The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Read Free

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 of free white people.” And the logical power of the speech was matched by its complete intellectual honesty. The candor and reasonableness of the passage on slavery beginning, “If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution,” came to reflective Americans like a cool and refreshing breeze out of the heated debates of the day.
    Thereafter Lincoln never really faltered. From the increased positiveness of the Bloomington speech in 1856—“We will say to the Southern disunionists, we
won’t go
out of the Union, and you SHAN’T !”—he went on to the irresistible force of the “house divided against itself” speech in Springfield the day after his nomination for the Senate in 1858; one of the political classics of the language. He was the least rhetorical of speakers, caring nothing for mere art, and everything for simplicity, directness, lucidity and honesty. These were qualities which, each seemingly commonplace in itself, his mind possessed to a degree which made it arrestingly individual and original. It was not the means which interested him, but the effect; he thought always of the minds of his auditors and readers, and desired only to reach these minds swiftly, candidly and logically. Few men understood the intelligent masses better than he, and the vocabulary and phrasing he had drawn from Shakespeare, the Bible and Blackstone were sufficient clothing for his honest thought in reaching them. For, above all, it was his thought which set him apart. He had perfected his logic until he could take a complex set of ideas, a jarring, confused array of facts, and, as shapeless globules of water are suddenly crystallized into ice, turn them into a diamond-clear pattern, which everyone saw to be Truth. People who were thinking crookedly heard him and were set thinking straight.And when he met an adversary the edge of his logic was like a living sword. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a battle of giants, but few have ever doubted which was the greater giant. The Cooper Union speech made, as the
Tribune
said, the greatest impression any political leader had ever produced on his first appearance before a New York audience. Not since Burke had so trenchant a political intellect appealed to the world in such forcible English.
    But still a third Lincoln, as his writings show, was to emerge from the final stage of his career, a Lincoln who superadded to special moral qualities and special force of reasoning a spiritual quality which not even the great Edmund Burke had ever possessed.
    Matthew Arnold said of Gladstone, whether justly or unjustly, that he failed in foresight because he failed in insight. It was precisely because Lincoln possessed so keen and sympathetic an insight into democratic strivings and hopes that, during the awful years of butchery and hatred after 1861, he rose to such a noble view of the nation’s future—to such prophetic heights. It was a spiritual insight. The first touches of the new grandeur in his thinking and writing appear in the First Inaugural, in that closing passage which represents an amalgamation of his and Seward’s thought. A half-practical, half-mystical sense of the true objects of the War—something far better than defeat of the South, far broader than emancipation—thereafter rapidly gained upon him. It was, he wrote even before Bull Run, “a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start …” A religious feeling as to the import of the War also grew upon him. It was, he thought, a testing by God of the purposes and devotion of