Jasper Leonidas McBrien

Lecture by Henry Watterson, journalist and orator, editor of the Louisville, Ky., Courier Journal since 1868. This lecture was originally delivered before the Lincoln Club of Chicago, February 12, 1895, and subsequently repeated on many platforms as a lecture. It has been heard in all parts of the country, but nowhere, with livelier demonstrations of approval than in the cities of the South "from Richmond and Charleston to New Orleans and Galveston."

The statesmen in knee breeches and powdered wigs who signed the Declaration of Independence and framed the Constitution—the soldiers in blue-and-buff, top-boots and epaulets who led the armies of the Revolution—were what we are wont to describe as gentlemen. They were English gentlemen. They were not all, nor even generally, scions of the British aristocracy; but they came, for the most part, of good Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish stock.

The shoe buckle and the ruffled shirt worked a spell peculiarly their own. They carried with them an air of polish and authority. Hamilton, though of obscure birth and small stature, is represented by those who knew him to have been dignity and grace personified; and old Ben Franklin, even in woolen hose, and none too courtier-like, was the delight of the great nobles and fine ladies, in whose company he made himself as much at home as though he had been born a marquis.

The first half of the Republic's first half century of existence the public men of America, distinguished for many things, were chiefly and almost universally distinguished for repose of bearing and sobriety of behavior. It was not until the institution of African slavery had got into politics as a vital force that Congress became a bear-garden, and that our law-makers, laying aside their manners with their small clothes, fell into the loose-fitting habiliments of modern fashion and the slovenly jargon of partisan controversy. The gentlemen who signed the Declaration and framed the Constitution were succeeded by gentlemen—much like themselves—but these were succeeded by a race of party leaders much less decorous and much more self-confident; rugged, puissant; deeply moved in all that they said and did, and sometimes turbulent; so that finally, when the volcano burst forth flames that reached the heavens, great human bowlders appeared amid the glare on every side; none of them much to speak of according to rules regnant at St. James and Versailles; but vigorous, able men, full of their mission and of themselves, and pulling for dear life in opposite directions.

There were Seward and Sumner and Chase, Corwin and Ben Wade, Trumbull and Fessenden, Hale and Collamer and Grimes, and Wendell Phillips, and Horace Greeley, our latter-day Franklin. There were Toombs and Hammond, and Slidell and Wigfall, and the two little giants, Douglas and Stephens, and Yancey and Mason, and Jefferson Davis. With them soft words buttered no parsnips, and they cared little how many pitchers might be broken by rude ones. The issue between them did not require a diagram to explain it. It was so simple a child might understand. It read, human slavery against human freedom, slave labor against free labor, and involved a conflict as inevitable as it was irrepressible.

Greek was meeting Greek at last; and the field of politics became almost as sulphurous and murky as an actual field of battle. Amid the noise and confusion, the clashing of intellects like sabers bright, and the booming of the big oratorical guns of the North and the South, now definitely arrayed, there came one day into the Northern camp one of the oddest figures imaginable; the figure of a man who, in spite of an appearance somewhat at outs with Hogarth's line of beauty, wore a serious aspect, if not an air of command, and, pausing to utter a single sentence that might be heard above the din, passed on and for a moment disappeared.

The sentence was pregnant with meaning. The man bore a commission from God on high! He said: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half free and half slave. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided." He was Abraham Lincoln.

How shall I describe him to you? Shall I do so as he appeared to me, when I first saw him immediately on his arrival in the national capital, the chosen president of the United States, his appearance quite as strange as the story of his life, which was then but half known and half told, or shall I use the words of another and a more graphic wordpainter?

In January, 1861, Colonel A. K. McClure, of Pennsylvania, journeyed to Springfield, Illinois, to meet and confer with the man he had done so much to elect, but whom he had never personally known. "I went directly from the depot to Lincoln's house," says Colonel McClure, "and rang the bell, which was answered by Lincoln, himself, opening the door. I doubt whether I wholly concealed my disappointment at meeting him. Tall, gaunt, ungainly, ill-clad, with a homeliness of manner that was unique in itself, I confess that my heart sank within me as I remembered that this was the man chosen by a great nation to become its ruler in the gravest period of its history. I remember his dress as if it were but yesterday—snuff-colored and slouchy pantaloons; open black vest, held by a few brass buttons; straight or evening dress coat, with tightly fitting sleeves to exaggerate his long, bony arms, all supplemented by an awkwardness that was uncommon among men of intelligence. Such was the picture I met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. We sat down in his plainly furnished parlor and were uninterrupted during the nearly four hours I remained with him, and little by little, as his earnestness, sincerity, and candor were developed in conversation, I forgot all the grotesque qualities which so confounded me when I first greeted him. Before half an hour had passed I learned not only to respect, but, indeed, to reverence the man."

A graphic portrait, truly, and not unlike. I recall him, two months later, a little less uncouth, a little better dressed, but in singularity and in angularity much the same. All the world now takes an interest in every detail that concerned him, or that relates to the weird tragedy of his life and death.

And who was this peculiar being, destined in his mother's arms—for cradle he had none—so profoundly to affect the future of humankind? He has told us, himself, in words so simple and unaffected, so idiomatic and direct, that we can neither misread them, nor improve upon them. Writing, in 1859, to one who had asked him for some biographic particulars, Abraham Lincoln said:—

There is the whole story, told by himself, and brought down to the point where he became a figure of national importance.

His political philosophy was expounded in four elaborate speeches; one delivered at Peoria, Illinois, the 16th of October, 1854; one at Springfield, Illinois, the 16th of June, 1858; one at Columbus, Ohio, the 16th of September, 1859, and one the 27th of February, 1860, at Cooper Institute, in the city of New York. Of course Mr. Lincoln made many speeches and very good speeches. But these four, progressive in character, contain the sum total of his creed touching the organic character of the Government and at the same time his party view of contemporary issues. They show him to have been an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with strong emancipation leanings; a thorough anti-slavery man, but never an extremist or an abolitionist. To the last he hewed to the line thus laid down.

Two or three years ago I referred to Abraham Lincoln—in a casual way—as one "inspired of God." I was taken to task for this and thrown upon my defense. Knowing less then than I know now of Mr. Lincoln, I confined myself to the superficial aspects of the case; to the career of a man who seemed to have lacked the opportunity to prepare himself for the great estate to which he had come, plucked as it were from obscurity by a caprice of fortune.

Accepting the doctrine of inspiration as a law of the universe, I still stand to this belief; but I must qualify it as far as it conveys the idea that Mr. Lincoln was not as well equipped in actual knowledge of men and affairs as any of his contemporaries. Mr. Webster once said that he had been preparing to make his reply to Hayne for thirty years. Mr. Lincoln had been in unconscious training for the presidency for thirty years. His maiden address as a candidate for the Legislature, issued at the ripe old age of twenty-three, closes with these words: "But if the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointment to be very much chagrined." The man who wrote that sentence, thirty years later wrote this sentence: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the angels of our better nature." Between those two sentences, joined by a kindred, somber thought, flowed a life-current—

pausing never for an instant; deepening whilst it ran, but nowise changing its course or its tones; always the same; calm; patient; affectionate; like one born to a destiny, and, as in a dream, feeling its resistless force.

It is needful to a complete understanding of Mr. Lincoln's relation to the time and to his place in the political history of the country, that the student peruse closely the four speeches to which I have called attention; they underlie all that passed in the famous debate with Douglas; all that their author said and did after he succeeded to the presidency. They stand to-day as masterpieces of popular oratory. But for our present purpose the debate with Douglas will suffice—the most extraordinary intellectual spectacle the annals of our party warfare afford. Lincoln entered the canvass unknown outside the state of Illinois. He closed it renowned from one end of the land to the other.

In that great debate it was Titan against Titan; and, perusing it after the lapse of forty years, the philosophic and impartial critic will conclude which got the better of it, Lincoln or Douglas, much according to his sympathy with the one or the other. Douglas, as I have said, had the disadvantage of riding an ebb tide. But Lincoln encountered a disadvantage in riding a flood tide, which was flowing too fast for a man so conservative and so honest as he was. Thus there was not a little equivocation on both sides foreign to the nature of the two. Both wanted to be frank. Both thought they were being frank. But each was a little afraid of his own logic; each was a little afraid of his own following; and hence there was considerable hair splitting, involving accusations that did not accuse and denials that did not deny. They were politicians, these two, as well as statesmen; they were politicians, and what they did not know about political campaigning was hardly worth knowing. Reverently, I take off my hat to both of them; and I turn down the page; I close the book and lay it on its shelf, with the inward ejaculation, "There were giants in those days."

I am not undertaking to deliver an oral biography of Abraham Lincoln, and shall pass over the events which quickly led up to his nomination and election to the presidency in 1860.

I met the newly elected president the afternoon of the day in the early morning of which he had arrived in Washington. It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the capitol under Mr. Seward's escort, and, among the rest, I was presented to him. His appearance did not impress me as fantastically as it had impressed Colonel McClure. I was more familiar with the Western type than Colonel McClure, and, whilst Mr. Lincoln was certainly not an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there was about him a dignity that commanded respect.

I met him again the forenoon of the 4th of March in his apartment at Willard's Hotel as he was preparing to start to his inauguration, and was touched by his unaffected kindness; for I came with a matter requiring his immediate attention. He was entirely self-possessed; no trace of nervousness; and very obliging. I accompanied the cortege that passed from the senate chamber to the east portico of the capitol, and, as Mr. Lincoln removed his hat to face the vast multitude in front and below, I extended my hand to receive it, but Judge Douglas, just beside me, reached over my outstretched arm and took the hat, holding it throughout the delivery of the inaugural address. I stood near enough to the speaker's elbow not to obstruct any gestures he might make, though he made but few; and then it was that I began to comprehend something of the power of the man.

He delivered that inaugural address as if he had been delivering inaugural addresses all his life. Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced the coming of a man; of a leader of men; and in its ringing tones and elevated style, the gentlemen he had invited to become members of his political family—each of whom thought himself a bigger man than his master—might have heard the voice and seen the hand of a man born to command. Whether they did or not, they very soon ascertained the fact. From the hour Abraham Lincoln crossed the threshold of the White House to the hour he went thence to his death, there was not a moment when he did not dominate the political and military situation and all his official subordinates.

Always courteous, always tolerant, always making allowance, yet always explicit, his was the master-spirit, his the guiding hand; committing to each of the members of his cabinet the details of the work of his own department; caring nothing for petty sovereignty; but reserving to himself all that related to great policies, the starting of moral forces and the moving of organized ideas.

I want to say just here a few words about Mr. Lincoln's relation to the South and the people of the South.

He was, himself, a Southern man. He and all his tribe were Southerners. Although he left Kentucky when but a child, he was an old child; he never was very young; and he grew to manhood in a Kentucky colony; for what was Illinois in those days but a Kentucky colony, grown since somewhat out of proportion? He was in no sense what we in the South used to call "a poor white." Awkward, perhaps; ungainly, perhaps, but aspiring; the spirit of a hero beneath that rugged exterior; the soul of a prose poet behind those heavy brows; the courage of a lion back of those patient, kindly aspects; and, long before he was of legal age, a leader. His first love was a Rutledge; his wife was a Todd. Let the romancist tell the story of his romance. I dare not. No sadder idyl can be found in all the short and simple annals of the poor.

We know that he was a prose poet; for have we not that immortal prose poem recited at Gettysburg? We know that he was a statesman; for has not time vindicated his conclusions? But the South does not know, except as a kind of hearsay, that he was a friend; the one friend who had the power and the will to save it from itself. He was the one man in public life who could have come to the head of affairs in 1861 bringing with him none of the embittered resentments growing out of the anti-slavery battle. Whilst Seward, Chase, Sumner and the rest had been engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Southern leaders at Washington, Lincoln, a philosopher and a statesman, had been observing the course of events from afar, and like a philosopher and a statesman. The direst blow that could have been laid upon the prostrate South was delivered by the assassin's bullet that struck him down.

But I digress. Throughout the contention that preceded the war, amid the passions that attended the war itself, not one bitter, proscriptive word escaped the lips of Abraham Lincoln, whilst there was hardly a day that he was not projecting his great personality between some Southern man or woman and danger.

Under the date of February 2, 1848, and from the hall of the House of Representatives at Washington, whilst he was serving as a member of Congress, I find this short note to his law partner at Springfield:—

From that time forward he never ceased to love Stephens, of Georgia.

After that famous Hampton Roads conference, when the Confederate commissioners, Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter, had traversed the field of official routine with Mr. Lincoln, the president, and Mr. Seward, the secretary of state, Lincoln, the friend, still the old Whig colleague, though one was now president of the United States and the other vice-president of the Southern Confederacy, took the "slim, pale-faced, consumptive man" aside, and, pointing to a sheet of paper he held in his hand, said: "Stephens, let me write 'Union' at the top of that page, and you may write below it whatever else you please."

In the preceding conversation Mr. Lincoln had intimated that payment for the slaves was not outside a possible agreement for reunion and peace. He based that statement upon a plan he already had in hand, to appropriate four hundred millions of dollars to this purpose.

There are those who have put themselves to the pains of challenging this statement of mine. It admits of no possible equivocation. Mr. Lincoln carried with him to Fortress Monroe two documents that still stand in his own handwriting; one of them a joint resolution to be passed by the two houses of Congress appropriating the four hundred millions, the other a proclamation to be issued by himself, as president, when the joint resolution had been passed. These formed no part of the discussion at Hampton Roads, because Mr. Stephens told Mr. Lincoln they were limited to treating upon the basis of the recognition of the Confederacy, and to all intents and purposes the conference died before it was actually born. But Mr. Lincoln was so filled with the idea that next day, when he had returned to Washington, he submitted the two documents to the members of his cabinet. Excepting Mr. Seward, they were all against him. He said: "Why, gentlemen, how long is the war going to last? It is not going to end this side of a hundred days, is it? It is costing us four millions a day. There are the four hundred millions, not counting the loss of life and property in the meantime. But you are all against me, and I will not press the matter upon you." I have not cited this fact of history to attack, or even to criticize, the policy of the Confederate Government, but simply to illustrate the wise magnanimity and justice of the character of Abraham Lincoln. For my part I rejoice that the war did not end at Fortress Monroe—or any other conference—but that it was fought out to its bitter and logical conclusion at Appomattox.

It was the will of God that there should be, as God's own prophet had promised, "a new birth of freedom," and this could only be reached by the obliteration of the very idea of slavery. God struck Lincoln down in the moment of his triumph, to attain it; He blighted the South to attain it. But He did attain it. And here we are this night to attest it. God's will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven. But let no Southern man point finger at me because I canonize Abraham Lincoln, for he was the one friend we had at court when friends were most in need; he was the one man in power who wanted to preserve us intact, to save us from the wolves of passion and plunder that stood at our door; and as that God, of whom it has been said that "whom He loveth He chasteneth," meant that the South should be chastened, Lincoln was put out of the way by the bullet of an assassin, having neither lot nor parcel, North or South, but a winged emissary of fate, flown from the shadows of the mystic world, which Æschylus and Shakespeare created and consecrated to tragedy!

I sometimes wonder shall we ever attain a journalism sufficiently upright in its treatment of current events to publish fully and fairly the utterances of our public men, and, except in cases of provable dishonor, to leave their motives and their personalities alone?

Reading just what Abraham Lincoln did say and did do, it is inconceivable how such a man could have aroused antagonism so bitter and abuse so savage, to fall at last by the hand of an assassin.

We boast our superior civilization and our enlightened freedom of speech; and yet, how few of us—when a strange voice begins to utter unfamiliar or unpalatable things—how few of us stop and ask ourselves, may not this man be speaking the truth after all? It is so easy to call names. It is so easy to impugn motives. It is so easy to misrepresent opinions we cannot answer. From the least to the greatest what creatures we are of party spirit, and yet, for the most part, how small its aims, how imperfect its instruments, how disappointing its conclusions!

One thinks now that the world in which Abraham Lincoln lived might have dealt more gently by such a man. He was himself so gentle—so upright in nature and so broad of mind—so sunny and so tolerant in temper—so simple and so unaffected in bearing—a rude exterior covering an undaunted spirit, proving by his every act and word that—

Though he was a party leader, he was a typical and patriotic American, in whom even his enemies might have found something to respect and admire. But it could not be so. He committed one grievous offense; he dared to think and he was not afraid to speak; he was far in advance of his party and his time; and men are slow to forgive what they do not readily understand.

Yet, all the while that the waves of passion were dashing over his sturdy figure, reared above the dead-level, as a lone oak upon a sandy beach, not one harsh word rankled in his heart to sour the milk of human kindness that, like a perennial spring from the gnarled roots of some majestic tree, flowed within him. He would smooth over a rough place in his official intercourse with a funny story fitting the case in point, and they called him a trifler. He would round off a logical argument with a familiar example, hitting the nail squarely on the head and driving it home, and they called him a buffoon. Big wigs and little wigs were agreed that he lowered the dignity of debate; as if debates were intended to mystify, and not to clarify truth. Yet he went on and on, and never backward, until his time was come, when his genius, fully developed, rose to the great exigencies intrusted to his hands. Where did he get his style? Ask Shakespeare and Burns where they got their style. Where did he get his grasp upon affairs and his knowledge of men? Ask the Lord God who created miracles in Luther and Bonaparte!

What was the mysterious power of this mysterious man, and whence?

His was the genius of common sense; of common sense in action; of common sense in thought; of common sense enriched by experience and unhindered by fear. "He was a common man," says his friend Joshua Speed, "expanded into giant proportions; well acquainted with the people, he placed his hand on the beating pulse of the nation, judged of its disease, and was ready with a remedy." Inspired he was truly, as Shakespeare was inspired; as Mozart was inspired; as Burns was inspired; each, like him, sprung directly from the people.

I look into the crystal globe that, slowly turning, tells the story of his life, and I see a little heart broken boy, weeping by the outstretched form of a dead mother, then bravely, nobly trudging a hundred miles to obtain her Christian burial. I see this motherless lad growing to manhood amid the scenes that seem to lead to nothing but abasement; no teachers; no books; no chart, except his own untutored mind; no compass, except his own undisciplined will; no light, save light from Heaven; yet, like the caravel of Columbus, struggling on and on through the trough of the sea, always toward the destined land. I see the full-grown man, stalwart and brave, an athlete in activity of movement and strength of limb, yet vexed by weird dreams and visions; of life, of love, of religion, sometimes verging on despair. I see the mind, grown as robust as the body, throw off these phantoms of the imagination and give itself wholly to the work-a-day uses of the world; the rearing of children; the earning of bread; the multiplied duties of life. I see the party leader, self-confident in conscious rectitude; original, because it was not his nature to follow; potent, because he was fearless, pursuing his convictions with earnest zeal, and urging them upon his fellows with the resources of an oratory which was hardly more impressive than it was many-sided. I see him, the preferred among his fellows, ascend the eminence reserved for him, and him alone of all the statesmen of the time, amid the derision of opponents and the distrust of supporters, yet unawed and unmoved, because thoroughly equipped to meet the emergency. The same being, from first to last; the poor child weeping over a dead mother; the great chief sobbing amid the cruel horrors of war; flinching not from duty, nor changing his life-long ways of dealing with the stern realities which pressed upon him and hurried him onward. And, last scene of all, that ends this strange, eventful history, I see him lying dead there in the capitol of the nation, to which he had rendered "the last, full measure of his devotion," the flag of his country around him, the world in mourning, and, asking myself how could any man have hated that man, I ask you, how can any man refuse his homage to his memory? Surely, he was one of God's elect; not in any sense a creature of circumstance, or accident. Recurring to the doctrine of inspiration, I say again and again, he was inspired of God, and I cannot see how any one who believes in that doctrine can regard him as anything else.

From CÆsar to Bismarck and Gladstone the world has had its statesmen and its soldiers—men who rose to eminence and power step by step, through a series of geometric progression as it were, each advancement following in regular order one after the other, the whole obedient to well-established and well-understood laws of cause and effect. They were not what we call "men of destiny." They were "men of the time." They were men whose careers had a beginning, a middle and an end, rounding off lives with histories, full it may be of interesting and exciting event, but comprehensive and comprehensible; simple, clear, complete.

The inspired ones are fewer. Whence their emanation, where and how they got their power, by what rule they lived, moved and had their being, we know not. There is no explication to their lives. They rose from shadow and they went in mist. We see them, feel them, but we know them not. They came, God's word upon their lips; they did their office, God's mantle about them; and they vanished, God's holy light between the world and them, leaving behind a memory, half mortal and half myth. From first to last they were the creations of some special Providence, baffling the wit of man to fathom, defeating the machinations of the world, the flesh and the devil, until their work was done, then passing from the scene as mysteriously as they had come upon it.

Tried by this standard, where shall we find an example so impressive as Abraham Lincoln, whose career might be chanted by a Greek chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial theme of modern times?

Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light or fair surrounding; without graces, actual or acquired; without name or fame or official training; it was reserved for this strange being, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity, raised to supreme command at a supreme moment, and intrusted with the destiny of a nation.

The great leaders of his party, the most experienced and accomplished public men of the day, were made to stand aside; were sent to the rear, whilst this fantastic figure was led by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. It is immaterial whether we were for him, or against him; wholly immaterial. That, during four years, carrying with them such a weight of responsibility as the world never witnessed before, he filled the vast space allotted him in the eyes and actions of mankind, is to say that he was inspired of God, for nowhere else could he have acquired the wisdom and the virtue.

Where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music? Whose hand smote the lyre of the Scottish plowman, and stayed the life of the German priest? God, God, and God alone; and as surely as these were raised up by God, inspired by God, was Abraham Lincoln; and a thousand years hence, no drama, no tragedy, no epic poem will be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with deeper feeling than that which tells the story of his life and death.