1 Abraham Lincoln CHAPTER I CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X Abraham Lincoln 2 CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XII Abraham Lincoln The Project Gutenberg EBook of Abraham Lincoln, by Lord Charnwood This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Abraham Lincoln Author: Lord Charnwood Release Date: May 11, 2006 [EBook #18379] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ABRAHAM LINCOLN *** Produced by Al Haines ABRAHAM LINCOLN BY LORD CHARNWOOD GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK Abraham Lincoln 3 GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. COPYRIGHT, 1917 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE Statesmen--even the greatest--have rarely won the same unquestioning recognition that falls to the great warriors or those supreme in science, art or literature. Not in their own lifetime and hardly to this day have the claims to supremacy of our own Oliver Cromwell, William III. and Lord Chatham rested on so sure a foundation as those of a Marlborough or a Nelson, a Newton, a Milton or a Hogarth. This is only natural. A warrior, a man of science, an artist or a poet are judged in the main by definite achievements, by the victories they have won over foreign enemies or over ignorance and prejudice, by the joy and enlightenment they have brought to the consciousness of their own and succeeding generations. For the statesman there is no such exact measure of greatness. The greater he is, the less likely is his work to be marked by decisive achievement which can be recalled by anniversaries or signalised by some outstanding event: the chief work of a great statesman rests in a gradual change of direction given to the policy of his people, still more in a change of the spirit within them. Again, the statesman must work with a rough and ready instrument. The soldier finds or makes his army ready to yield unhesitating obedience to his commands, the sailor animates his fleet with his own personal touch, and the great man in art, literature or science is master of his material, if he can master himself. The statesman cannot mould a heterogeneous people, as the men of a well-disciplined army or navy can be moulded, to respond to his call and his alone. He has to do all his work in a society of which a large part cannot see his object and another large part, as far as they do see it, oppose it. Hence his work at the best is often incomplete and he has to be satisfied with a rough average rather than with his ideal. Abraham Lincoln 4 Lincoln, one of the few supreme statesmen of the last three centuries, was no exception to this rule. He was misunderstood and underrated in his lifetime, and even yet has hardly come to his own. For his place is among the great men of the earth. To them he belongs by right of his immense power of hard work, his unfaltering pursuit of what seemed to him right, and above all by that childlike directness and simplicity of vision which none but the greatest carry beyond their earliest years. It is fit that the first considered attempt by an Englishman to give a picture of Lincoln, the great hero of America's struggle for the noblest cause, should come at a time when we in England are passing through as fiery a trial for a cause we feel to be as noble. It is a time when we may learn much from Lincoln's failures and success, from his patience, his modesty, his serene optimism and his eloquence, so simple and so magnificent. BASIL WILLIAMS. BISCOT CAMP, LUTON, March, 1916. CONTENTS GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE CHAP. I. BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN II. THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION 1. The Formation of a National Government 2. Territorial Expansion 3. The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government 4. The Missouri Compromise 5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth 6. Slavery and Southern Society 7. Intellectual Development Abraham Lincoln 5 III. LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER 1. Life at New Salem 2. In the Illinois Legislature 3. Marriage IV. LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT 1. The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress 2. California and the Compromise of 1850 3. Lincoln in Retirement 4. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise V. THE RISE OF LINCOLN 1. Lincoln's Return to Public Life 2. The Principles and the Oratory of Lincoln 3. Lincoln against Douglas 4. John Brown 5. The Election of Lincoln as President VI. SECESSION 1. The Case of the South against the Union 2. The Progress of Secession 3. The Inauguration of Lincoln 4. The Outbreak of War VII. THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR VIII. THE OPENING OF THE WAR AND LINCOLN'S ADMINISTRATION 1. Preliminary Stages of the War 2. Bull Run 3. Lincoln's Administration Generally 4. Foreign Policy and England 5. The Great Questions of Domestic Policy IX. THE DISASTERS OF THE NORTH 1. Military Policy of the North 2. The War in the West up to May, 1862 3. The War in the East up to May, 1863 X. EMANCIPATION XI. THE APPROACH OF VICTORY 1. The War to the End of 1863 2. Conscription and the Politics of 1863 3. The War in 1864 4. The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864 XII. THE END BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE CHAPTER I 6 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE INDEX ABRAHAM LINCOLN CHAPTER I BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN The subject of this memoir is revered by multitudes of his countrymen as the preserver of their commonwealth. This reverence has grown with the lapse of time and the accumulation of evidence. It is blended with a peculiar affection, seldom bestowed upon the memory of statesmen. It is shared to-day by many who remember with no less affection how their own fathers fought against him. He died with every circumstance of tragedy, yet it is not the accident of his death but the purpose of his life that is remembered. Readers of history in another country cannot doubt that the praise so given is rightly given; yet any bare record of the American Civil War may leave them wondering why it has been so unquestioningly accorded. The position and task of the American President in that crisis cannot be understood from those of other historic rulers or historic leaders of a people; and it may seem as if, after that tremendous conflict in which there was no lack of heroes, some perverse whim had made men single out for glory the puzzled civil magistrate who sat by. Thus when an English writer tells again this tale, which has been well told already and in which there can remain no important new facts to disclose, he must endeavour to make clear to Englishmen circumstances and conditions which are familiar to Americans. He will incur the certainty that here and there his own perspective of American affairs and persons will be false, or his own touch unsympathetic. He had better do this than chronicle sayings and doings which to him and to those for whom he writes have no significance. Nor should the writer shrink too timidly from the display of a partisanship which, on one side or CHAPTER I 7 the other, it would be insensate not to feel. The true obligation of impartiality is that he should conceal no fact which, in his own mind, tells against his views. Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America, was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called Hodgensville in what is now La Rue County. Fifty years later when he had been nominated for the Presidency he was asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':-- "'The short and simple annals of the poor.' That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make out of it." His other references to early days were rare. He would repeat queer reminiscences of the backwoods to illustrate questions of state; but of his own part in that old life he spoke reluctantly and sadly. Nevertheless there was once extracted from him an awkward autobiographical fragment, and his friends have collected and recorded concerning his earlier years quite as much as is common in great men's biographies or can as a rule be reproduced with its true associations. Thus there are tales enough of the untaught student's perseverance, and of the boy giant's gentleness and prowess; tales, too, more than enough in proportion, of the fun which varied but did not pervade his existence, and of the young rustic's occasional and somewhat oafish pranks. But, in any conception we may form as to the growth of his mind and character, this fact must have its place, that to the man himself the thought of his early life was unattractive, void of self-content over the difficulties which he had conquered, and void of romantic fondness for vanished joys of youth.