Whenever
Abe had a chance in the field while at work, or at
the house, he would stop and read.
the house, he would stop and read.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v16 to v20 - Phi to Qui
For a long time she
sat on a chest up there, silent and gazing before her.
It was accomplished, then. Her heart beat so loud that she
could hear it, and it was as if she felt a dull pain there. Her
face gradually assumed a rigid, cold look. She thought he was
now telling his stepmother that they were engaged, and she was
preparing herself for what she would have to endure.
-
-
>>
## p. 9053 (#49) ############################################
JONAS LIE
9053
She waited to be called down; at last she determined to go
herself.
In the sitting-room each one sat wholly taken up with his
own work. The lieutenant pretended to be reading a book,—over
which, however, when she entered he sent her a stolen, tenderly
anxious glance.
Supper was brought in, and everything went on as usual. He
joked a little, as was his wont. She thought it was as if a fog
had enveloped them all. Mina asked her once if anything ailed
her, and she answered mechanically, "No. "
It was therefore to happen later in the evening. She went in
and out as usual with the tea things; still it was as if she could
not feel the floor under her feet, or what she carried in her hands.
The evening passed, and they retired without anything having
occurred. In the dim light of the stairway he grasped her hand
warmly, and said, "Good-night, my Elizabeth, my-my Elizabeth! "
But she would not return his grasp, and when he approached her
brow with his lips she drew back quickly.
"I came out. here alone to tell you this, dear, beloved Eliza-
beth! " whispered he, with a trembling fervor in his voice, while
he sought to embrace her. "I must return again to-morrow.
Shall I go without a sign that you care for me? "
She slowly bent her brow toward him, and he kissed it, when
she immediately left him.
"Good-night, my beloved! " whispered he after her.
Elizabeth lay long awake. She felt the need of having a good
cry, and her heart was chilled within her. When she at last slept
she did not dream about her lover, but about Salve-the whole
time about Salve. She saw him gazing at her with his earnest
face; it was so heavy with sorrow, and she stood like a criminal
before him. He said something which she could not hear, but
she understood that he cursed her, and that he had thrown her
dress overboard.
She arose early, and sought to engage her thoughts with
other dreams,- her future as the officer's wife. But it was as
if everything that heretofore had seemed only as gold would now
present itself before her as brass. She felt unhappy and rest-
less, and bethought herself a long time before entering the sitting-
room.
Carl Beck did not go that morning; he had perceived that
there was something or other that put Elizabeth out of sorts.
## p. 9054 (#50) ############################################
9054
JONAS LIE
During the forenoon, when his sisters were out and his step-
mother was occupied, he fortunately chanced to have the oppor-
tunity of speaking with her alone. She was still in a fever, and
expected that he had spoken to Madam Beck.
"Elizabeth," he said, gently smoothing her hair, for she
seemed so embarrassed as she stood looking down, "I could not
go before I had spoken with you again. "
Her eyes were still lowered, but she did not reject his hand.
"Do you really care for me? Will you become my wife? "
She was silent. At last, a little paler, and as if somewhat
overcome, she said:-
"Yes, Herr Beck! "
"Say du to me-say Carl," he fervently prayed, "and-look
at me! "
She looked at him; but not as he had expected. It was with
a fixed, cold glance, wherewith she said:-
"Yes-when we are betrothed. "
"Are we not betrothed ? »
"When will your stepmother know it? " she asked, somewhat
hesitatingly.
"Dear Elizabeth! they must not notice anything here at home
until until three months are past, when I am — »
But he now noticed the expression of her face, and the quick
way in which she withdrew her hand, which led him to reserve
what he had originally thought, and he corrected himself hastily:
Are you
"During next week, from Arendal I shall write to father, and
then I will tell my stepmother what I have written.
satisfied, Elizabeth, dear Elizabeth! or will you have it done
now? " he exclaimed resolutely, and again seized her hand.
"No, no, not now! -next week. - do not let it be done until
next week! " she broke out in sudden dread; at the same time
she almost beseechingly returned the pressure of his hand - the
first he had gotten from her.
"And then will you be mine, Elizabeth ? »
"Yes - then! » She sought to escape his eye.
―――――――
—
"Farewell then, Elizabeth; but I will come again on Satur-
day; I can be no longer without seeing you. "
"Farewell! " said she, somewhat lifelessly.
He sprang down to the sail-boat which lay in waiting; but
she did not look after him, and passed in the opposite direction
with bowed head into the house.
## p. 9055 (#51) ############################################
JONAS LIE
9955
Small things often weigh heavily in the world of impressions.
Elizabeth was overwhelmed by his noble way of thinking, when
he had declared that he would elevate her to be his wife. She
felt it was her worth which in his eyes had outweighed all else.
That he should shrink from the outward struggle with the fam-
ily, had on the other hand not occurred to her. To be sure, she
had felt that it would be painful; but on this point she sheltered
herself behind his manly shield. When he now so unexpectedly
began to put off the time of announcement, first even by saying
that he intended to be absent when the matter came up at home,
there passed through her a feeling which she, in her inward
dread, instinctively grasped as a saving straw, which possibly
might enable her to reconsider.
The two days passed hard and heavily with her, until Carl
Beck returned again, and the nights were as a fever.
Saturday evening he came, and she was the first one he
greeted. He hardly seemed longer to be desirous of concealing
their relation to each other: while she, pale and quiet, was busy
going in and out of the room.
He had with him a letter from his father, which was read at
the table. It was dated from a South-American port, and spoke
of Salve. In the latitude of Cape Hatteras they had had hard
weather, during which it was necessary to cut away the main-
mast's rigging. The topmast still remained hanging by a couple
of ropes, and reeled forward and back in the violent sea, against
the under-rigging, so that the latter was threatened with destruc-
tion. Then Salve Kristiansen had ventured up to cut away the
rest, and while he sat there the whole went overboard. He fell
with it, but was so fortunate in falling as to catch hold of a
topping-lift and save himself. "It was a great piece of daring,"
added the communication in closing; "but for the rest, every-
thing is not with him as it should be, and as was expected. "
«< Oh, no! I thought that before," remarked young Beck, and
shrugged his shoulders scornfully: "he was a God-forsaken
scamp, and if he did not end that time he will soon have another
chance. "
He did not see the angry eyes Elizabeth fixed upon him at
these words. She felt with despair, at this instant, that it was
her fault alone that Salve behaved so recklessly, and had become
what he was. She sat for a long time silent, angry, and quiet,
with her hands in her lap; she was meditating a decision.
## p. 9056 (#52) ############################################
9056
JONAS LIE
Before they retired, Carl Beck whispered to her:-
"I have sent a letter to father to-day, and to-morrow, Eliza-
beth, will be our betrothal day! Mina will show a pair of won-
dering eyes. "
Elizabeth was the last one up, as she put the room to rights,
and when she went she took a piece of paper with writing.
materials out with her. She lay down on her bed; but at mid-
night she sat with a candle and covered a scrap of paper with
letters. It read:
-
"PARDON me that I cannot become your wife, for my heart is
another's.
ELIZABETH RAKLEV. "
She folded it together, and fastened it with a pin in want of
a wafer.
Then she softly opened the door to the chamber where
Madam Beck slept, put her mouth close to her ear, and whispered
her name. She awoke, and was quite frightened when she saw
Elizabeth standing before her fully dressed, and apparently ready
to leave.
"Madam Beck! " said she softly, "I will confide something to
you, and beg advice and help of you. Your stepson has asked if
I would be his wife. It was last Sunday- and I answered yes;
but now I will not. And now I want to go to my aunt; or I
would prefer to go further, if you know of any way for me. For
otherwise I fear he will follow me. "
Madam Beck sat as if the heavens had fallen. She assumed
an incredulous, scornful expression; but when she felt that every-
thing really must be as stated, she involuntarily sat up higher in
bed.
"But why do you come with this just now, in the night? "
she remarked at last, suspiciously examining her: she thought she
still lacked full light in the matter.
"Because he has written his father to-day about it, and is
going to tell you and the rest to-morrow. "
"Ah, he has already written! Hence it was for this reason
that he got you into this house! " she uttered after a pause,
somewhat bitterly. Then it struck her that there was something
noble in Elizabeth's conduct. She looked at her more amiably
and said:
"Yes, you are right: it is best for you to go to -a place
where he cannot so easily reach you. "
## p. 9057 (#53) ############################################
JONAS LIE
9057
She gave herself again to thought; then a bright idea struck
her, and she rose and dressed. There was a man's definiteness
about her, and she was wont to direct affairs. The Dutch skip-
per Garvloit, who was married to her half-sister, had just during
the last days been inquiring for a Norse girl, that could help
them about the house; and here indeed was a place for Eliza-
beth. She had only to go on board his trader, which lay ready
to sail.
She wrote at once a letter to Garvloit, which she handed to
Elizabeth, together with a tolerably large sum of money: "Your
wages for your work here," she said.
In the still, moonlit night Elizabeth rowed alone the little
boat into Arendal. The bright sound was filled with myriads of
reflected stars 'twixt the deep shadows of the sloping ridges,
while more than one light mast betrayed that there were vessels
close to the land. Occasionally the falling stars shot athwart the
heavens, and she felt a jubilant gladness which she must often
subdue by hard rowing for long stretches. She was, as it were,
liberated, freed from some pressing evil. And Marie Fostberg -
how delighted she would be to see her now!
She reached town before daybreak and went straight up to
her aunt's, to whom she explained that Madam Beck desired that
she should get a place in Holland with Skipper Garvloit, who
was just ready to sail. She showed her the letter, there was such
pressing haste. The aunt listened for a time, and then said sud-
denly:-
"Elizabeth, there has been something out of the way with
the naval officer! "
"Yes, aunt, there has," she answered, promptly: "he has
offered himself to me! "
"Well, then — »
"And then I as good as promised him; but I will not have
him. So I told Madam Beck. "
The aunt's gestures showed that she thought this astounding
intelligence.
"So you will not have him? " she said at last:
then it was
perhaps because you would rather have Salve? »
"Yes, aunt," she answered, somewhat softly.
"Why didn't you take him, then? " said the aunt, a little
harshly.
The tears came to Elizabeth's eyes.
XVI-567
## p. 9058 (#54) ############################################
9058
JONAS LIE
"Yes, as one makes his bed so he must lie," remarked the
old woman, who was always strong in proverbs; and gave her
attention to the morning coffee.
Elizabeth, on the way to get some one to row her out to the
trader, went in by the post-office, where she found Marie already
up, in her morning dress and busy in the day-room. The latter
was very much astonished when Elizabeth told her her new de-
cision. It was so profitable, and an almost independent position,
and Madam Beck had herself advised it, Elizabeth explained;
and showed much ingenuity in avoiding putting her on the track.
That Marie Fostberg did not after all get things to rhyme, Eliza-
beth could understand by her eyes. When they took leave they
embraced each other and wept.
There was grand amazement out at the country-place that
Elizabeth was absent. The lieutenant had found her letter in
the crack of his door, but had not imagined that she had left;
and he had gone out with it in violent excitement, without com-
ing home again until late in the afternoon.
Madam Beck had meanwhile intrusted the matter to the
daughters, and they understood that it was to be kept secret from
outsiders.
Although his eyes searched, still he did not inquire expressly
for Elizabeth until evening; and when he heard that she was
gone, and probably was now under way for Holland, he sat for
a time as if petrified. Thereupon he looked scornfully upon them,
one after another.
>>
―
"If I knew that I had any one of you to thank for this," he
burst out at last, "then - Here he grasped the chair he sat
upon, cast it on the floor so that it broke, and jumped upon it.
But her letter was unfortunately plain enough: she loved another,
and he also knew who that other was.
Translation of Mrs. Ole Bull.
## p. 9059 (#55) ############################################
9959
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(1809-1865)
BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
B
ORN in 1809 and dying in 1865, Mr. Lincoln was the contem-
porary of every distinguished man of letters in America
to the close of the war; but from none of them does he
appear to have received literary impulse or guidance. He might
have read, if circumstances had been favorable, a large part of the
work of Irving, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier,
Holmes, Longfellow, and Thoreau, as it came from the press; but
he was entirely unfamiliar with it apparently until late in his career,
and it is doubtful if even at that period he knew it well or cared
greatly for it. He was singularly isolated by circumstances and by
temperament from those influences which usually determine, within
certain limits, the quality and character of a man's style.
And Mr. Lincoln had a style,—a distinctive, individual, character-
istic form of expression. In his own way he gained an insight into
the structure of English, and a freedom and skill in the selection
and combination of words, which not only made him the most convin-
cing speaker of his time, but which have secured for his speeches
a permanent place in literature. One of those speeches is already
known wherever the English language is spoken; it is a classic by
virtue not only of its unique condensation of the sentiment of a
tremendous struggle into the narrow compass of a few brief para-
graphs, but by virtue of that instinctive felicity of style which gives
to the largest thought the beauty of perfect simplicity. The two
Inaugural Addresses are touched by the same deep feeling, the same
large vision, the same clear, expressive, and persuasive eloquence;
and these qualities are found in a great number of speeches, from
Mr. Lincoln's first appearance in public life. In his earliest expres-
sions of his political views there is less range; but there is the
structural order, clearness, sense of proportion, ease, and simplicity.
which give classic quality to the later utterances. Few speeches
have so little of what is commonly regarded as oratorical quality;
few have approached so constantly the standards and character of
literature. While a group of men of gift and opportunity in the East
were giving American literature its earliest direction, and putting the
## p. 9060 (#56) ############################################
9060
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
stamp of a high idealism on its thought and a rare refinement of
spirit on its form, this lonely, untrained man on the old frontier was
slowly working his way through the hardest and rudest conditions to
perhaps the foremost place in American history, and forming at the
same time a style of singular and persuasive charm.
There is, however, no possible excellence without adequate educa-
tion; no possible mastery of any art without thorough training.
Lincoln has sometimes been called an accident, and his literary gift
an unaccountable play of nature; but few men have ever more defi-
nitely and persistently worked out what was in them by clear intel-
ligence than Mr. Lincoln, and no speaker or writer of our time has,
according to his opportunities, trained himself more thoroughly in the
use of English prose. Of educational opportunity in the scholastic
sense, the future orator had only the slightest. He went to school
"by littles," and these "littles" put together aggregated less than a
year; but he discerned very early the practical uses of knowledge, and
set himself to acquire it. This pursuit soon became a passion, and
this deep and irresistible yearning did more for him perhaps than
richer opportunities would have done. It made him a constant stu-
dent, and it taught him the value of fragments of time.
"He was
always at the head of his class," writes one of his schoolmates, "and
passed us rapidly in his studies. He lost no time at home, and when
he was not at work was at his books. He kept up his studies on
Sunday, and carried his books with him to work, so that he might
read when he rested from labor. " "I induced my husband to permit
Abe to read and study at home as well as at school," writes his step-
mother. "At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he
too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a
dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was
reading not to disturb him,- would let him read on and on until he
quit of his own accord. "
The books within his reach were few, but they were among the
best. First and foremost was that collection of great literature in
prose and verse, the Bible: a library of sixty-six volumes, present-
ing nearly every literary form, and translated at the fortunate mo-
ment when the English language had received the recent impress of
its greatest masters of the speech of the imagination. This literature
Mr. Lincoln knew intimately, familiarly, fruitfully; as Shakespeare
knew it in an earlier version, and as Tennyson knew it and was
deeply influenced by it in the form in which it entered into and
trained Lincoln's imagination. Then there was that wise and very
human text-book of the knowledge of character and life, Æsop's
Fables'; that masterpiece of clear presentation, 'Robinson Crusoe';
and that classic of pure English, The Pilgrim's Progress. ' These four
## p. 9061 (#57) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9061
books in the hands of a meditative boy, who read until the last
ember went out on the hearth, began again when the earliest light
reached his bed in the loft of the log cabin, who perched himself on
a stump, book in hand, at the end of every furrow in the plowing
season—contained the elements of a movable university.
To these must be added many volumes borrowed from more fortu-
nate neighbors; for he had "read through every book he had heard of
in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles. " A history of the United
States and a copy of Weems's 'Life of Washington' laid the founda-
tions of his political education. That he read with his imagination
as well as with his eyes is clear from certain words spoken in the
Senate chamber at Trenton in 1861. "May I be pardoned," said Mr.
Lincoln, "if on this occasion I mention that way back in my child-
hood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a
small book, such a one as few of the members have ever seen,-
Weems's 'Life of Washington. ' I remember all the accounts there
given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties of the coun-
try; and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the
struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the
contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time,
-
- all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolu-
tionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how
those early impressions last longer than any others. "
"When Abe and I returned to the house from work," writes John
Hanks, "he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread,
sit down, take a book, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read.
We grubbed, plowed, weeded, and worked together barefooted in the
field.
Whenever Abe had a chance in the field while at work, or at
the house, he would stop and read. " And this habit was kept up
until Mr. Lincoln had found both his life work and his individual ex-
pression. Later he devoured Shakespeare and Burns; and the poetry
of these masters of the dramatic and lyric form, sprung like himself
from the common soil, and like him self-trained and directed, fur-
nished a kind of running accompaniment to his work and his play.
What he read he not only held tenaciously, but took into his imagin-
ation and incorporated into himself. His familiar talk was enriched
with frequent and striking illustrations from the Bible and sop's
Fables. '
This passion for knowledge and for companionship with the great
writers would have gone for nothing, so far as the boy's training
in expression was concerned, if he had contented himself with acqui-
sition; but he turned everything to account. He was as eager for
expression as for the material of expression; more eager to write and
to talk than to read. Bits of paper, stray sheets, even boards served
## p. 9062 (#58) ############################################
9062
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
his purpose.
He was continually transcribing with his own hand
thoughts or phrases which had impressed him. Everything within
reach bore evidence of his passion for reading, and for writing as
well. The flat sides of logs, the surface of the broad wooden shovel,
everything in his vicinity which could receive a legible mark, was
covered with his figures and letters. He was studying expression
quite as intelligently as he was searching for thought. Years after-
ward, when asked how he had attained such extraordinary clearness
of style, he recalled his early habit of retaining in his memory words
or phrases overheard in ordinary conversation or met in books and
newspapers, until night, meditating on them until he got at their
meaning, and then translating them into his own simpler speech.
This habit, kept up for years, was the best possible training for the
writing of such English as one finds in the Bible and in The Pil-
grim's Progress. ' His self-education in the art of expression soon bore
fruit in a local reputation both as a talker and a writer. His facil-
ity in rhyme and essay-writing was not only greatly admired by his
fellows, but awakened great astonishment, because these arts were
not taught in the neighboring schools.
In speech too he was already disclosing that command of the pri-
mary and universal elements of interest in human intercourse which
was to make him, later, one of the most entertaining men of his
time. His power of analyzing a subject so as to be able to present
it to others with complete clearness was already disclosing itself.
No matter how complex a question might be, he did not rest until
he had reduced it to its simplest terms. When he had done this
he was not only eager to make it clear to others, but to give his
presentation freshness, variety, attractiveness. He had, in a word, the
literary sense. "When he appeared in company," writes one of his
early companions, "the boys would gather and cluster around him to
hear him talk. Mr. Lincoln was figurative in his speech, talks, and
conversation. He argued much from analogy, and explained things
hard for us to understand by stories, maxims, tales, and figures. He
would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was
plain and near to us, that we might instantly see the force and bear-
ing of what he said. "
In that phrase lies the secret of the closeness of Mr. Lincoln's
words to his theme and to his listeners,-one of the qualities of
genuine, original expression. He fed himself with thought, and he
trained himself in expression; but his supreme interest was in the
men and women about him, and later, in the great questions which
agitated them. He was in his early manhood when society was pro-
foundly moved by searching questions which could neither be silenced
nor evaded; and his lot was cast in a section where, as a rule, people
## p. 9063 (#59) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9063
read little and talked much. Public speech was the chief instru-
mentality of political education and the most potent means of per-
suasion; but behind the platform, upon which Mr. Lincoln was to
become a commanding figure, were countless private debates carried
on at street corners, in hotel rooms, by the country road, in every
place where men met even in the most casual way.
In these way-
side schools Mr. Lincoln practiced the art of putting things until he
became a past-master in debate, both formal and informal.
If all these circumstances, habits, and conditions are studied in
their entirety, it will be seen that Mr. Lincoln's style, so far as its
formal qualities are concerned, is in no sense accidental or even sur-
prising. He was all his early life in the way of doing precisely what
he did in his later life with a skill which had become instinct. He
was educated, in a very unusual way, to speak for his time and to
his time with perfect sincerity and simplicity; to feel the moral
bearing of the questions which were before the country; to discern
the principles involved; and to so apply the principles to the ques-
tions as to clarify and illuminate them. There is little difficulty in
accounting for the lucidity, simplicity, flexibility, and compass of Mr.
Lincoln's style; it is not until we turn to its temperamental and spir-
itual qualities, to the soul of it, that we find ourselves perplexed and
baffled.
But Mr. Lincoln's possession of certain rare qualities is in no
way more surprising than their possession by Shakespeare, Burns,
and Whitman. We are constantly tempted to look for the sources
of a man's power in his educational opportunities instead of in his
temperament and inheritance. The springs of genius are purified
and directed in their flow by the processes of training, but they are
fed from deeper sources. The man of obscure ancestry and rude
surroundings is often in closer touch with nature, and with those
universal experiences which are the very stuff of literature, than the
man who is born on the upper reaches of social position and oppor-
tunity. Mr. Lincoln's ancestry for at least two generations were
pioneers and frontiersmen, who knew hardship and privation, and
were immersed in that great wave of energy and life which fertilized
and humanized the central West. They were in touch with those
original experiences out of which the higher evolution of civilization
slowly rises; they knew the soil and the sky at first hand; they
wrested a meagre subsistence out of the stubborn earth by constant
toil; they shared to the full the vicissitudes and weariness of human-
ity at its elemental tasks.
It was to this nearness to the heart of a new country, perhaps,
that Mr. Lincoln owed his intimate knowledge of his people and his
deep and beautiful sympathy with them. There was nothing sinuous
## p. 9064 (#60) ############################################
9064
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
or secondary in his processes of thought: they were broad, simple,
and homely in the old sense of the word. He had rare gifts, but he
was rooted deep in the soil of the life about him, and so completely
in touch with it that he divined its secrets and used its speech.
This vital sympathy gave his nature a beautiful gentleness, and suf-
fused his thought with a tenderness born of deep compassion and
love. He carried the sorrows of his country as truly as he bore its
burdens; and when he came to speak on the second immortal day at
Gettysburg, he condensed into a few sentences the innermost meaning
of the struggle and the victory in the life of the nation. It was this
deep heart of pity and love in him which carried him far beyond the
reaches of statesmanship or oratory, and gave his words that finality
of expression which marks the noblest art.
That there was a deep vein of poetry in Mr. Lincoln's nature is
clear to one who reads the story of his early life; and this innate
idealism, set in surroundings so harsh and rude, had something to do
with his melancholy. The sadness which was mixed with his whole
life was, however, largely due to his temperament; in which the final
tragedy seemed always to be predicted. In that temperament too
is hidden the secret of the rare quality of nature and mind which
suffused his public speech and turned so much of it into literature.
There was humor in it, there was deep human sympathy, there was
clear mastery of words for the use to which he put them; but there
was something deeper and more pervasive, there was the quality
of his temperament; and temperament is a large part of genius. The
inner forces of his nature played through his thought; and when
great occasions touched him to the quick, his whole nature shaped
his speech and gave it clear intelligence, deep feeling, and that
beauty which is distilled out of the depths of the sorrows and hopes
of the world. He was as unlike Burke and Webster, those masters of
the eloquence of statesmanship, as Burns was unlike Milton and
Tennyson. Like Burns, he held the key of the life of his people;
and through him, as through Burns, that life found a voice, vibrating,
pathetic, and persuasive.
Daniellen W. Merkin
## p. 9065 (#61) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9065
[The following passages are all quoted from Abraham Lincoln's Speeches. '
Compiled by L. E. Chittenden. Published and copyrighted 1895, by
Dodd, Mead & Co. , New York. ]
THE PERPETUATION OF OUR POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
From Address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Jan-
uary 1837
WⓇ
E FIND ourselves under the government of a system of
political institutions conducing more essentially to the
ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the
history of former times tells us. We, when remounting the stage
of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these funda-
mental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or the estab-
lishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed to us by a once
hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race
of ancestors.
All honor to our Revolutionary ancestors, to whom we are
indebted for these institutions. They will not be forgotten. In
history we hope they will be read of and recounted, so long as
the Bible shall be read. But even granting that they will, their
influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they
cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were
by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that strug-
gle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of
its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the
form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living cory
was to be found in every family,—a history bearing the indu-
bitable testimonies to its own authenticity in the limbs mangled,
in the scars of wounds received in the midst of the very scenes
related; a history too that could be read and understood alike
by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.
But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever.
They were a fortress of strength; but what the invading foemen
could never do, the silent artillery of time has done,—the level-
ing of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant
oaks; but the resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left
only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn
of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more
gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few
more ruder storms, and then to sink and be no more.
·
## p. 9066 (#62) ############################################
9066
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
·
FROM HIS SPEECH AT THE COOPER INSTITUTE
IN NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 27TH, 1860
IT
T IS surely safe to assume that the thirty-nine framers of the
original Constitution, and the seventy-six members of the
Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken to-
gether, do certainly include those who may be fairly called “our
fathers who framed the government under which we live. " And
so assuming, I defy any man to show that any one of them ever,
in his whole life, declared that in his understanding any proper
division of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Con-
stitution, forbade the Federal government to control as to slavery
in the Federal Territories. I go a step further. I defy any one
to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior
to the beginning of the present century (and I might almost say,
prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century),
declare that in his understanding any proper division of local
from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade
the Federal government to control as to slavery in the Federal
Territories. To those who now so declare, I give not only "our
fathers who framed the government under which we live," but
with them all other living men within the century in which it
was framed, among whom to search; and they shall not be able
to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them.
<<
But enough! Let all who believe that our fathers who
framed the government under which we live" understood this
question just as well and even better than we do now, speak as
they spoke, and act as they acted upon it. This is all Repub-
licans ask, all Republicans desire, in relation to slavery. As
those fathers marked it, so let it again be marked: as an evil not
to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because
of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that tol-
eration and protection a necessity. Let all the guaranties those
fathers gave it be not grudgingly, but fully and fairly maintained.
For this Republicans contend; and with this, so far as I know or
believe, they will be content.
And now, if they would listen,- as I suppose they will not,—
I would address a few words to the Southern people.
I would say to them: You consider yourselves a reasonable
and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities
of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people.
## p. 9067 (#63) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9067
Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to
denounce us as reptiles, or at the best as no better than outlaws.
You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing
like it to "Black Republicans. " In all your contentions with
one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation
of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to.
Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable
prerequisite license, so to speak-among you, to be admitted
or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you or not be prevailed
upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us,
or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and speci-
fications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or
justify.
You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue;
and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof,
and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your
section -gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially
true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we
should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your
section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot
escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it?
If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to
be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very
year.
-
The fact that we get no votes in your section is a fact of
your making and not of ours. And if there be fault in that
fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until you show
that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice.
If we
do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is
ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started,-
to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle.
If our
principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the bene-
fit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle and we
with it are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as
such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle,
put in practice, would wrong your section, and so meet us as if
it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do
you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that the
principle which "our fathers who framed the government under
which we live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse
it again and again upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly
## p. 9068 (#64) ############################################
9068
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's con-
sideration.
Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning
against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell
Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that
warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and
signed an act of Congress enforcing the prohibition of slavery in
the Northwestern Territory: . . and about one year after
he penned it [that warning] he wrote Lafayette that he con-
sidered that prohibition a wise measure; expressing in the same
connection his hope that we should at some time have a confed-
eracy of free States.
·
Again, you say we have made the slavery question more
prominent than it formerly was. We deny it.
It was
not we but you who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We
resisted, and still resist, your innovation; and thence comes the
greater prominence of the question. Would you have that ques-
tion reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that old
policy. . . . . If you would have the peace of the old times,
readopt the precepts and policy of the old times.
You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves.
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 his Harper's Ferry enterprise.
If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know
it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcus-
able for not designating the man and proving the fact.
do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it.
If you
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insur-
rection. 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 it could not succeed. That affair, in its philoso-
phy, corresponds with the many attempts
at the assas-
sination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast
ventures
the attempt,
which ends in little else than his own
execution.
But you will not abide the election of a Republican president!
In that supposed event, you say you will destroy the Union; and
then you say the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon
us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and
•
a
2
し
V
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## p. 9069 (#65) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9069
mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill
you, and then you will be a murderer! "
If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions
against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and .
swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nation-
ality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist
upon its extension-its enlargement. All they ask we could
readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could
as readily grant if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it
right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which
depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do,
they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition as being
right; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?
Can we cast our votes with their view and against our own? In
view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do
this?
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it
alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity aris-
ing from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our
votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Terri-
tories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense
of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and
effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical con-
trivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored,
-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between
the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who
should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy
of "don't care," on a question about which all true men do care;
such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to
disunionists,-reversing the Divine rule, and calling not the
sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to
Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and
undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusa-
tions against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction
to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have
faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end
dare to do our duty as we understand it.
## p. 9070 (#66) ############################################
9070
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
FROM THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS, MARCH 4TH, 1861
A
PPREHENSION seems to exist among the people of the Southern
States, that by the accession of a Republican Administra-
tion their property and their peace and personal security
are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable
cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence
to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their
inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of
him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those
speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or
indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the
States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do
so, and I have no inclination to do so. "
I only press
upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which
the case is susceptible, that the property, peace, and security of
no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incom-
ing Administration. I add, too, that all the protection which con-
sistently with the Constitution and the laws can be given, will
cheerfully be given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for
whatever cause; as cheerfully to one section as to another. . .
I take the official oath to-day with no mental reservations,
and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or the laws by
any hypercritical rules. And while I do not choose now to
specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do
suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and
private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which
stand unrepealed, than to violate any of them, trusting to find
impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.
It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a
President under our national Constitution. During that period
fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens have, in succes-
sion, administered the executive branch of the government. They
have conducted it through many perils, and generally with
great success. Yet with all this scope of precedent, I now enter
upon the same great task for the brief constitutional term of
four years, under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of
the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably
attempted.
I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Con-
stitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is
## p. 9071 (#67) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9071
implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national
governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper
ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.
Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national
government, and the Union will endure forever,-it being impos-
sible to destroy it, except by some action not provided for in the
instrument itself.
Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but
an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it
as a contract be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties
who made it? One party to a contract may violate it-break it,
so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
sat on a chest up there, silent and gazing before her.
It was accomplished, then. Her heart beat so loud that she
could hear it, and it was as if she felt a dull pain there. Her
face gradually assumed a rigid, cold look. She thought he was
now telling his stepmother that they were engaged, and she was
preparing herself for what she would have to endure.
-
-
>>
## p. 9053 (#49) ############################################
JONAS LIE
9053
She waited to be called down; at last she determined to go
herself.
In the sitting-room each one sat wholly taken up with his
own work. The lieutenant pretended to be reading a book,—over
which, however, when she entered he sent her a stolen, tenderly
anxious glance.
Supper was brought in, and everything went on as usual. He
joked a little, as was his wont. She thought it was as if a fog
had enveloped them all. Mina asked her once if anything ailed
her, and she answered mechanically, "No. "
It was therefore to happen later in the evening. She went in
and out as usual with the tea things; still it was as if she could
not feel the floor under her feet, or what she carried in her hands.
The evening passed, and they retired without anything having
occurred. In the dim light of the stairway he grasped her hand
warmly, and said, "Good-night, my Elizabeth, my-my Elizabeth! "
But she would not return his grasp, and when he approached her
brow with his lips she drew back quickly.
"I came out. here alone to tell you this, dear, beloved Eliza-
beth! " whispered he, with a trembling fervor in his voice, while
he sought to embrace her. "I must return again to-morrow.
Shall I go without a sign that you care for me? "
She slowly bent her brow toward him, and he kissed it, when
she immediately left him.
"Good-night, my beloved! " whispered he after her.
Elizabeth lay long awake. She felt the need of having a good
cry, and her heart was chilled within her. When she at last slept
she did not dream about her lover, but about Salve-the whole
time about Salve. She saw him gazing at her with his earnest
face; it was so heavy with sorrow, and she stood like a criminal
before him. He said something which she could not hear, but
she understood that he cursed her, and that he had thrown her
dress overboard.
She arose early, and sought to engage her thoughts with
other dreams,- her future as the officer's wife. But it was as
if everything that heretofore had seemed only as gold would now
present itself before her as brass. She felt unhappy and rest-
less, and bethought herself a long time before entering the sitting-
room.
Carl Beck did not go that morning; he had perceived that
there was something or other that put Elizabeth out of sorts.
## p. 9054 (#50) ############################################
9054
JONAS LIE
During the forenoon, when his sisters were out and his step-
mother was occupied, he fortunately chanced to have the oppor-
tunity of speaking with her alone. She was still in a fever, and
expected that he had spoken to Madam Beck.
"Elizabeth," he said, gently smoothing her hair, for she
seemed so embarrassed as she stood looking down, "I could not
go before I had spoken with you again. "
Her eyes were still lowered, but she did not reject his hand.
"Do you really care for me? Will you become my wife? "
She was silent. At last, a little paler, and as if somewhat
overcome, she said:-
"Yes, Herr Beck! "
"Say du to me-say Carl," he fervently prayed, "and-look
at me! "
She looked at him; but not as he had expected. It was with
a fixed, cold glance, wherewith she said:-
"Yes-when we are betrothed. "
"Are we not betrothed ? »
"When will your stepmother know it? " she asked, somewhat
hesitatingly.
"Dear Elizabeth! they must not notice anything here at home
until until three months are past, when I am — »
But he now noticed the expression of her face, and the quick
way in which she withdrew her hand, which led him to reserve
what he had originally thought, and he corrected himself hastily:
Are you
"During next week, from Arendal I shall write to father, and
then I will tell my stepmother what I have written.
satisfied, Elizabeth, dear Elizabeth! or will you have it done
now? " he exclaimed resolutely, and again seized her hand.
"No, no, not now! -next week. - do not let it be done until
next week! " she broke out in sudden dread; at the same time
she almost beseechingly returned the pressure of his hand - the
first he had gotten from her.
"And then will you be mine, Elizabeth ? »
"Yes - then! » She sought to escape his eye.
―――――――
—
"Farewell then, Elizabeth; but I will come again on Satur-
day; I can be no longer without seeing you. "
"Farewell! " said she, somewhat lifelessly.
He sprang down to the sail-boat which lay in waiting; but
she did not look after him, and passed in the opposite direction
with bowed head into the house.
## p. 9055 (#51) ############################################
JONAS LIE
9955
Small things often weigh heavily in the world of impressions.
Elizabeth was overwhelmed by his noble way of thinking, when
he had declared that he would elevate her to be his wife. She
felt it was her worth which in his eyes had outweighed all else.
That he should shrink from the outward struggle with the fam-
ily, had on the other hand not occurred to her. To be sure, she
had felt that it would be painful; but on this point she sheltered
herself behind his manly shield. When he now so unexpectedly
began to put off the time of announcement, first even by saying
that he intended to be absent when the matter came up at home,
there passed through her a feeling which she, in her inward
dread, instinctively grasped as a saving straw, which possibly
might enable her to reconsider.
The two days passed hard and heavily with her, until Carl
Beck returned again, and the nights were as a fever.
Saturday evening he came, and she was the first one he
greeted. He hardly seemed longer to be desirous of concealing
their relation to each other: while she, pale and quiet, was busy
going in and out of the room.
He had with him a letter from his father, which was read at
the table. It was dated from a South-American port, and spoke
of Salve. In the latitude of Cape Hatteras they had had hard
weather, during which it was necessary to cut away the main-
mast's rigging. The topmast still remained hanging by a couple
of ropes, and reeled forward and back in the violent sea, against
the under-rigging, so that the latter was threatened with destruc-
tion. Then Salve Kristiansen had ventured up to cut away the
rest, and while he sat there the whole went overboard. He fell
with it, but was so fortunate in falling as to catch hold of a
topping-lift and save himself. "It was a great piece of daring,"
added the communication in closing; "but for the rest, every-
thing is not with him as it should be, and as was expected. "
«< Oh, no! I thought that before," remarked young Beck, and
shrugged his shoulders scornfully: "he was a God-forsaken
scamp, and if he did not end that time he will soon have another
chance. "
He did not see the angry eyes Elizabeth fixed upon him at
these words. She felt with despair, at this instant, that it was
her fault alone that Salve behaved so recklessly, and had become
what he was. She sat for a long time silent, angry, and quiet,
with her hands in her lap; she was meditating a decision.
## p. 9056 (#52) ############################################
9056
JONAS LIE
Before they retired, Carl Beck whispered to her:-
"I have sent a letter to father to-day, and to-morrow, Eliza-
beth, will be our betrothal day! Mina will show a pair of won-
dering eyes. "
Elizabeth was the last one up, as she put the room to rights,
and when she went she took a piece of paper with writing.
materials out with her. She lay down on her bed; but at mid-
night she sat with a candle and covered a scrap of paper with
letters. It read:
-
"PARDON me that I cannot become your wife, for my heart is
another's.
ELIZABETH RAKLEV. "
She folded it together, and fastened it with a pin in want of
a wafer.
Then she softly opened the door to the chamber where
Madam Beck slept, put her mouth close to her ear, and whispered
her name. She awoke, and was quite frightened when she saw
Elizabeth standing before her fully dressed, and apparently ready
to leave.
"Madam Beck! " said she softly, "I will confide something to
you, and beg advice and help of you. Your stepson has asked if
I would be his wife. It was last Sunday- and I answered yes;
but now I will not. And now I want to go to my aunt; or I
would prefer to go further, if you know of any way for me. For
otherwise I fear he will follow me. "
Madam Beck sat as if the heavens had fallen. She assumed
an incredulous, scornful expression; but when she felt that every-
thing really must be as stated, she involuntarily sat up higher in
bed.
"But why do you come with this just now, in the night? "
she remarked at last, suspiciously examining her: she thought she
still lacked full light in the matter.
"Because he has written his father to-day about it, and is
going to tell you and the rest to-morrow. "
"Ah, he has already written! Hence it was for this reason
that he got you into this house! " she uttered after a pause,
somewhat bitterly. Then it struck her that there was something
noble in Elizabeth's conduct. She looked at her more amiably
and said:
"Yes, you are right: it is best for you to go to -a place
where he cannot so easily reach you. "
## p. 9057 (#53) ############################################
JONAS LIE
9057
She gave herself again to thought; then a bright idea struck
her, and she rose and dressed. There was a man's definiteness
about her, and she was wont to direct affairs. The Dutch skip-
per Garvloit, who was married to her half-sister, had just during
the last days been inquiring for a Norse girl, that could help
them about the house; and here indeed was a place for Eliza-
beth. She had only to go on board his trader, which lay ready
to sail.
She wrote at once a letter to Garvloit, which she handed to
Elizabeth, together with a tolerably large sum of money: "Your
wages for your work here," she said.
In the still, moonlit night Elizabeth rowed alone the little
boat into Arendal. The bright sound was filled with myriads of
reflected stars 'twixt the deep shadows of the sloping ridges,
while more than one light mast betrayed that there were vessels
close to the land. Occasionally the falling stars shot athwart the
heavens, and she felt a jubilant gladness which she must often
subdue by hard rowing for long stretches. She was, as it were,
liberated, freed from some pressing evil. And Marie Fostberg -
how delighted she would be to see her now!
She reached town before daybreak and went straight up to
her aunt's, to whom she explained that Madam Beck desired that
she should get a place in Holland with Skipper Garvloit, who
was just ready to sail. She showed her the letter, there was such
pressing haste. The aunt listened for a time, and then said sud-
denly:-
"Elizabeth, there has been something out of the way with
the naval officer! "
"Yes, aunt, there has," she answered, promptly: "he has
offered himself to me! "
"Well, then — »
"And then I as good as promised him; but I will not have
him. So I told Madam Beck. "
The aunt's gestures showed that she thought this astounding
intelligence.
"So you will not have him? " she said at last:
then it was
perhaps because you would rather have Salve? »
"Yes, aunt," she answered, somewhat softly.
"Why didn't you take him, then? " said the aunt, a little
harshly.
The tears came to Elizabeth's eyes.
XVI-567
## p. 9058 (#54) ############################################
9058
JONAS LIE
"Yes, as one makes his bed so he must lie," remarked the
old woman, who was always strong in proverbs; and gave her
attention to the morning coffee.
Elizabeth, on the way to get some one to row her out to the
trader, went in by the post-office, where she found Marie already
up, in her morning dress and busy in the day-room. The latter
was very much astonished when Elizabeth told her her new de-
cision. It was so profitable, and an almost independent position,
and Madam Beck had herself advised it, Elizabeth explained;
and showed much ingenuity in avoiding putting her on the track.
That Marie Fostberg did not after all get things to rhyme, Eliza-
beth could understand by her eyes. When they took leave they
embraced each other and wept.
There was grand amazement out at the country-place that
Elizabeth was absent. The lieutenant had found her letter in
the crack of his door, but had not imagined that she had left;
and he had gone out with it in violent excitement, without com-
ing home again until late in the afternoon.
Madam Beck had meanwhile intrusted the matter to the
daughters, and they understood that it was to be kept secret from
outsiders.
Although his eyes searched, still he did not inquire expressly
for Elizabeth until evening; and when he heard that she was
gone, and probably was now under way for Holland, he sat for
a time as if petrified. Thereupon he looked scornfully upon them,
one after another.
>>
―
"If I knew that I had any one of you to thank for this," he
burst out at last, "then - Here he grasped the chair he sat
upon, cast it on the floor so that it broke, and jumped upon it.
But her letter was unfortunately plain enough: she loved another,
and he also knew who that other was.
Translation of Mrs. Ole Bull.
## p. 9059 (#55) ############################################
9959
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(1809-1865)
BY HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
B
ORN in 1809 and dying in 1865, Mr. Lincoln was the contem-
porary of every distinguished man of letters in America
to the close of the war; but from none of them does he
appear to have received literary impulse or guidance. He might
have read, if circumstances had been favorable, a large part of the
work of Irving, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier,
Holmes, Longfellow, and Thoreau, as it came from the press; but
he was entirely unfamiliar with it apparently until late in his career,
and it is doubtful if even at that period he knew it well or cared
greatly for it. He was singularly isolated by circumstances and by
temperament from those influences which usually determine, within
certain limits, the quality and character of a man's style.
And Mr. Lincoln had a style,—a distinctive, individual, character-
istic form of expression. In his own way he gained an insight into
the structure of English, and a freedom and skill in the selection
and combination of words, which not only made him the most convin-
cing speaker of his time, but which have secured for his speeches
a permanent place in literature. One of those speeches is already
known wherever the English language is spoken; it is a classic by
virtue not only of its unique condensation of the sentiment of a
tremendous struggle into the narrow compass of a few brief para-
graphs, but by virtue of that instinctive felicity of style which gives
to the largest thought the beauty of perfect simplicity. The two
Inaugural Addresses are touched by the same deep feeling, the same
large vision, the same clear, expressive, and persuasive eloquence;
and these qualities are found in a great number of speeches, from
Mr. Lincoln's first appearance in public life. In his earliest expres-
sions of his political views there is less range; but there is the
structural order, clearness, sense of proportion, ease, and simplicity.
which give classic quality to the later utterances. Few speeches
have so little of what is commonly regarded as oratorical quality;
few have approached so constantly the standards and character of
literature. While a group of men of gift and opportunity in the East
were giving American literature its earliest direction, and putting the
## p. 9060 (#56) ############################################
9060
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
stamp of a high idealism on its thought and a rare refinement of
spirit on its form, this lonely, untrained man on the old frontier was
slowly working his way through the hardest and rudest conditions to
perhaps the foremost place in American history, and forming at the
same time a style of singular and persuasive charm.
There is, however, no possible excellence without adequate educa-
tion; no possible mastery of any art without thorough training.
Lincoln has sometimes been called an accident, and his literary gift
an unaccountable play of nature; but few men have ever more defi-
nitely and persistently worked out what was in them by clear intel-
ligence than Mr. Lincoln, and no speaker or writer of our time has,
according to his opportunities, trained himself more thoroughly in the
use of English prose. Of educational opportunity in the scholastic
sense, the future orator had only the slightest. He went to school
"by littles," and these "littles" put together aggregated less than a
year; but he discerned very early the practical uses of knowledge, and
set himself to acquire it. This pursuit soon became a passion, and
this deep and irresistible yearning did more for him perhaps than
richer opportunities would have done. It made him a constant stu-
dent, and it taught him the value of fragments of time.
"He was
always at the head of his class," writes one of his schoolmates, "and
passed us rapidly in his studies. He lost no time at home, and when
he was not at work was at his books. He kept up his studies on
Sunday, and carried his books with him to work, so that he might
read when he rested from labor. " "I induced my husband to permit
Abe to read and study at home as well as at school," writes his step-
mother. "At first he was not easily reconciled to it, but finally he
too seemed willing to encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a
dutiful son to me always, and we took particular care when he was
reading not to disturb him,- would let him read on and on until he
quit of his own accord. "
The books within his reach were few, but they were among the
best. First and foremost was that collection of great literature in
prose and verse, the Bible: a library of sixty-six volumes, present-
ing nearly every literary form, and translated at the fortunate mo-
ment when the English language had received the recent impress of
its greatest masters of the speech of the imagination. This literature
Mr. Lincoln knew intimately, familiarly, fruitfully; as Shakespeare
knew it in an earlier version, and as Tennyson knew it and was
deeply influenced by it in the form in which it entered into and
trained Lincoln's imagination. Then there was that wise and very
human text-book of the knowledge of character and life, Æsop's
Fables'; that masterpiece of clear presentation, 'Robinson Crusoe';
and that classic of pure English, The Pilgrim's Progress. ' These four
## p. 9061 (#57) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9061
books in the hands of a meditative boy, who read until the last
ember went out on the hearth, began again when the earliest light
reached his bed in the loft of the log cabin, who perched himself on
a stump, book in hand, at the end of every furrow in the plowing
season—contained the elements of a movable university.
To these must be added many volumes borrowed from more fortu-
nate neighbors; for he had "read through every book he had heard of
in that country, for a circuit of fifty miles. " A history of the United
States and a copy of Weems's 'Life of Washington' laid the founda-
tions of his political education. That he read with his imagination
as well as with his eyes is clear from certain words spoken in the
Senate chamber at Trenton in 1861. "May I be pardoned," said Mr.
Lincoln, "if on this occasion I mention that way back in my child-
hood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a
small book, such a one as few of the members have ever seen,-
Weems's 'Life of Washington. ' I remember all the accounts there
given of the battle-fields and struggles for the liberties of the coun-
try; and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the
struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river, the
contest with the Hessians, the great hardships endured at that time,
-
- all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single Revolu-
tionary event; and you all know, for you have all been boys, how
those early impressions last longer than any others. "
"When Abe and I returned to the house from work," writes John
Hanks, "he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread,
sit down, take a book, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read.
We grubbed, plowed, weeded, and worked together barefooted in the
field.
Whenever Abe had a chance in the field while at work, or at
the house, he would stop and read. " And this habit was kept up
until Mr. Lincoln had found both his life work and his individual ex-
pression. Later he devoured Shakespeare and Burns; and the poetry
of these masters of the dramatic and lyric form, sprung like himself
from the common soil, and like him self-trained and directed, fur-
nished a kind of running accompaniment to his work and his play.
What he read he not only held tenaciously, but took into his imagin-
ation and incorporated into himself. His familiar talk was enriched
with frequent and striking illustrations from the Bible and sop's
Fables. '
This passion for knowledge and for companionship with the great
writers would have gone for nothing, so far as the boy's training
in expression was concerned, if he had contented himself with acqui-
sition; but he turned everything to account. He was as eager for
expression as for the material of expression; more eager to write and
to talk than to read. Bits of paper, stray sheets, even boards served
## p. 9062 (#58) ############################################
9062
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
his purpose.
He was continually transcribing with his own hand
thoughts or phrases which had impressed him. Everything within
reach bore evidence of his passion for reading, and for writing as
well. The flat sides of logs, the surface of the broad wooden shovel,
everything in his vicinity which could receive a legible mark, was
covered with his figures and letters. He was studying expression
quite as intelligently as he was searching for thought. Years after-
ward, when asked how he had attained such extraordinary clearness
of style, he recalled his early habit of retaining in his memory words
or phrases overheard in ordinary conversation or met in books and
newspapers, until night, meditating on them until he got at their
meaning, and then translating them into his own simpler speech.
This habit, kept up for years, was the best possible training for the
writing of such English as one finds in the Bible and in The Pil-
grim's Progress. ' His self-education in the art of expression soon bore
fruit in a local reputation both as a talker and a writer. His facil-
ity in rhyme and essay-writing was not only greatly admired by his
fellows, but awakened great astonishment, because these arts were
not taught in the neighboring schools.
In speech too he was already disclosing that command of the pri-
mary and universal elements of interest in human intercourse which
was to make him, later, one of the most entertaining men of his
time. His power of analyzing a subject so as to be able to present
it to others with complete clearness was already disclosing itself.
No matter how complex a question might be, he did not rest until
he had reduced it to its simplest terms. When he had done this
he was not only eager to make it clear to others, but to give his
presentation freshness, variety, attractiveness. He had, in a word, the
literary sense. "When he appeared in company," writes one of his
early companions, "the boys would gather and cluster around him to
hear him talk. Mr. Lincoln was figurative in his speech, talks, and
conversation. He argued much from analogy, and explained things
hard for us to understand by stories, maxims, tales, and figures. He
would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was
plain and near to us, that we might instantly see the force and bear-
ing of what he said. "
In that phrase lies the secret of the closeness of Mr. Lincoln's
words to his theme and to his listeners,-one of the qualities of
genuine, original expression. He fed himself with thought, and he
trained himself in expression; but his supreme interest was in the
men and women about him, and later, in the great questions which
agitated them. He was in his early manhood when society was pro-
foundly moved by searching questions which could neither be silenced
nor evaded; and his lot was cast in a section where, as a rule, people
## p. 9063 (#59) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9063
read little and talked much. Public speech was the chief instru-
mentality of political education and the most potent means of per-
suasion; but behind the platform, upon which Mr. Lincoln was to
become a commanding figure, were countless private debates carried
on at street corners, in hotel rooms, by the country road, in every
place where men met even in the most casual way.
In these way-
side schools Mr. Lincoln practiced the art of putting things until he
became a past-master in debate, both formal and informal.
If all these circumstances, habits, and conditions are studied in
their entirety, it will be seen that Mr. Lincoln's style, so far as its
formal qualities are concerned, is in no sense accidental or even sur-
prising. He was all his early life in the way of doing precisely what
he did in his later life with a skill which had become instinct. He
was educated, in a very unusual way, to speak for his time and to
his time with perfect sincerity and simplicity; to feel the moral
bearing of the questions which were before the country; to discern
the principles involved; and to so apply the principles to the ques-
tions as to clarify and illuminate them. There is little difficulty in
accounting for the lucidity, simplicity, flexibility, and compass of Mr.
Lincoln's style; it is not until we turn to its temperamental and spir-
itual qualities, to the soul of it, that we find ourselves perplexed and
baffled.
But Mr. Lincoln's possession of certain rare qualities is in no
way more surprising than their possession by Shakespeare, Burns,
and Whitman. We are constantly tempted to look for the sources
of a man's power in his educational opportunities instead of in his
temperament and inheritance. The springs of genius are purified
and directed in their flow by the processes of training, but they are
fed from deeper sources. The man of obscure ancestry and rude
surroundings is often in closer touch with nature, and with those
universal experiences which are the very stuff of literature, than the
man who is born on the upper reaches of social position and oppor-
tunity. Mr. Lincoln's ancestry for at least two generations were
pioneers and frontiersmen, who knew hardship and privation, and
were immersed in that great wave of energy and life which fertilized
and humanized the central West. They were in touch with those
original experiences out of which the higher evolution of civilization
slowly rises; they knew the soil and the sky at first hand; they
wrested a meagre subsistence out of the stubborn earth by constant
toil; they shared to the full the vicissitudes and weariness of human-
ity at its elemental tasks.
It was to this nearness to the heart of a new country, perhaps,
that Mr. Lincoln owed his intimate knowledge of his people and his
deep and beautiful sympathy with them. There was nothing sinuous
## p. 9064 (#60) ############################################
9064
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
or secondary in his processes of thought: they were broad, simple,
and homely in the old sense of the word. He had rare gifts, but he
was rooted deep in the soil of the life about him, and so completely
in touch with it that he divined its secrets and used its speech.
This vital sympathy gave his nature a beautiful gentleness, and suf-
fused his thought with a tenderness born of deep compassion and
love. He carried the sorrows of his country as truly as he bore its
burdens; and when he came to speak on the second immortal day at
Gettysburg, he condensed into a few sentences the innermost meaning
of the struggle and the victory in the life of the nation. It was this
deep heart of pity and love in him which carried him far beyond the
reaches of statesmanship or oratory, and gave his words that finality
of expression which marks the noblest art.
That there was a deep vein of poetry in Mr. Lincoln's nature is
clear to one who reads the story of his early life; and this innate
idealism, set in surroundings so harsh and rude, had something to do
with his melancholy. The sadness which was mixed with his whole
life was, however, largely due to his temperament; in which the final
tragedy seemed always to be predicted. In that temperament too
is hidden the secret of the rare quality of nature and mind which
suffused his public speech and turned so much of it into literature.
There was humor in it, there was deep human sympathy, there was
clear mastery of words for the use to which he put them; but there
was something deeper and more pervasive, there was the quality
of his temperament; and temperament is a large part of genius. The
inner forces of his nature played through his thought; and when
great occasions touched him to the quick, his whole nature shaped
his speech and gave it clear intelligence, deep feeling, and that
beauty which is distilled out of the depths of the sorrows and hopes
of the world. He was as unlike Burke and Webster, those masters of
the eloquence of statesmanship, as Burns was unlike Milton and
Tennyson. Like Burns, he held the key of the life of his people;
and through him, as through Burns, that life found a voice, vibrating,
pathetic, and persuasive.
Daniellen W. Merkin
## p. 9065 (#61) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9065
[The following passages are all quoted from Abraham Lincoln's Speeches. '
Compiled by L. E. Chittenden. Published and copyrighted 1895, by
Dodd, Mead & Co. , New York. ]
THE PERPETUATION OF OUR POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
From Address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Jan-
uary 1837
WⓇ
E FIND ourselves under the government of a system of
political institutions conducing more essentially to the
ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the
history of former times tells us. We, when remounting the stage
of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these funda-
mental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or the estab-
lishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed to us by a once
hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race
of ancestors.
All honor to our Revolutionary ancestors, to whom we are
indebted for these institutions. They will not be forgotten. In
history we hope they will be read of and recounted, so long as
the Bible shall be read. But even granting that they will, their
influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then they
cannot be so universally known nor so vividly felt as they were
by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that strug-
gle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of
its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the
form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother, a living cory
was to be found in every family,—a history bearing the indu-
bitable testimonies to its own authenticity in the limbs mangled,
in the scars of wounds received in the midst of the very scenes
related; a history too that could be read and understood alike
by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned.
But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever.
They were a fortress of strength; but what the invading foemen
could never do, the silent artillery of time has done,—the level-
ing of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant
oaks; but the resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left
only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn
of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more
gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few
more ruder storms, and then to sink and be no more.
·
## p. 9066 (#62) ############################################
9066
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
·
FROM HIS SPEECH AT THE COOPER INSTITUTE
IN NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 27TH, 1860
IT
T IS surely safe to assume that the thirty-nine framers of the
original Constitution, and the seventy-six members of the
Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken to-
gether, do certainly include those who may be fairly called “our
fathers who framed the government under which we live. " And
so assuming, I defy any man to show that any one of them ever,
in his whole life, declared that in his understanding any proper
division of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Con-
stitution, forbade the Federal government to control as to slavery
in the Federal Territories. I go a step further. I defy any one
to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior
to the beginning of the present century (and I might almost say,
prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century),
declare that in his understanding any proper division of local
from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade
the Federal government to control as to slavery in the Federal
Territories. To those who now so declare, I give not only "our
fathers who framed the government under which we live," but
with them all other living men within the century in which it
was framed, among whom to search; and they shall not be able
to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them.
<<
But enough! Let all who believe that our fathers who
framed the government under which we live" understood this
question just as well and even better than we do now, speak as
they spoke, and act as they acted upon it. This is all Repub-
licans ask, all Republicans desire, in relation to slavery. As
those fathers marked it, so let it again be marked: as an evil not
to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because
of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that tol-
eration and protection a necessity. Let all the guaranties those
fathers gave it be not grudgingly, but fully and fairly maintained.
For this Republicans contend; and with this, so far as I know or
believe, they will be content.
And now, if they would listen,- as I suppose they will not,—
I would address a few words to the Southern people.
I would say to them: You consider yourselves a reasonable
and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities
of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people.
## p. 9067 (#63) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9067
Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to
denounce us as reptiles, or at the best as no better than outlaws.
You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing
like it to "Black Republicans. " In all your contentions with
one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation
of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to.
Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable
prerequisite license, so to speak-among you, to be admitted
or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you or not be prevailed
upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us,
or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and speci-
fications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or
justify.
You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue;
and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof,
and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your
section -gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially
true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we
should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your
section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot
escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it?
If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to
be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very
year.
-
The fact that we get no votes in your section is a fact of
your making and not of ours. And if there be fault in that
fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until you show
that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice.
If we
do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is
ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started,-
to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle.
If our
principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the bene-
fit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle and we
with it are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as
such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle,
put in practice, would wrong your section, and so meet us as if
it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do
you accept the challenge? No! Then you really believe that the
principle which "our fathers who framed the government under
which we live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse
it again and again upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly
## p. 9068 (#64) ############################################
9068
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's con-
sideration.
Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning
against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell
Address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that
warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and
signed an act of Congress enforcing the prohibition of slavery in
the Northwestern Territory: . . and about one year after
he penned it [that warning] he wrote Lafayette that he con-
sidered that prohibition a wise measure; expressing in the same
connection his hope that we should at some time have a confed-
eracy of free States.
·
Again, you say we have made the slavery question more
prominent than it formerly was. We deny it.
It was
not we but you who discarded the old policy of the fathers. We
resisted, and still resist, your innovation; and thence comes the
greater prominence of the question. Would you have that ques-
tion reduced to its former proportions? Go back to that old
policy. . . . . If you would have the peace of the old times,
readopt the precepts and policy of the old times.
You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves.
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 his Harper's Ferry enterprise.
If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know
it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcus-
able for not designating the man and proving the fact.
do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it.
If you
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insur-
rection. 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 it could not succeed. That affair, in its philoso-
phy, corresponds with the many attempts
at the assas-
sination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast
ventures
the attempt,
which ends in little else than his own
execution.
But you will not abide the election of a Republican president!
In that supposed event, you say you will destroy the Union; and
then you say the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon
us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear and
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## p. 9069 (#65) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9069
mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill
you, and then you will be a murderer! "
If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions
against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and .
swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nation-
ality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist
upon its extension-its enlargement. All they ask we could
readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could
as readily grant if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it
right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which
depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do,
they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition as being
right; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them?
Can we cast our votes with their view and against our own? In
view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do
this?
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it
alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity aris-
ing from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our
votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Terri-
tories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense
of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and
effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical con-
trivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored,
-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between
the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who
should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy
of "don't care," on a question about which all true men do care;
such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to
disunionists,-reversing the Divine rule, and calling not the
sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to
Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and
undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusa-
tions against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction
to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have
faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end
dare to do our duty as we understand it.
## p. 9070 (#66) ############################################
9070
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
FROM THE FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS, MARCH 4TH, 1861
A
PPREHENSION seems to exist among the people of the Southern
States, that by the accession of a Republican Administra-
tion their property and their peace and personal security
are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable
cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence
to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their
inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of
him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those
speeches when I declare that "I have no purpose, directly or
indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the
States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do
so, and I have no inclination to do so. "
I only press
upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which
the case is susceptible, that the property, peace, and security of
no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incom-
ing Administration. I add, too, that all the protection which con-
sistently with the Constitution and the laws can be given, will
cheerfully be given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for
whatever cause; as cheerfully to one section as to another. . .
I take the official oath to-day with no mental reservations,
and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or the laws by
any hypercritical rules. And while I do not choose now to
specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do
suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and
private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which
stand unrepealed, than to violate any of them, trusting to find
impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.
It is seventy-two years since the first inauguration of a
President under our national Constitution. During that period
fifteen different and greatly distinguished citizens have, in succes-
sion, administered the executive branch of the government. They
have conducted it through many perils, and generally with
great success. Yet with all this scope of precedent, I now enter
upon the same great task for the brief constitutional term of
four years, under great and peculiar difficulty. A disruption of
the Federal Union, heretofore only menaced, is now formidably
attempted.
I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Con-
stitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is
## p. 9071 (#67) ############################################
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
9071
implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national
governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper
ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.
Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national
government, and the Union will endure forever,-it being impos-
sible to destroy it, except by some action not provided for in the
instrument itself.
Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but
an association of States in the nature of contract merely, can it
as a contract be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties
who made it? One party to a contract may violate it-break it,
so to speak; but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it?
