticut is a free, sovereign and independent state."

  Even Lincoln himself had once believed in the right of secession. He had said during a speech in Congress: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. That is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.

  "Nor is the right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit."

  He had said that in 1848. This, however, was 1860, and he no longer believed it. But the South did. Six weeks after Lincoln's election South Carolina passed an Ordinance of Secession. Charleston celebrated the new "Declaration of Independence" with martial music and bonfires and fireworks and dancing in the streets. Six other States followed in rapid succession; and two days before Lincoln left Springfield for Washington, Jefferson Davis was elected President of a new nation, founded upon what was called "the great truth . . . that slavery is the negro's natural and normal condition."

  The outgoing administration of Buchanan, honeycombed with disloyalty, did nothing whatever to prevent all this; so Lincoln was obliged to sit helplessly in Springfield for three months, and watch the Union dissolving and the republic tottering on the verge of ruin. He saw the Confederacy buying guns and building forts and drilling soldiers; and he realized that he would have to lead a people through a civil war—bitter and bloody.

  He was so distressed that he couldn't sleep at night. He lost forty pounds in weight, from worry.

  Lincoln, who was superstitious, believed that coming events cast their shadow through dreams and omens. The day after his election in 1860 he went home in the afternoon and threw himself down on a haircloth sofa. Opposite him was a bureau with a swinging mirror; and, as he looked into the mirror, he saw himself reflected with one body but with two faces—one very

  pale. He was startled, and he got up, but the illusion vanished. He lay down again, and there was the ghost, plainer than before. The thing worried and haunted him; and he told Mrs. Lincoln about it. She was sure it was a sign that he would be elected to a second term of office, but that the death pallor of one face meant he would not live through the second term.

  Lincoln himself soon came to believe very strongly that he was going to Washington to die. He received scores of letters with sketches of gibbets and stilettoes; and almost every mail brought him threats of death.

  After the election, Lincoln said to a friend:

  "I am worrying to know what to do with my house. I don't want to sell myself out of a home, but if I rent it, it will be pretty well used up by the time I get back."

  But finally he found a man who he thought would take care of the place and keep it in repair; so Lincoln rented it to him for ninety dollars a year; and then inserted this notice in the "Springfield Journal":

  The furniture consisting of Parlor and Chamber Sets, Carpets, Sofas, Chairs, Wardrobes, Bureaus, Bedsteads, Stoves, China, Queensware, Glass, etc., at the residence on the corner of Eighth and Jackson Street is offered at private sale without reserve. For particulars apply at the premises at once.

  The neighbors came and looked things over. One wanted a few chairs and a cook-stove, another asked the price of a bed.

  "Take whatever you want," Lincoln probably replied, "and pay me what you think it is worth."

  They paid him little enough.

  Mr. L. L. Tilton, superintendent of the Great Western Railway, bought most of the furniture; and later took it with him to Chicago, where it was destroyed in the great fire of 1871.

  A few pieces remained in Springfield; and years afterward a bookseller purchased as much of it as possible and took it to Washington and installed it in the rooming-house where Lincoln died. That house stands almost directly across the street from Ford's Theater, and is now the property of the United States Government—a national shrine and museum.

  The second-hand chairs that Lincoln's neighbors could have bought for a dollar and a half apiece, are to-day worth more

  than their weight in gold and platinum. Everything that Lincoln touched intimately has now taken on value and glory. The black walnut rocking-chair in which he sa
t when Booth shot him, sold in 1929 for two thousand five hundred dollars. And a letter that he wrote appointing Major-General Hooker Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Potomac recently sold at public auction for ten thousand dollars, while a collection of four hundred and eighty-five telegrams that he sent during the war, now owned by Brown University, are valued at a quarter of a million dollars. An unsigned manuscript of one of his unimportant talks was recently purchased for eighteen thousand dollars, and a copy of the Gettysburg address in Lincoln's handwriting brought hundreds of thousands.

  The people of Springfield in 1861 little realized what caliber of man Lincoln was, and what he was destined to become.

  For years the future great President had been walking down their streets almost every morning with a market-basket over his arm, a shawl about his neck, going to the grocery store and butcher's shop and carrying home his provisions. For years he had been going out each evening to a pasture on the edge of town and cutting out his cow from the rest of the herd and driving her home and milking her, grooming his horse, cleaning the stable, and cutting the firewood and carrying it in for the kitchen stove.

  Three weeks before he left for Washington, Lincoln began the preparation of his first inaugural address. Wanting solitude and seclusion, he locked himself in an upstairs room over a general store and set to work. He owned very few books himself; but his law partner had something of a library, and Lincoln asked Herndon to bring him a copy of the Constitution, Andrew Jackson's Proclamation against Nullification, Henry Clay's great speech of 1850, and Webster's Reply to Hayne. And so amidst a lot of plunder in dingy, dusty surroundings, Lincoln wrote the famous speech ending with this beautiful plea to the Southern States:

  I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot's grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this

  broad land, will swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angel of our nature.

  Before leaving Illinois he traveled seventy miles to Charleston, in that State, to say farewell to his stepmother. He called her "Mamma," as he had always done; and she clung to him, saying between her sobs: "I didn't want you to run for President, Abe, and I didn't want to see you elected. My heart tells me that something will happen to you, and that I'll never see you again till we meet in heaven."

  During those last days in Springfield, he thought often of the past and New Salem and Ann Rutledge, dreaming once again the dreams that had proved to be far beyond all earthly realities. A few days before he left for Washington he talked at length about Ann, to a New Salem pioneer who had come to Springfield to reminisce and say farewell. "I loved her deeply," Lincoln confessed, "and I think of her now very, very often."

  The night before he left Springfield forever Lincoln visited his dingy law office for the last time and settled a few business details. Herndon tells us:

  After these things were all disposed of, he crossed to the opposite side of the room and threw himself down on the old office sofa, which, after many years of service, had been moved against the wall for support. He lay for some moments, his face toward the ceiling, without either of us speaking. Presendy he inquired, "Billy, how long have we been together?"

  "Over sixteen years," I answered.

  "We've never had a cross word during all that time, have we?" to which I returned a vehement, "No, indeed we have not."

  He then recalled some incidents of his early practice and took great pleasure in delineating the ludicrous features of many a lawsuit on the circuit. ... He gathered a bundle of books and papers 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 should remain. "Let it hang there undisturbed," he said, with a significant lowering of his voice. "Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln and Herndon.

  If T live I'm coming back some time, and then we'll go right on practising law as if nothing had ever 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. I accompanied him downstairs. On the way he spoke of the unpleasant features surrounding the Presidential office. "I am sick of office-holding already," he complained, "and I shudder when I think of the tasks that are still ahead."

  Lincoln probably was worth about ten thousand dollars at the time; but he was so short of cash then that he had to borrow money from his friends to pay for his trip to Washington.

  The Lincolns spent their last week in Springfield at the Chenery House. The night before they left, their trunks and boxes were brought down to the hotel lobby and Lincoln himself roped them. Then he asked the clerk for some of the hotel cards, turned them over, and wrote on the back: "A. Lincoln, Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C.," and tacked them on his baggage.

  The next morning, at half-past seven, the dilapidated old bus backed up to the hotel, and Lincoln and his family got in and jolted away to the Wabash station, where a special train was waiting to take them to Washington.

  It was dark and rainy, but the station platform was crowded with a thousand or fifteen hundred of his old neighbors. They formed a line and slowly filed by Lincoln, shaking his great bony hand. Finally the ringing of the engine bell warned him that it was time to go aboard. He entered his private car by the front steps and a minute later appeared on the rear platform.

  He had not intended to make a speech. He had told the newspaper reporters that it would not be necessary for them to be at the station, as he would have nothing to say. However, as he looked for the last time into the faces of his old neighbors, he felt he must say something. The words he uttered that morning in the falling rain are not to be compared with those he spoke at Gettysburg, or placed beside the sublime spiritual masterpiece that he pronounced on the occasion of his second inauguration. But this farewell speech is as beautiful as one of the Psalms of David, and it contains perhaps more of personal emotion and pathos than any other of Lincoln's addresses.

  There were only two times in his life that Lincoln wept when trying to speak. This morning was one of them:

  "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 cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot 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."

  Wh

  hile Lincoln was en route to Washington for his inauguration, both the United States Secret Service and private detectives discovered what they believed was a plot to assassinate him as he passed through Baltimore.

  In alarm Lincoln's friends pleaded with him to abandon the schedule that had been announced, and urged him to slip into Washington incognito by night.

  That sounded cowardly, and Lincoln knew it would raise a storm of scoffs and sneers. He was decidedly against it. But finally, after hours of pleading, he bowed to the wishes of his trusted advisers, and prepared to make the rest of the trip secretly.

  As soon as Mrs. Lincoln heard about the altered arrangements she insisted that she would go with him, and when she was told most emphatically that she must come on a later train she lost her temper and protested so loudly that she all but gave the plan away.

  It had been announced that Lincoln would speak in Harris-burg, Pennsyl
vania, on February 22, spend the night there, and then leave the next morning for Baltimore and Washington.

  He made his speech in Harrisburg according to schedule; but, instead of spending the night there, he slipped out of the back door of the hotel that evening at six and, disguised in an old threadbare overcoat and a soft wool hat such as he had never worn before, he was driven to an unlighted railway coach, and

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  a few minutes later an engine was whirling him away to Philadelphia, and the telegraph wires in Harrisburg were cut at once so that the information would not be relayed to the would-be assassins.

  At Philadelphia, his party had to wait for an hour to change trains and stations. In order to prevent recognition during that time, Lincoln and Allan Pinkerton, the famous detective, drove about the streets of the city in a darkened cab.

  At 10:55, leaning on Pinkerton's arm and stooping so as not to draw attention to his height, Lincoln entered the station by a side door. He carried his head bent forward and had his old traveling shawl drawn close so that it almost covered his face. In that guise, he crossed the waiting-room and made his way to the rear section of the last sleeping-car on the train, which one of Pinkerton's aides, a woman, had had cut off from the rest of the car by a heavy curtain and reserved for her "invalid brother."

  Lincoln had received scores of threatening letters, declaring that he would never live to enter the White House, and General Winfield Scott, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, feared that Lincoln would be shot during the inaugural address—and so did thousands of others.