President Lincoln’s Characteristics—His Love of Humour—His Stories—Pithy Sayings—Repartees—His Dignity.

Whatever the defects of Lincoln’s character were, it may be doubted whether there was ever so great a man who was, on the whole, so good. Compared to his better qualities, these faults were as nothing; yet they came forth so boldly, owing to the natural candour and manliness on which they grew, that, to petty minds, they obscured what was grand and beautiful. It has been very truly said, that he was the most remarkable product of the remarkable possibilities of American life. Born to extreme poverty, and with fewer opportunities for culture than are open to any British peasant, he succeeded, by sheer perseverance and determination, in making himself a land-surveyor, a lawyer, a politician, and a President. And it is not less evident that even his honesty was the result of will, though his kind-heartedness came by nature. What was most remarkable in him was his thorough Republicanism. He was so completely inspired with a sense that the opinions and interests common to the community are right, that to his mind common sense assumed its deepest meaning as a rule of the highest justice. When the whole land was a storm of warring elements, and in the strife between States’ Rights and National Supremacy all precedents were forgotten and every man made his own law, then Abraham Lincoln, watching events, and guided by what he felt was really the sense of the people, sometimes leading, but always following when he could, achieved Emancipation, and brought a tremendous civil war to a quiet end.

Abraham Lincoln was remarkably free from jealousy or personal hatred. His honesty in all things, great or small, was most exemplary. In appointing men, he was more guided by the interests of the country or their fitness than by any other consideration, and avoided favouritism to such an extent that it was once said, in reference to him, that honesty was undoubtedly good policy, but it was hard that an American citizen should be excluded from office because he had, unfortunately, at some time been a friend of the President. Owing to this principle, he was often accused of ingratitude, heartlessness, or indifference. Mr. Lincoln had a quick perception of character, and liked to give men credit for what they understood. Once, when his opinion was asked as to politics, he said, “You must ask Raymond about that; in politics, he is my lieutenant-general.”35 The manner in which Lincoln became gradually appreciated was well expressed in the London “Saturday Review,” after his death, when it said that, “during the arduous experience of four years, Mr. Lincoln constantly rose in general estimation by calmness of temper, by an intuitively logical appreciation of the character of the conflict, and by undisputed sincerity.”

Mr. Lincoln was habitually very melancholy, and, as is often the case, sought for a proper balance of mind in the humour of which he had such a rare appreciation. When he had a great duty on hand, he would prepare his mind for it by reading “something funny.” As I write this, I am kindly supplied with an admirable illustration by Mr. Bret Harte. One evening the President, who had summoned his Cabinet at a most critical juncture, instead of proceeding to any business, passed half-an-hour in reading to them the comic papers of Orpheus C. Kerr (office-seeker), which had just appeared. But at last, when more than one gentleman was little less than offended at such levity, Mr. Lincoln rose, laid aside the book, and, with a most serious air, as of one who has brought his mind to a great point, produced and read the slips containing the Proclamation of Emancipation, and this he did with an earnestness and feeling which were electric, moving his auditors as they had seldom been moved. By far the best work of humour produced during the war, if it be not indeed the best work of purely American humour ever written, was the Petroleum V. Nasby papers. F. B. Carpenter relates that, on the Saturday before the President left Washington to go to Richmond, he had a most wearisome day, followed by an interview with several callers on business of great importance. Pushing everything aside, he said—“Have you seen the ‘Nasby Papers’?” “No, I have not,” was the answer; “what are they?” “There is a chap out in Ohio,” returned the President, “who has been writing a series of letters in the newspapers over the signature of Petroleum V. Nasby. Some one sent me a collection of them the other day. I am going to write to Petroleum to come down here, and I intend to tell him, if he will communicate his talent to me, I will swap places with him.” Thereupon he arose, went to a drawer in his desk, and taking out the letters, he sat down and read one to the company, finding in their enjoyment of it the temporary excitement and relief which another man would have found in a glass of wine. The moment he ceased, the book was thrown aside, his countenance relapsed into its habitual serious expression, and business was entered upon with the utmost earnestness. The author of these “Nasby Papers” was David R. Locke. After Mr. Lincoln’s death, two comic works, both well thumbed, indicating that they had been much read, were found in his desk. One was the “Nasby Letters,” and the other “The Book of Copperheads,” written and illustrated by myself and my brother, the late Henry P. Leland. This was kindly lent to me by Mr. M’Pherson, Clerk of the House of Representatives, that I might see how thoroughly Mr. Lincoln had read it. Both of these works were satires on that party in the North which sympathised with the South.

Men of much reading, and with a varied knowledge of life, especially if their minds have somewhat of critical culture, draw their materials for illustration in conversation from many sources. Abraham Lincoln’s education and reading were not such as to supply him with much unworn or refined literary illustration, so he used such material as he had—incidents and stories from the homely life of the West. I have observed that, in Europe, Scotchmen approach most nearly to Americans in this practical application of events and anecdotes. Lincoln excelled in the art of putting things aptly and concisely, and, like many old Romans, would place his whole argument in a brief droll narrative, the point of which would render his whole meaning clear to the dullest intellect. In their way, these were like the illustrated proverbs known as fables. Menenius Agrippa and Lincoln would have been congenial spirits. However coarse or humble the illustration might be, Mr. Lincoln never failed to convince even the most practised diplomatists or lawyers that he had a marvellous gift for grasping rapidly all the details of a difficulty, and for reducing this knowledge to a practical deduction, and, finally, for presenting the result in a concisely humorous illustration which impressed it on the memory.

Mr. Lincoln was in a peculiar way an original thinker, without being entirely an originator, as a creative genius is. His stories were seldom or never his own inventions; hundreds of them were well known, but, in the words of Dr. Thompson, “however common his ideas were to other minds, however simple when stated, they bore the stamp of individuality, and became in some way his own.” During his life, and within a few months after his death, I made a large MS. collection of Lincolniana. Few of the stories were altogether new, but most were original in application. It is said that, being asked if a very stingy neighbour of his was a man of means, Mr. Lincoln replied that he ought to be, for he was about the meanest man round there. This may or may not be authentic, but it is eminently Lincolnian. So with the jests of Tyll Eulenspiegel, or of any other great droll; he invariably becomes the nucleus of a certain kind of humour.

Unconsciously, Abraham Lincoln became a great proverbialist. Scores of his pithy sayings are current among the people. “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free,” is the sum-total of all the policy which urged Emancipation for the sake of the white man. “This struggle of to-day is for a vast future also,” expressed a great popular opinion. “We are making history rapidly,” was very flattering to all who shared in the war. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” spoke the very extreme of conviction. The whole people took his witty caution “not to swap horses in the middle of a stream.” When it was always urged by the Democrats that emancipation implied amalgamation, he answered—“I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife.” This popular Democratic shibboleth, “How would you like your daughter to marry a negro?” was keenly satirised by Nasby. I have myself known a Democratic procession in Philadelphia to contain a car with a parcel of girls dressed in white, and the motto, “Fathers, protect us from Black Husbands.” To which the Republican banner simply replied, “Our Daughters do not want to marry Black Husbands.”

Abraham Lincoln was always moderate in argument. Once, when Judge Douglas attempted to parry an argument by impeaching the veracity of a senator whom Mr. Lincoln had quoted, he answered that the question was not one of veracity, but simply one of argument. He said—“Euclid, by a course of reasoning, proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles; now, would you undertake to disprove that assertion by calling Euclid a liar?”

“I never did invent anything original—I am only a retail dealer,” is very characteristic of Mr. Lincoln. He was speaking of the stories credited to him, and yet the modesty of the remark, coupled with the droll distinction between original wholesale manufacturers and retail dealers, is both original and quaint.

Mr. Lincoln was very ingenious in finding reasons for being merciful. On one occasion, a young soldier who had shown himself very brave in war, and had been severely wounded, after a time deserted. Being re-captured, he was under sentence of death, and President Lincoln was of course petitioned for his pardon. It was a difficult case; the young man deserved to die, and desertion was sadly injuring the army. The President mused solemnly, until a happy thought struck him. “Did you say he was once badly wounded?” he asked of the applicant for a pardon. “He was.” “Then, as the Scripture says that in the shedding of blood is the remission of sins, I guess we’ll have to let him off this time.”

When Mr. Lincoln was grossly and foolishly flattered, as happened once in the case of a gushing “interviewer,” who naÏvely put his own punishment into print, he could quiz the flatterer with great ingenuity by apparently falling into the victim’s humour. When only moderately praised, he retorted gently. Once, when a gentleman complimented him on having no vices, such as drinking or smoking, “That is a doubtful compliment,” answered Mr. Lincoln. “I recollect once being outside a stage-coach in Illinois, when a man offered me a cigar. I told him I had no vices. He said nothing, but smoked for some time, and then growled out, ‘It’s my opinion that people who have no vices have plaguy few virtues.’”

President Lincoln was not merely obliging or condescending in allowing every one to see him; in his simple Republicanism, he believed that the people who had made him President had a right to talk to him. One day a friend found him half-amused, half-irritated. “You met an old lady as you entered,” he said. “Well, she wanted me to give her an order for stopping the pay of a Treasury clerk who owes her a board-bill of seventy dollars.” His visitor expressed surprise that he did not adopt the usual military plan, under which every application to see the general commanding had to be filtered through a sieve of officers, who allowed no one to take up the chief’s time except those who had business of sufficient importance. “Ah yes,” the President replied, “such things may do very well for you military people, with your arbitrary rule. But the office of a President is a very different one, and the affair is very different. For myself, I feel, though the tax on my time is heavy, that no hours of my day are better employed than those which thus bring me again into direct contact with the people. All serves to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung, and to which, at the end of two years, I must return.” To such an extreme did he carry this, and such weariness did it cause him, that, at the end of four years, he who had been one of the strongest men living, was no longer strong or vigorous. But he always had a good-natured story, even for his tormentors. Once, when a Kentucky farmer wanted him at a critical period of the Emancipation question to exert himself and turn the whole machinery of government to aid him in recovering two slaves, President Lincoln said this reminded him of Jack Chase, the captain of a western steamboat. It is a terrible thing to steer a boat down the roaring rapids, where the mistake of an inch may cause wreck, and it requires the extreme attention of the pilot. One day, when the boat was plunging and wallowing along the boiling current, and Jack at the wheel was using all care to keep in the perilous channel, a boy pulled his coat-tail and cried, “Say, Mister Captain! I wish you’d stop your boat a minute. I’ve lost my apple overboard.”

In self-conscious “deportment,” Mr. Lincoln was utterly deficient; in true unconscious dignity, he was unsurpassed. He would sit down on the stone-coping outside the White House to write on his card the directions by which a poor man might be relieved from his sorrow, looking as he did so as if he were sitting on the pavement; or he would actually lie down on the grass beside a common soldier, and go over his papers with him, while his carriage waited, and great men gathered around; but no man ever dared to be impertinent, or unduly familiar with him. Once an insolent officer accused him to his face of injustice, and he arose, lifted the man by the collar, and carried him out, kicking. But this is, I believe, the only story extant of any one having treated him with insolence.

Hunting popularity by means of petty benevolence is so usual with professional politicians, that many may suspect that Lincoln was not unselfish in his acts of kindness. But I myself know of one instance of charity exercised by him, which was certainly most disinterested. One night, a poor old man, whose little farm had been laid waste during the war, and who had come to Washington, hoping that Government would repay his loss, found himself penniless in the streets of the capital. A person whom I know very well saw him accost the President, who listened to his story, and then, writing something on a piece of paper, gave it to him, and with it a ten-dollar note. The President went his way, and my acquaintance going up to the old man, who was deeply moved, asked him what was the matter. “I thank God,” said the old man, using a quaint American phrase, “that there are some white people36 in this town. I’ve been tryin’ to get somebody to listen to me, and nobody would, because I’m a poor foolish old body. But just now a stranger listened to all my story, and give me this here.” He said this, showing the money and the paper, which contained a request to Secretary Stanton to have the old man’s claim investigated at once, and, if just, promptly satisfied. When it is remembered that Lincoln went into office and out of it a poor man, or at least a very poor man for one in his position, his frequent acts of charity appear doubly creditable.

Whatever may be said of Lincoln, he was always simply and truly a good man. He was a good father to his children, and a good President to the people, whom he loved as if they had been his children. America and the rest of the world have had many great rulers, but never one who, like Lincoln, was so much one of the people, or who was so sympathetic in their sorrows and trials.