The Wonderful Story of Lincoln

"I see him, as he stands,

With gifts of mercy in his outstretched hands;

A kindly light within his gentle eyes,

Sad as the toil in which his heart grew wise;

His lips half parted with the constant smile

That kindled truth but foiled the deepest guile;

His head bent forward, and his willing ear

Divinely patient right and wrong to hear:

Great in his goodness, humble in his state,

Firm in his purpose, yet not passionate,

He led his people with a tender hand,

And won by love a sway beyond command."

George H. Boker.

Inspiration Series of Patriotic Americans

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF LINCOLN

AND THE MEANING OF HIS LIFE FOR THE YOUTH

AND PATRIOTISM OF AMERICA

By C. M. STEVENS

Author of "The Wonderful Story of Washington"

NEW YORK

CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Copyright, 1917, by

CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY

Printed in U. S. A.

CONTENTS

Standard authorities have already fully recorded Lincoln's biography and its historical environment. There yet remains the far more difficult, delicate and consequential message from generation to generation, so much needed in patriotic appreciation, to interpret his rise from those vanished social origins, in order that there may be a just valuation of his life by American youth.

The schoolboy learns with little addition to his ideals, or to his patriotism, or humanity, when he reads of a person, born in what appears to be the most sordid and pathetic destitution of the wild West, at last becoming a martyr president. The scenes in the making of Lincoln's life run by too fast in the reading for the strengthening life-interest to be received and appreciated. The human process of Lincoln's youth, with its supreme lesson of patience and labor and growth, is lost in considering the man solely as a strange figure of American history. If that life can be separated enough from the political turmoil so as to be seen and to be given a worthy interpretation, there is thus a service that may be worth while for the American youth.

Heroes have been made in many a historical crisis and they represent some splendid devotion to a single idea of human worth, but Lincoln's heroism was the far severer test of a hard struggle through many years. He came near encountering every discouragement and in mastering every difficulty that may befall any American from the worst to the best, and from the lowliest to the most responsible position.

The poet has expressed these valuations arising through the frailties and vicissitudes of his long, tragic struggle in the following lines:

"A blend of mirth and sadness, smiles and tears;

A quaint knight-errant of the pioneers;

A homely hero born of star and sod;

A Peasant Prince; a Masterpiece of God."

Lincoln's life has much more for American youth than the adventure-story of a backwoods boy of pioneer days on his unknown way to be a hero of American history. What Lincoln thought he was and what he made out of his relations with those around him are only incidental to the inspiring patience with which he kept the faith of high meaning within him, and the labor with which he strove on until his ideal came clear as one of the supreme visions of humanity.

Every really ambitious American boy asks himself the question, How did he do it? The probably correct answer is that he didn't do it. He made himself the right man and the right people did it.

We do not now hear so much of Lincoln as the "fireplace" student, because that word no longer carries so pathetic a vision as it did to the American boy. "Lincoln the railsplitter" has almost disappeared from the phrases of patriotic eulogy for this great American, because the task and significance of railsplitting no longer bear the force of meaning that they did to the boys of Civil-War days. This means that, if the American boy is to receive any inspiration from the early life of Lincoln, there must be achieved some new and more significant form of interpretation from the making of his life and character.

Even the strong description of Edwin Markham becomes more figurative than concrete in its illustration more poetic than material, when he says,

"He built the rail-pile as he built the state,

Pouring his splendid strength through every blow,

The conscience of him testing every stroke,

To make his deed the measure of a man."

Many of the early events entering into Lincoln's life seem too trivial to mention in the light of his great services to America. But the human struggle and the moral achievement of a supreme American ideal cannot be appreciated or understood unless the experiences buffeting the way to it, and their circumstances, are known for what they mean to his life. Trivial experiences have very much to do with forming our lives and without them we can neither appreciate nor understand the great events that we believe have given us our career and our destiny.

After being nominated for the presidency of the United States, Lincoln was asked for material from his early life out of which to make a biography.

"Why," he replied earnestly, as if this was a sacred privacy in his own profound struggle, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed in a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Grey's Elegy: 'The short and simple annals of the poor.'"

His early friends all agree that he was lazy and idle, but, when we ask closer, they tell us that he spent his time "reading and writing and arguing." One of his most admiring friends hired him for a certain period and became greatly disgusted at the young man's preference for idling his time away reading. Another friend one day found him reading, and, with the intention of severely rebuking him, asked what he was doing. "Reading law," was the reply, without taking his eye from the page.

"Almighty Gosh!" was all the disgusted friend could say. Reading was bad enough waste of time, but to be reading law was beyond all use of words or censure.

So, it merely proves that no one can be understood by the historical student, except as the conditions of mental soil in which the character grew are understood. And especially is it good to learn why the prophet is without honor in his own country, sometimes not even known in his own age. Home people rarely or never understand the unusual worker, because they cannot measure outside of their own experience, and their opinions rarely give much insight into the great laborer born among them, with the great urge, if not the vision, of work and the way.

Lincoln is probably the last Great American who shall ever have to begin his mind-making as anything less than an "heir of all ages." In Lincoln's case it seemed as if all else was banished that a mind might build itself up anew to be a fundamental interpretation of American civilization. Like the great Newton, he built his world of principle out of the particulars of original experience, and found that it was the order of the universe. And yet, it might be said that he was a failure in particulars and minor matters, for he thought in terms of general humanity and swung the world into a new consciousness and vision of the moral law.

As Mr. Herndon says, "His origin was in that unknown and sunless bog in which history never made a footprint." The social origin and development of Christ were far less obscure, humble and lowly in destitute and helpless environment, before the special task of preserving a meaning in the earth as a home for man.

Julia Ward Howe expresses the seriousness attending the possibilities of every new-born soul, as she says, of Lincoln,

"Through the dim pageant of the years

A wondrous tracery appears:

A cabin of the western wild

Shelters in sleep a new-born child,

Nor nurse, nor parent dear, can know

The way those infant feet must go;

And yet a nation's help and hope

Are sealed within that horoscope."

It was certainly impossible for a pioneer of the early frontier to imagine how the rich live now, but it is not so hard for any one now to imagine how people lived then, if he will go into the deep woods with only a few simple tools and try to live. It can be done and it will probably be a healthful experience, but not an experience that any person would be expected to try twice.

It is therefore not needful to the setting of our story about the making of a man, for any extended description to be made of the ignorance and the poverty common to those times.

It is enough for us to say with Maurice Thompson in his lines:

"He was the North, the South, the East, the West;

The thrall, the master, all of us in one."

Ida Tarbell, after her extensive original researches into the early life of Lincoln, very thoughtfully, says,

"He seems to have had as nearly a universal human sympathy as any one in history. A man could not be so high or so low that Lincoln could not meet him and he could not be so much of a fool, or so many kinds of a fool. He could listen unruffled to cant, to violence, to criticism, just and unjust. Amazingly he absorbed from each man the real thing he had to offer, annexed him by showing him that he understood, and yet gave him somehow a sense of the impossibility of considering him alone, and leaving out the multitudes of other men as convinced and as loyal as he was."