第61章 LINCOLN(1)

O captain. My captain. Our fearful trip is done;The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! Heart! Heart!

Leave you not the little spot, Where on the deck my captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

O captain. My captain. Rise up and hear the bells;Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills;For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding;For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;O captain. Dear father.

This arm I push beneath you;

It is some dream that on the deck, You've fallen cold and dead.

My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor win:

But the ship, the ship is anchor'd safe, its voyage closed and done;From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won:

Exult O shores, and ring, O bells.

But I with silent tread, Walk the spot the captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

--Walt Whitman.

LINCOLN

As Washington stands to the Revolution and the establishment of the government, so Lincoln stands as the hero of the mightier struggle by which our Union was saved. He was born in 1809, ten years after Washington, his work done had been laid to rest at Mount Vernon. No great man ever came from beginnings which seemed to promise so little. Lincoln's family, for more than one generation, had been sinking, instead of rising, in the social scale. His father was one of those men who were found on the frontier in the early days of the western movement, always changing from one place to another, and dropping a little lower at each remove. Abraham Lincoln was born into a family who were not only poor, but shiftless, and his early days were days of ignorance, and poverty, and hard work. Out of such inauspicious surroundings, he slowly and painfully lifted himself. He gave himself an education, he took part in an Indian war, he worked in the fields, he kept a country store, he read and studied, and, at last, he became a lawyer. Then he entered into the rough politics of the newly-settled State. He grew to be a leader in his county, and went to the legislature. The road was very rough, the struggle was very hard and very bitter, but the movement was always upward.

At last he was elected to Congress, and served one term in Washington as a Whig with credit, but without distinction. Then he went back to his law and his politics in Illinois. He had, at last, made his position. All that was now needed was an opportunity, and that came to him in the great anti-slavery struggle.

Lincoln was not an early Abolitionist. His training had been that of a regular party man, and as a member of a great political organization, but he was a lover of freedom and justice. Slavery, in its essence, was hateful to him, and when the conflict between slavery and freedom was fairly joined, his path was clear before him. He took up the antislavery cause in his own State and made himself its champion against Douglas, the great leader of the Northern Democrats. He stumped Illinois in opposition to Douglas, as a candidate for the Senate, debating the question which divided the country in every part of the State. He was beaten at the election, but, by the power and brilliancy of his speeches, his own reputation was made. Fighting the anti-slavery battle within constitutional lines, concentrating his whole force against the single point of the extension of slavery to the Territories, he had made it clear that a new leader had arisen in the cause of freedom. From Illinois his reputation spread to the East, and soon after his great debate he delivered a speech in New York which attracted wide attention. At the Republican convention of 1856, his name was one of those proposed for vice-president.

When 1860 came, he was a candidate for the first place on the national ticket. The leading candidate was William H. Seward, of New York, the most conspicuous man of the country on the Republican side, but the convention, after a sharp struggle, selected Lincoln, and then the great political battle came at the polls. The Republicans were victorious, and, as soon as the result of the voting was known, the South set to work to dissolve the Union. In February Lincoln made his way to Washington, at the end coming secretly from Harrisburg to escape a threatened attempt at assassination, and on March 4, 1861 assumed the presidency.

No public man, no great popular leader, ever faced a more terrible situation. The Union was breaking, the Southern States were seceding, treason was rampant in Washington, and the Government was bankrupt. The country knew that Lincoln was a man of great capacity in debate, devoted to the cause of antislavery and to the maintenance of the Union. But what his ability was to deal with the awful conditions by which he was surrounded, no one knew. To follow him through the four years of civil war which ensued is, of course, impossible here. Suffice it to say that no greater, no more difficult, task has ever been faced by any man in modern times, and no one ever met a fierce trial and conflict more successfully.

Lincoln put to the front the question of the Union, and let the question of slavery drop, at first, into the background. He used every exertion to hold the border States by moderate measures, and, in this way, prevented the spread of the rebellion. For this moderation, the antislavery extremists in the North assailed him, but nothing shows more his far-sighted wisdom and strength of purpose than his action at this time. By his policy at the beginning of his administration, he held the border States, and united the people of the North in defense of the Union.