APPENDIX A.
LINCOLN IN 1864

The following article, suggested by the controversy over Mr. Barnard’s statue of Lincoln, was written for the New York Sun, and published in that paper during the summer of 1917:

I am impelled by your full-page illustrated article on Lincoln, and the artist’s representation of him to be given to a nation that believed in and sympathized with him and that desires to honor him and perpetuate his memory, to give you and the public my views:

I was born in Illinois in 1838 and have always been a resident of that State. I knew Lincoln, not intimately, but well. I saw, and heard him speak frequently during the years next preceding the Civil War. I knew him before he was a candidate for the presidency, and best during the contest between him and Douglas for the senatorship. It is, I think, well understood that the contest between these two great men was the stepping-stone to the presidency for Lincoln, and gave him to the nation and the world as one of its foremost noble and heroic characters. I knew him later as president, and I am the only person living who was present on the occasion of the first meeting between Lincoln and General U. S. Grant. This meeting took place in the White House on the evening of the eighth of March, 1864, when General Grant came to Washington, escorted by Congressman E. B. Washburn, to receive his commission as Lieutenant-General of the Army. Those present on that occasion, all from Illinois, were Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, General Grant, Hon. E. B. Washburne, Mr. and Mrs. B. F. James, and myself.

In Harper’s Weekly published at that time is a full-page illustration of the presentation of the commission by President Lincoln, in the presence of the members of the cabinet, on the day following the first meeting. The presentation took place at the Capitol. It may not be generally known, but General Grant was the first to enjoy the full rank of Lieutenant-General after Washington; General Winfield Scott having received it by brevet. I was engaged in the Quartermaster’s Department at this time and was on duty in Knoxville, Tenn., and had been sent to Washington to confer with the Quartermaster General, M. C. Meigs. This visit gave me opportunity to see Lincoln under conditions vastly different from those when I had seen him in Illinois. He was, however, the same Lincoln that I had known. If there was a change, it was that he seemed shrunken in stature. He was, however, both in manner and dress, quite in keeping with his exalted station. He was at ease and well poised; nothing in his manner, dress or speech even suggested awkwardness. He had indelibly stamped on his features more than a suggestion of nobility. There were clearly outlined and defined those characteristics that made him famous; that made him the Saviour of his Country and the liberator of a race from bondage. It seems to me, that any representation of Lincoln should, at least, aim to show him as teeming with and, in fact, overflowing with those qualities and characteristics that he was known to possess. On the contrary, the artist has gone far back to his early life, and has sought to represent him even worse than he could have been under the most adverse circumstances. The statue is what the artist seemingly intended it to be—a splendid, a magnificent misrepresentation of Abraham Lincoln as he was in the later years of his life, for it reverts to what he conceived him to have been back in Kentucky before he had found himself. As evidence of this, it is stated that the sculptor went to Kentucky and found a man who was, and always had been, a rail-splitter and nothing else; and he gives it as Lincoln. Those of us who knew him cannot accept such a substitute.

At the Commencement exercises of Lombard College, June fifth, 1901, Mr. Higinbotham delivered a eulogy in memory of the Rev. Dr. Otis A. Skinner, whom he called “my exemplar,” “my ideal of a grand and noble manhood,” “the most splendid and attractive man I have ever beheld.”

As this address expresses intimately its author’s philosophy of life and death, we append the following extracts:

We have been told by a world-famous student and philosopher that self-sacrifice is the surest means of securing happiness and repose, that life is only of value through devotion to what is true and good. But in turning aside at this hour from other claims upon my time and attention to consider briefly the power of personality in life, as exemplified in the career of a good man, it is not so much the spirit of self-sacrifice as it is the feeling of inadequacy that enters into my task. It is friendship that interrogates me; it is frankness that will respond. It is a pleasure to lay a wreath, however simple, upon the grave of one to whose noble example and beneficent influence I am largely indebted for any humane endeavor or philanthropic spirit that has found expression in my life....

On Sunday afternoons it was his custom to go into the country to preach, and on many of these occasions it was my privilege to accompany him. He talked and thought a great deal about the happiness of others. He always seemed to be looking for a soul that he could cheer by loving and thoughtful words. He knew that no man could live unto God except by living at the same time unto his fellows.... So this man’s good works follow him and will be reflected and multiplied in the lives of others to the end of time....

It is wonderful how indestructibly the good grows and propagates itself, even among weedy entanglements. Evil things perish, but the good goes on forever. Music heard from afar is all harmony; the discordant notes perish by the way and never reach the ear of the listener....

If men are changed by events and environment, they are changed much more, either for good or ill, by their fellow-men. This is the alchemy of influence. We, all of us, are apt to minimize our power or influence, arguing to ourselves that what we may say or do is not noticed or observed, and is therefore of little moment or consequence. There was never a greater error.

For every good deed of ours the world will be better always. And perhaps on no day does a man walk the street cheerfully without meeting some other person who is brightened by his face, and who unconsciously to himself catches from that look an ineffable something—an inspiration that gives him new courage and saves him from a wrong action. Usefulness, after all, is nobler than fame—so noble, indeed, that man should not demand a higher reward for his labors under the sun than the consciousness of having done his neighbor some form of service.

Every person who has lived in the past, who lives in the present or may hereafter come into being, either has exerted or will exert some influence for the good or ill of his fellows. Even in inanimate nature this seems to be the law of existence. The glacier, that had its beginning when the earth was new, carries in its icy grasp objects which today tell the story of its course as plainly as if by written or spoken word. The tree standing by the wayside, barren of either flower or fruit and seemingly useless, may have a beneficent office. Some tired and lonely traveler, discouraged and disheartened, resting beneath its shade, may be lured back to a life of usefulness and happiness by the song of a bird in its branches. And so it is too in the animal kingdom. The beasts of the field and the fowls of the air in divers ways make their impress upon nature and upon all life.

Is there any feeling quite like that with which you pick up the Morning Paper?

You yourself, child of mystery, have just come from a brief visit with Death, in the house of Sleep, and are upon the stoop of another Day, and when you look at the Paper, it is as if your hand lay upon the latch that opens the Door of another Room in that great House of Adventure—Life.

What will you see? Kings fallen? New wonders of strange lands? Another crime? What new shifting in the kaleidoscope of Fate?

The other day I read that Harlow N. Higinbotham, sometime President of the World’s Columbian Exposition, man of affairs, wealth, business, and philanthropy, had died. At eighty-two years of age, still active and vigorous, he had fallen beneath an automobile in the street.

This is not the story of his life. Others will write his biography. They will tell of his plans, achievements, honors.

But certain men, to you, are types. They are symbols. Whatever may be their order in the usual chronicle of the world, to you they stand for a point of sentiment, a mark of an idea.

Harlow N. Higinbotham will always be to me the concrete representative and ikon of

“The Man Who Did Me a Good Turn.”

It matters not what it was all about, but once he, wealthy and busy, stopped his work, left his office and walked with me, little and unknown, down the street, to do me a favor, for no reason except that he took a fancy to me.

That was more than twenty years ago. So he is gone now! I wish I might drop a tear upon his folded hands; perhaps the Recording Angel, checking up his account, might see it, and think it was a pearl, and put it to his credit. So only can I pay my debt.

Reading of his death has set me thinking. How many persons there are who have done me a Good Turn! Just casual people, I mean. All kinds. Let me recall. Alas, that my memory for kindness is so poor!

I cannot understand those who say they owe no man anything. My days are crowded with undeserved Good Turns. I shall never pay my debts, if I live a thousand years.

There’s the man who gave me a match, the girl who gave me a smile, the farmer who gave me a ride, a cobbler in Munich once mended my shoe and would take no money, a man made way for me in a crowd to see the parade, a baby once smiled at me and held out her arms—I would not forget these small things, little sparkles in the life-stream.

And men have given me a chance, and some have stopped to praise me, and I have seen the little flame in women’s eyes as they looked on me, and years ago George Armstrong and Jo Holmes lent me money when I am sure they did not know they would ever get it back.

There are others, appearing out of the stranger throng, that have stood by me, defended my name, spoken out boldly and called themselves my friends.

Of all these Harlow N. Higinbotham is the type, because my acquaintance with him was but casual, because he had no reason for his kindness except the human spark, because he emerged from the multitude, did me his Good Turn, and receded again into the mist.

Always his strong face, shrewd and understanding, will stand out from among the sea of human faces in my memory, and rebuke my dark moods, saying unto me that this world of men and women is a good place, full of unexpected impulse, not a vale of tears, but a place of Heart and Humanity.

So, Recording Angel, when the case of this man comes up on the Day of Judgment, let me bear my testimony.

Well, I am one of them.

Dear Mr. Higinbotham: I am sending you this book for several reasons. In the first place, I should like to have it serve as a token of that sense of pleasure which, in common with the rest of our townsmen, I feel to have you back in Chicago after months of absence in foreign lands. Then, again, I am glad to give you the book because I know that you will regard it with the appreciative and jealous tenderness which every author loves to see others bestow upon the creations of his brain and pen. But above all I am hoping, dear sir, that you will look upon this gift as a cordial expression (however modest) of my feeling of indebtedness to you for the goodness you have shown to me and to my friends for my sake.

Chicago, February, 1892.

And in Mr. Field’s hand writing this little poem referring to Mr. Higinbotham’s return from a three year’s absence in Europe.