Between March and December, 1863, Congress was not in session. Its members were busy "taking the sense of the country" as they would have said: "potting their ears to the ground," as other people would say. A startling tale the ground told them. it was nothing less than that Lincoln was the popular hero; that the people believed in him; that the politicians would do well to shape their ways accordingly. When they reassembled, they were in a sullen, disappointed frame of mind. They would have liked to ignore the ground's mandate; but being politicians, they dared not.
What an ironical turn of events! Lincoln's well-laid plan for a coalition of Moderates and Democrats had come to nothing. Logically, he ought now to be at the mercy of the Republican leaders. But instead, those leaders were beginning to be afraid of him, were perceiving that he had power whereof they had not dreamed. Like Saul the son of Kish, who had set out to find his father's asses, he had found instead a kingdom. How had he done it?
On a grand scale, it was the same sort of victory that had made him a power, so long before, on the little stage at Springfield. It was personal politics. His character had saved him. A multitude who saw nothing in the fine drawn constitutional issue of the war powers, who sensed the war in the most simple and elementary way, had formed, somehow, a compelling and stimulating idea of the President. They were satisfied that "Old Abe," or "Father Abraham," was the man for them. When, after one of his numerous calls for fresh troops, their hearts went out to him, a new song sprang to life, a ringing, vigorous, and yet a touching song with the refrain, "We're coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more."
But how has he done it, asked the bewildered politicians, one of another. How had he created this personal confidence? They, Wade, Chandler, Stevens, Davis, could not do it; why could he?
Well, for one thing, he was a grand reality. They, relatively, were shadows. The wind of destiny for him was the convictions arising out of his own soul; for them it was vox populi. The genuineness of Lincoln, his spiritual reality, had been perceived early by a class of men whom your true politician seldom understands. The Intellectuals--"them literary fellers," in the famous words of an American Senator--were quick to see that the President was an extraordinary man; they were not long in concluding that he was a genius. The subtlest intellect of the time, Hawthorne, all of whose prejudices were enlisted against him, said in the Atlantic of July, 1863: "He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and what is still more to the purpose, of powerful character. As to his integrity, the people have that intuition of it which is never deceived he has a flexible mind capable of much expansion." And this when Trumbull chafed in spirit because the President was too "weak" for his part and Wade railed at him as a despot. As far back as 1860, Lowell, destined to become one of his ablest defenders, had said that Lincoln had "proved both his ability and his integrity; he . . . had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician." To be sure, there were some Intellectuals who could not see straight nor think clear. The world would have more confidence in the caliber of Bryant had he been able to rank himself in the Lincoln following. But the greater part of the best intelligence of the North could have subscribed to Motley's words, "My respect for the character of the President increases every day."[1] The impression he made on men of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him often in the streets of Washington: "None of the artists or pictures have caught the subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. One -of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed."[2]
Lincoln's popular strength lay in a combination of the Intellectuals and the plain people against the politicians. He reached the masses in three ways: through his general receptions which any one might attend; through the open-door policy of his office, to which all the world was permitted access; through his visits to the army. Many thousand men and women, in one or another of these ways, met the President face to face, often in the high susceptibility of intense woe, and carried away an impression which was immediately circulated among all their acquaintances.
It would be impossible to exaggerate the grotesque miscellany of the stream of people flowing ever in and out of the President's open doors. Patriots eager to serve their country but who could find no place in the conventional requirements of the War Office; sharpers who wanted to inveigle him into the traps of profiteers; widows with al their sons in service, pleading for one to be exempted; other parents struggling with the red tape that kept them from sons in hospitals; luxurious frauds prating of their loyalty for the sake of property exemptions; inventors with every imaginable strange device; politicians seeking to cajole him; politicians bluntly threatening him; cashiered officers demanding justice; men with grievances of a myriad sorts; nameless statesmen who sought to teach him his duty; clergymen in large numbers, generally with the same purpose; deputations from churches, societies, political organizations, commissions, trades unions, with every sort of message from flattery to denunciation; and best of all, simple, confiding people who wanted only to say, 'We trust you--God bless you!"
There was a method in this madness of accessibility. Its deepest inspiration, to be sure, was kindness. in reply to a protest that he would wear himself out listening to thousands of requests most of which could not be granted, he replied with one of those smiles in which there was so much sadness, "They don't want much; they get but little, and I must see them."[3]
But there was another inspiration. His open doors enabled him to study the American people, every phase of it, good and bad. "Men moving only in an official circle," said he, "are apt to become merely official--not to say arbitrary--in their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity. . . . Many of the matters brought to my notice are utterly frivolous, but others are of more or less importance, and all serve 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. . . . I call these receptions my public opinion baths; for I have but little time to read the papers, and gather public opinion that way; and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty."[4]
He did not allow his patience to be abused with evil intent. He read his suppliants swiftly. The profiteer, the shirk, the fraud of any sort, was instantly unmasked. "I'll have nothing to do with this business," he burst out after listening to a gentlemanly profiteer; "nor with any man who comes to me with such degrading propositions. What! Do you take the President of the United States to be a commission broker? You have come to the wrong place, and for you and for every one who comes for the same purpose, there is the door."[5]
Lincoln enjoyed this indiscriminate mixing with people. It was his chief escape from care. He saw no reason why his friends should Commiserate him because of the endless handshaking. That was a small matter compared with the interest he took in the ever various stream of human types. Sometimes, indeed, he would lapse into a brown study in the midst of a reception. Then he "would shake hands with thousands of people, seemingly unconscious of what he was doing, murmuring monotonous salutations as they went by, his eye dim, his thoughts far withdrawn. . . Suddenly, he would see some familiar face--his memory for faces was very good-and his eye would brighten and his whole form grow attentive; he would greet the visitor with a hearty grasp and a ringing word and dismiss him with a cheery laugh that filled the Blue Room with infectious good nature."[6] Carpenter, the portrait painter, who for a time saw him daily, says that "his laugh stood by itself. The neigh of a wild horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hearty." An intimate friend called it his "life preserver."[7]
Lincoln's sense of humor delighted in any detail of an event which suggested comedy. His genial awkwardness amused himself quite as much as it amused the world. At his third public reception he wore a pair of white kid gloves that were too small. An old friend approached. The President shook hands so heartily that his glove burst with a popping sound. Holding up his hand, Lincoln gazed at the ruined glove with a droll air while the arrested procession came to a standstill. "Well, my old friend," said he, "this is a general bustification; you and I were never intended to wear these things. If they were stronger they might do to keep out the cold, but they are a failure to shake hands with between old friends like us. Stand aside, Captain, and I'll see you shortly."[8]
His complete freedom from pose, and from the sense of place, was glimpsed by innumerable visitors. He would never allow a friend to address him by a title. 'Call me Lincoln," he would say; "Mr. President is entirely too formal for us."[9]
In a mere politician, all this might have been questioned. But Hawthorne was right as to the people's intuition of Lincoln's honesty. He hated the parade of eminence. Jefferson was his patron saint, and "simplicity" was part of his creed. Nothing could induce him to surround himself with pomp, or even--as his friends thought--with mere security. Rumors of plots against his life were heard almost from the beginning. His friends begged long and hard before he consented to permit a cavalry guard at the gates of the White House. Very soon he countermanded his consent. "It would never do," said he, "for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor."[10]
A military officer, alarmed for his safety, begged him to consider "the fact that any assassin or maniac seeking his life, could enter his presence without the interference of a single armed man to hold him back. The entrance doors, and all doors on the official side of the building, were open at all hours of the day and very late into the evening; and I have many times entered the mansion and walked up to the rooms of the two private secretaries as late as nine or ten o'clock at night, without Seeing, or being challenged by a single soul." But the officer pleaded in vain. Lincoln laughingly paraphrased Charles II, "Now as to political assassination, do you think the Richmond people would like to have Hannibal Hamlin here any more than myself? . . . As to the crazy folks, Major, why I must only take my chances-the most crazy people at present, I fear, being some of my own too zealous adherents."[11] With Carpenter, to whom he seems to have taken a liking, he would ramble the streets of Washington, late at night, "without escort or even the company of a servant."[12] Though Halleck talked him into accepting an escort when driving to and fro between Washington and his summer residence at the Soldiers' Home, he would frequently give it the slip and make the journey on horseback alone. in August of 1862 on one of these solitary rides, his life was attempted. It was about eleven at night; he was "jogging along at a slow gait immersed in deep thought" when some one fired at him with a rifle from near at hand. The ball missed its aim and the President's horse, as Lincoln confided to his familiars, "gave proof of decided dissatisfaction at the racket, and with one reckless bound, he unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug hat . . . At break-neck speed we reached a haven of safety. Meanwhile, I was left in doubt whether death was more desirable from being thrown from a runaway Federal horse, or as the tragic result of a rifle ball fired by a disloyal bushwhacker in the middle of the night"[13]
While carrying his life in his hands in this oddly reckless way, he belied himself, as events were to show, by telling his friends that he fancied himself "a great coward physically," that he felt sure he would make a poor soldier. But he was sufficiently just to himself to add, "Moral cowardice is something which I think I never had."[14]
Lincoln's humor found expression in other ways besides telling stories and laughing at himself. He seized every opportunity to convert a petition into a joke, when this could be done without causing pain. One day, there entered a great man with a long list of favors which he hoped to have granted. Among these was "the case of Betsy Ann Dougherty, a good woman," said the great man. "She lived in my county and did my washing for a long time. Her husband went off and joined the Rebel army and I wish you would give her a protection paper." The pompous gravity of the way the case was presented struck Lincoln as very funny. His visitor had no humor. He failed to see jokes while Lincoln quizzed him as to who and what was Betsy Ann. At length the President wrote a line on a card and handed it to the great man. "Tell Betsy Ann to put a string in this card and hang it round her neck," said he. "When the officers (who may have doubted her affiliations) see this they will keep their hands off your Betsy Ann." On the card was written, "Let Betsy Ann Dougherty alone as long as she behaves herself. A. Lincoln."[15]
This eagerness for a joke now and then gave offense. On one occasion, a noted Congressman called on the President shortly after a disaster. Lincoln began to tell a story. The Congressman jumped up. "Mr. President, I did not come here this morning to hear stories. It is too serious a time." Lincoln's face changed. "Ashley," said he, "sit down! I respect you as an earnest, sincere man. You can not be more anxious than I have been constantly since the beginning of the war; and I say to you now, that were it not for this occasional vent, I should die."[16] Again he said, "When the Peninsula Campaign terminated suddenly at Harrison's Landing, I was as near inconsolable as I could be and live."[17]
Lincoln's imaginative power, the ineradicable artist in him, made of things unseen true realities to his sensibility. Reports of army suffering bowed his spirit. "This was especially' the case when the noble victims were of his own acquaintance, or of the narrower circle of his familiar friends; and then he seemed for the moment possessed of a sense of personal responsibility for their individual fate which was at once most unreasonable and most pitiful." On hearing that two sons of an old friend were desperately wounded and would probably die, he broke out with: "Here, now, are these dear brave boys killed in this cursed war. My God! My God! It is too bad! They worked hard to earn money to educate themselves and this is the end! I loved them as if they were my own."[18] He was one of the few who have ever written a beautiful letter of condolence. Several of his letters attempting this all but impossible task, come as near their mark as such things can. One has become a classic:
"I have been shown," he wrote to Mrs. Bixby, "in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I can not refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."[19]
All these innumerable instances of his sympathy passed from mouth to mouth; became part of a floating propaganda that was organizing the people in his support. To these were added many anecdotes of his mercy. The American people had not learned that war is a rigorous thing. Discipline in the army was often hard to maintain. Impulsive young men who tired of army life, or who quarreled with their officers, sometimes walked away. There were many condemnations either for mutiny or desertion. In the stream of suppliants pouring daily through the President's office, many were parents imploring mercy for rash sons. As every death-warrant had to be signed by the President, his generals were frequently enraged by his refusal to carry out their decisions. "General," said he to an angry commander who charged him with destroying discipline, "there are too many weeping widows in the United States now. -For God's sake don't ask me to add to the number; for I tell you plainly I won't do it."[20]
Here again, kindness was blended with statecraft, mercy with shrewdness. The generals could not grasp the political side of war. Lincoln tried to make them see it. When they could not, he quietly in the last resort counteracted their influence. When some of them talked of European experience, he shook his head; it would not do; they must work with the tools they had; first of all with an untrained people, intensely sensitive to the value of human life, impulsive, quick to forget offenses, ultra-considerate of youth and its rashness. Whatever else the President did, he must not allow the country to think of the army as an ogre devouring its sons because of technicalities. The General saw only the discipline, the morale, of the soldiers; the President saw the far more difficult, the more roundabout matter, the discipline and the morale of the citizens. The one believed that he could compel; the other with his finger on the nation's pulse, knew that he had to persuade.
However, this flowing army of the propaganda did not always engage him on the tragic note. One day a large fleshy man, of a stern but homely countenance and a solemn and dignified carriage, immaculate dress--"swallow-tailed coat, ruffled shirt of faultless fabric, white cravat and orange-colored gloves"--entered with the throng. Looking at him Lincoln was somewhat appalled. He expected some formidable demand. To his relief, the imposing stranger delivered a brief harangue on the President's policy, closing with, "I have watched you narrowly ever since your inauguration. . . . As one of your constituents, I now say to you, do in future as you damn please, and I will support you." "Sit down, my friend," said Lincoln, "sit down. I am delighted to see you. Lunch with us today. Yes, you must stay and lunch with us, my friend, for I have not seen enough of you yet."[21] There were many of these informal ambassadors of the people assuring the President of popular support. And this florid gentleman was not the only one who lunched with the President on first acquaintance.
This casual way of inviting strangers to lunch with him was typical of his mode of life, which was exceedingly simple. He slept lightly and rose early. in summer when he used the Soldiers' Home as a residence, he was at his desk in the White House at eight o'clock in the morning. His breakfast was an egg and a cup of coffee; luncheon was rarely more than a glass of milk and a biscuit with a plate of fruit in season; his dinner at six o'clock, was always a light meal. Though he had not continued a total abstainer, as in the early days at Springfield, he very seldom drank wine. He never used tobacco. So careless was he with regard to food that when Mrs. Lincoln was away from home, there was little regularity in his meals. He described his habits on such occasions as "browsing around."[22]
Even when Mrs. Lincoln was in command at the White House, he was not invariably dutiful. An amusing instance was observed by some high officials. The luncheon hour arrived in the midst of an important conference. Presently, a servant appeared reminding Mr. Lincoln of the hour, but he took no notice. Another summons, and again no notice. After a short interval, the door of the office flew open and the titular "First Lady" flounced into the room, a ruffled, angry little figure, her eyes flashing. With deliberate quiet, as if in a dream, Lincoln rose slowly, took her calmly, firmly by the shoulders, lifted her, carried her through the doorway, set her down, closed the door, and went on with the conference as if unconscious of an interruption.[23] Mrs. Lincoln did not return. The remainder of the incident is unknown.
The burden of many anecdotes that were included in the propaganda was his kindness to children. It began with his own. His little rascal "Tad," after Willie's death, was the apple of his eye. The boy romped in and out of his office. Many a time he was perched on his father's knee while great affairs of state were under discussion.[24] Lincoln could persuade any child from the arms of its mother, nurse, or play fellow, there being a "peculiar fascination in his voice and manner which the little one could not resist."[25] All impressionable, imaginative young people, brought into close association with him, appear to have felt his spell. His private secretaries were his sworn henchmen. Hay's diary rings with admiration-the keen, discriminating, significant admiration of your real observer. Hay refers to him by pet name-"The Ancient," "The Old Man," "The Tycoon." Lincoln's entire relation with these gifted youngsters may be typified by one of Hay's quaintest anecdotes. Lincoln had gone to bed, as so often he did, with a book. "A little after midnight as I was writing . the President came into the office laughing, with a volume of Hood's Works in his hand, to show Nicolay and me the little caricature, 'An Unfortunate Being'; seemingly utterly unconscious that he, with his short shirt hanging about his long legs, and setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich, was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at. What a man it is! occupied all day with matters of vast moment, deeply anxious about the fate of the greatest army of the world, with his own plans and future hanging on the events of the passing hour, he yet has such a wealth of simple bonhomie and good fellowship that he gets out of bed and perambulates the house in his shirt to find us that we may share with him the fun of poor Hood's queer little conceits."[26]
In midsummer, 1863, "The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what a tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, until now. The most important things he decides and there is no cavil. I am growing more convinced that the good of the country demands that he should be kept where he is till this thing is over. There is no man in the country so wise, so gentle, and so firm."[27]
And again, "You may talk as you please of the Abolition Cabal directing affairs from Washington; some well-meaning newspapers advise the President to keep his fingers out of the military pie, and all that sort of thing. The truth is, if he did, the pie would be a sorry mess. The old man sits here and wields, like a backwoods Jupiter, the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand especially steady and equally firm. . I do not know whether the nation is worthy of him for another term. I know the people want him. There is no mistaking that fact. But the politicians are strong yet, and he is not their 'kind of a cat.' I hope God won't see fit to scourge us for our sins by any of the two or three most prominent candidates on the ground."[28] This was the conclusion growing everywhere among the bulk of the people. There is one more cause of it to be reckoned with. Lincoln had not ceased to be the literary statesman. in fact, he was that more effectively than ever. His genius for fable-making took a new turn. Many a visitor who came to find fault, went home to disseminate the apt fable with which the President had silenced his objections and captured his agreement. His skill in narration also served him well. Carpenter repeats a story about An-drew Johnson and his crude but stern religion which in mere print is not remarkable. "I have elsewhere insinuated," comments Carpenter, "that Mr. Lincoln was capable of much dramatic power. . . . It was shown in his keen appreciation of Shakespeare, and unrivaled faculty of Storytelling. The incident just related, for example, was given with a thrilling effect which mentally placed Johnson, for the time being, alongside Luther and Cromwell. Profanity or irreverence was lost sight of in a fervid utterance of a highly wrought and great-souled determination, united with a rare exhibition of pathos and self-abnegation."[29]
In formal literature, he had done great things upon a far higher level than any of his writings previous to that sudden change in his style in 1860. For one, there was the Fast Day Proclamation. There was also a description of his country, of the heritage of the nation, in the third message. Its aim was to give imaginative reality to the national idea; just as the second message had aimed to give argumentative reality.
"There is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary upon which to divide. Trace through from east to west, upon the line between the free and the slave Country and we shall find a little more than one-third of its length are rivers, easy to be crossed, and populated, or soon to be populated, thickly upon both sides; while nearly all its remaining length are merely surveyors' lines, over which people may walk back and forth without any consciousness of their presence. No part of this line can be made any more difficult to pass by writing it down on paper or parchment as a national boundary.
"But there is another difficulty. The great interior region, bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets, and which includes part of Virginia, part of Tennessee, all of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Territories of Dakota, Nebraska, and part of Colorado, already has above ten millions of people, and will have fifty millions within fifty years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the Country owned by the United States--certainly more than one million square miles. Once half as populous as Massachusetts already is, it would have more than seventy-five millions of people. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it, the magnificent region sloping west from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific being the deepest and also the richest in undeveloped resources. In the production of provisions, grains, grasses, and all which proceed from them, this great interior region is naturally one of the most important in the world. Ascertain from the statistics the small proportion of the region which has, as yet, been brought into cultivation, and also the large and rapidly increasing amount of its products and we shall be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the prospect presented; and yet, this region has no seacoast, touches no ocean anywhere. As part of one nation, its people now find, and may forever find, their way to Europe by New York, to South America and Africa by New Orleans, and to Asia by San Francisco. But separate our common country into two nations as designed by the present rebellion, and every man of this great interior region is thereby cut off from some one or more of these outlets-not, perhaps, by a physical barrier, but by embarrassing and onerous trade regulations.
"And this is true wherever a dividing or boundary line may be fixed. Place it between the now free and slave country, or place it south of Kentucky or north of Ohio, and still the truth remains that none south of it can trade to any port or place north of it, and none north of it can trade to any port or place south of it, except upon terms dictated by a government foreign to them. These outlets east, west, and south, are indispensable to the well-being of the people inhabiting and to inhabit, this vast interior region. Which of the three may be the best is no proper question. All are better than either; and all of right belong to that people and ?o their Successors forever. True to themselves, they will not ask where a line of separation shall be, but will vow rather that there shall be no such line. Nor are the marginal regions less interested in these communications to and through them to the great outside world. They, too, and each of them, must have access to this Egypt of the West without paying toll at the crossing of any national boundary.
"Our national strife springs not from our permanent part, not from the land we inhabit, not from our national homestead. There is no possible severing of this but would multiply, and not mitigate, evils among us. In all its adaptations and aptitudes it demands union and abhors separation. In fact, it would ere long, force reunion, however much of blood and treasure the separation might have cost."[30]
A third time he made a great literary stroke, gave utterance, in yet another form, to his faith that the national idea was the one constant issue for which he had asked his countrymen, and would continue to ask them, to die. it was at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863, in consecration of a military burying-ground, that he delivered, perhaps, his greatest utterance:
"But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate--we can not consecrate--we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, for the people, by the people, shall not perish from the earth."[31]