Abraham Lincoln's Cardinal Traits;

Many phases of this profound coincidence of the life of Lincoln with the Nation's life come into sight whenever his life's career is carefully reviewed. But among all the illustrations of his self-submergence deep within the overflowing fullness of our national history, there is one that demonstrates his tender kindliness beyond all possibility of refutation. This is his profound participation with the Nation in her fate because of slavery. Around this awful issue circles all the thought of this, as of the first address. That this puissant co-efficient of our national history was somehow the cause of the existing war he said that all men felt. He registered his own opinion that all the sorrows of the war were in requital for that sin. Into those sorrows no man entered more profoundly than did Lincoln himself. They sobered all his joy. They solemnized him utterly. It is true few heard his groans. In his patience he was mainly silent. None ever heard him make complaint. All impulse to resentment was subdued. But the nation's sorrows were on his heart. Through all those days he was our confessor, self-sacrificed, sorrow-laden, faithful absolutely, but uncomplaining. Upon his head an angry, unanimous South, and many thousands in the North dealt vengeful, malicious blows, denying him all joy, crying out against him ruthlessly. All this he bore, as though he heard them not, and continued day and night to seek the Nation's peace. With marvelous freedom from malice himself, with fullness of charity for all, he taught a Nation how a Nation's sorrows should be patiently borne. And yet through all the days, in all this land, no man was more purely innocent of the Nation's sin of slavery than this same man. Here is friendship. Here is neighborly compassion written large. This is generosity, untinctured with any selfish reservation. Amid all the sorrows and fortunes of our history no sight is half as pathetic as this deep, free, silent companionship of Lincoln with his Nation's griefs in the deepest period of her affliction. And yet he almost seemed to cherish his fate. He bore it all so quietly, and with such a steady heart and eye, that in his seeming calm we are unconscious of his pain. He gives no hint of faltering and drawing back. He even strove repeatedly to lure the Nation to his side, to enter into sacrificial fellowship with the hapless South. But to nothing of this would the people hear.

This commanding fact, the moral mutualness of the innocent Lincoln's sorrows with the sorrows of a guilty land, is a primary factor in this historic scene. From such a moral complication momentous questions emerge. How can such confusion of moral issues be ever justified? Why do guilty and innocent suffer and sorrow alike? In such a glaring moral inequality how could Lincoln himself ever bring his candid mind to honestly acquiesce? Why should a later generation suffer vengeance for their father's sins? Why the black man's fate? How can moral judgments diverge so hopelessly upon such basic moral themes? If God's judgment is just, why are his judgments upon such inhumanity so long delayed? How about those kindred sufferings of those earlier days that for total generations were unavenged? Questions such as these must have risen in Lincoln's mind as he drained his bitter cup. Such questions are not to be evaded or suppressed. It should rather be said that Lincoln's undeniable gentleness in enduring, as the Nation's head, and for his country's sake, a Nation's curse for a national sin forces just such questions into sharpest definition, and focuses them insistently and unavoidably before every thoughtful eye. They are shaped and fastened here solely to render aid in indicating, as they undeniably do, the supreme refinement of Lincoln's friendliness. He held by kindly fellowship with his fellowmen, even when that fellowship involved his innocent life in the moral shame and pain of their reprobation and woe. Here is an interchange of guilt and innocence, in Lincoln's undeniable experience, undeniably resolved and harmonized. Here is human kindliness, triumphant, transcending all debate.

Around this exalted illustration of the strength and purity of Lincoln's benevolence cluster many statements eager to be heard. His kindness showed in many ways, but they were all but varying, accordant forms of pure neighborliness. His mastery of all malice, his unfailing charity, the kindliness of his cherished hope, his companionship with others' sorrow, his longings for peace at home and among all men, his pity for the bereft, his tenderness before our human wounds, his reluctance to go to war, his championship of the oppressed, his willingness to bear another's blame, his silence before abuse, his mighty predilections towards universal friendliness, are all concordant and coincident types and forms of his prevailing, spontaneous companionship with men. Each phase deserves elaborate description. But it is in closer keeping with the treatment here to name some general qualities of his kindliness, qualities that are common to all its forms.

His friendliness was immediate. When human needs appealed for comfort and aid, it was not his way to send a deputy. He appeared himself. Here is something nothing less than marvelous. An intimate friend of all, he stood in conscious touch with all the Nation's citizenship. At first thought this may seem to be in consequence and by means of his eminence and office as the people's president. As chief executive of the people's will, and as foremost representative citizen, he stood for every man in that man's place; and his universal friendliness found open avenues to every individual citizen's consciousness. Here is truth. But this truth only partially meets this case. The operations of his benevolence were somehow independent of space and time. His tours while president were short and few. Back and forth between the White House, the war office, and the soldier's home he wore a historic path. It is almost overwhelmingly sad to realize how almost all his movements while president were within the sorrow-shadowed walls and the hidden solitudes of his official home. As said before, he seemed to exist apart from men, in a pathetic isolation. Nevertheless, it is plain to all that Lincoln's uncalculating generosity reached, like the shining of the sun, to the limits of the land. It is most surprising when one thinks. But when one thinks, it is most clear that there was in Lincoln's kindliness a Nation-wide capacity for intimacy. In the open genial presence of his good-will all men feel they have an immediate and equal share. And this holds true whether one is near enough to feel the warmth of his living breath, or whether half a continent intervenes.

This fact forces into view and consciousness the pure excellence of his love. It was in its nature deeply real. He did in verity live close to every man. He wore no distant air. He practised no reserve. He felt and proved himself to be the kin of all. His pictured face and published speech were a perfect symbol, a convincing pledge to every honest man of close and equal partnership. His ways are often said to have been homely. But their very homeliness was all human and all humane. And in his presence, or in the presence of any truthful impress or echo of his life, no honest nature but feels itself instantly at ease and quite at home. This habitude in him of overcoming distance, and absence, and all other obstacles to his far-ranging love, and winning entrance everywhere into the affections of all kindly men, is a notable stamp upon the total texture of his friendliness. He stood with men in personal partnership, immediate, intimate, real.

And in all his intimate and immediate fellowship with men his personal contribution was entire. In his co-partnership he had no treasure too precious to invest. He gave his all. Imposing, almost impossible as is the meaning of these words, all mankind do recognize, and that with wondering reverence, that when Lincoln rose to take the presidential oath, he held nothing back. In his service of the Union he invested his life, his honor, his hope, even all he had. It was little else he had to give. His lineage was of the lowliest. His education was of the meagerest, and wholly a by-achievement. In social graces he was quite unversed and unadorned. He was no flatterer. The fawner's dialect he never knew. He would not boast. To beg he was ashamed. He was too honest for any knavery. Pure integrity was his only asset. As he took his stand at the presidential post, he stood without a single decoration, unsupported, all alone. It was literal truth that when he took his official oath the only bond he had to furnish was his naked honor. But that possession was no counterfeit. Its value did not fluctuate. It was solid gold. In his honest rating, the plighted faith in the words of his official pledge was beyond all price. As he discerned and understood the crisis of his day, the Nation's very being was at mortal stake. And when in that momentous hour she summoned him to take the presidency, she laid sovereign requisition upon his total being. And when he obeyed the call, he invested all. No reserve of his possession was kept in hiding for his refuge and reimbursement, in case the Nation failed. He ventured all he had, even all his honor. And this complete consignment by Lincoln to the Nation's use of all his moral wealth, of all his pure and priceless personal worth, was an act of unalloyed benignity. It was for the Nation's welfare that he devoted himself. It was that the Union might be preserved, and that all men might be free, that he plighted his integrity.

This investment of Lincoln's friendliness for the well-being of all the land, even of all the men therein, was not alone immediate, winning direct attachment to every man; nor merely all-absorbing on Lincoln's part, impressing into kindly service every value and every capacity of his total life; it also enshrined a deathless hope. Lincoln's patriotic devotedness was no venture of a day or of a decade. Lincoln's good-will looked far ahead. He had a passion for immortality. His total effort and aim in all his generous endeavors and hopes, as he served in his public life, can be defined as a sovereign aspiration that our government should be so guided and chastened in all its life that the Union should never be dissolved. To his kindly heart no possible event seemed more appalling than that this hope should fail. So far as his words reveal, this central, sovereign passion of his glowing heart was all but exclusively patriotic. He apparently forgot himself in his wistful anxious hope that the Nation's peace might long endure. His faith in the Union's indestructibility may be said to spring out of his undying continual love for his fellowman. Indeed just here seems to be the birthplace of all his prophetic ponderings over the final issues of our civic life. The very stature of the government which his ideal conceived and which he thankfully saw that our Republic designed, was deemed by him to be copied from nothing other than the divinely fashioned moral nature which he found alike in himself and in all his fellowmen. Deep within his friendly heart he cherished the vision of a Republic of freemen leagued together indissolubly as mutual friends. It was to realize and certify that hope that he dedicated his life. And when he pledged and sealed that offering, it was with no design that the seal should ever be broken, or the pledge be ever recalled. Here is another primary quality of Lincoln's friendliness. It was inwrought with personal durability. Grounded as was his civic hope in the freedom and conscience of Godlike men, it was impossible for him to consent that such a hope should ever encounter defeat or decay. Deep and sure within its essential nature were the urgent promptings and the soaring promise of immortality.

These observations upon the immediate directness, the integral whole-heartedness, and the deathless eagerness of Lincoln's friendliness, if thoughtfully compared together, reveal that these distinctive phases of his outpouring good-will are in nature identically the same, and spring from an identical source. This essential coincidence, this mutual convergence deserves attention. It intimates wherein the very essence and being of his neighborly kindness consists. And in Lincoln's life this indication of the precise whereabouts and substance of the essential and innermost quality and being of human kindliness is certain and clear, as in hardly any other man. His benignance in his dealings with men is of well-nigh unparalleled openness and freedom from all admixture and alloy. Lincoln's kindness embodies and conveys Lincoln's self. In every favor from him he is in the gift. In the center of all the friendliness that is characteristic of Lincoln, Lincoln himself stands erect and entire, offering and commending in every case his full-sized, undivided self. This is the core and this the circumference, this is the sum and this the substance of his good-will. It is rich with all his personal wealth, solid with all his personal worth. In him an act of friendship was an inauguration of personal copartnership. In his good-will was all the energy of his life. In his benefactions he gave himself. Just so with his compassions. With the sorrows of humanity it was his way to enter into personal fellowship. This was the form and being of all his generosity. His mastery over all malice when facing a foe, his abounding charity when judging a wrong, his hearty gladness in the presence of human joy, his cordial ways in greeting friends, his fatherly affection for his boy, his love for his native land, his pity in presence of the bereft, his sadness at sight of wounds, his readiness to share evenly with all his Nation all that guilty Nation's painful discipline – all this variety and plenitude of ample, open-hearted tenderness towards other men was alike and always the complete and conscious contribution of himself. In brief, in full, and finally, Lincoln's friendliness, through all its beautiful versatility, was a free and facile, a full and total, personal self-devotion. This is the common content giving all its value to all the forms of his human kindliness.

His Pureness – Life

In the exposition just foregoing, the thought has been drawn into allusions to Lincoln's premonitions or aspirations towards immortality, for the Union, if not for himself. This was in the course of an effort to find the spring-head of his kindliness. And it culminated in the suggestion that deep within Lincoln's being there was enshrined an assurance, however unconfessed or even half unconscious, of personal immortality. And that from within this shrine of living hope, common to him with every man, he drew his inspiration and his very pattern of a national Union and a national peace that would endure forever.

Here is something that calls for examination, for in this we touch a radical quality of Lincoln's moral being. This eager craving after permanence was in him an appetite that could never be fed or satisfied by any things that perish. In itself and in its nutriment there is an irrepealable call for something indefeasable, something utterly superior to all fear of death, something never amenable to any form of dissolution or decay, something spiritually pure, and essentially kindred to the essential being of a deathless soul.

The matter may be approached to start with by saying some things negatively. Lincoln was centrally in no sense a materialist. He was indeed firmly sensitive to the physical majesties of this continent, though in his day they were hardly half disclosed. He calculated with carefulness our material capacities for expansion in power and wealth. He foresaw our certain outward growth into a puissant Nation, the coveted and ample resort and refuge and home of hordes of men from other lands. In his own well-seasoned and resourceful physique he felt and knew the worth of physical virility. He could thoughtfully compute the glittering values, the goodly financial revenues, the days and months and total seasons of physical idleness and delights that accrue to human owners from the unrequited toil of human slaves. And in the current civil war he completely understood that no less a concern than the perpetuity of the American Union was pending upon contests largely consisting of encounters of physical prowess, of tests of muscular endurance and strength.

But not in calculations such as these did his thoughtful studies of human welfare take ultimate resort, or find final rest. His conception of the ideal state, of the ideal citizen, of the ideal life, was not constructed or inspired from carnal elements. He noted with life-long sadness the sordid baseness inseparably attending the fact of owning or being a slave. He deeply saw that those battles in the Wilderness were no mere conflicts of beasts. And never could he imagine or allow that his personal weight, and force, and worth were ratable by gymnastic tests. It was not upon things like these that Lincoln's attention and hope were fixed, when his hopes and plans for our prosperity took form. To the whole world of his material environment he was marvelously indifferent. On every perusal of his life one grieves at the story of his poverty, and the sad infrequency and meagerness in his daily life of the pleasures and recreations which are for the comfort and happiness of men in material things. But in this he seems as though unconscious of any disappointment. For himself as for the Nation, and for the Nation as for himself, his satisfaction and confidence were not born and fed of things that perish in their use. Luxury in food or attire, however toothsome or attractive to other natures, stirred but the feeblest hankerings, if any at all, in him. Towards sensualism of any sort, whether gluttony, drunkenness or lust, his sound and temperate manliness did not incline. And in his estimate of personal character his eye and respect did not rest in outer attitudes, on printed, age-long codes of manner. He was no slave of stately ceremonies, or artificial etiquette. Nor in religion did he bind his tongue to creeds however hoary, nor to rituals however august. He swore not by the oaths of any sect, however ancient and renowned. Neither in this mountain nor in that did he worship God.

But on the other hand, and now to speak affirmatively, Lincoln lived no penury-stricken life. The resources within his personality were well-nigh incalculable. Few men in all our national catalogue have been endowed by God with so sterling and abundant interior wealth. And of all American patriotic benefactors few indeed have left in their single individual name and right such priceless legacies to their native land. What is life? What is human life? Wherein, completely and precisely wherein, is man distinguishable from the beast? For answer, study Lincoln and see. In the full development of such a study many massive verities will unfold. But the feature in Lincoln's manhood, which this chapter is set apart to designate and clarify, is the simple purity, the elemental spirituality of all his elemental traits. His dominant sentiments, his primary convictions, his main and all-mastering decisions were never born to die. They were instinct with life, with life indeed, a life never failing, ever more abundant and free.

This interior vitality, this unalloyed and undecaying purity may be described one way as a real idealism. But in ascribing idealism to Lincoln, it needs to be said at once that Lincoln's idealism, real and glorious as it must surely be confessed to be, was transparently and unvaryingly practical. In one way it may be defined as hope. A waiting hope was a standard characteristic of Lincoln's attitude. His sorrowful eye held fast to things as yet unrealizable. It is impressive to see how often and how fondly he mentioned the future, the "vast future," as he termed it, of our American career. The secret of the beauty and of the power of some of his loftiest and most spontaneous rhetoric is due to just this solemn eagerness towards the coming days. As one comes to study more intently into the outlay of his heroic strength, his struggle and toil are seen to be leashed about his consuming wish that the Nation in its undivided might could be unified about the speedy fulfillment of his prophetic aims. He never forgot the mighty lesson, nor lost the living inspiration of his own advancement from humblest station of ignorance and toiling poverty to the presidency. That transformation he loved to humbly hold before the attention of his fellow Americans, as a pattern of what might anywhere occur again. He loved to linger upon the possibilities of upward movement in the ranks of all laboring men. Large place and honorable position were given to this arousing theme in his first annual message to Congress. This general topic – the far-set, soaring possibilities of human betterment – held constant and commanding eminence in the ranging measure of his eagle-searching thought. For the Nation, and for its every inhabitant, he was a true idealist.

But Lincoln's idealism, again be it said, was no wild indulgence of a vagrant and untrained imagination. It was utterly sober-minded. It took its form and found its force in the center of his sanest thoughtfulness. The terms in which its description has just been illustratively traced show it to be perfectly rational, and even matter-of-fact. Lincoln's idealism was nothing else but a heedful interpretation of the proper destiny of man. It was a reflection in terms of carefulest thought, albeit also in the guise of ardent hope, of the essential lineaments in the nature of man. And no human portrait by any artist was ever truer to fact, while yet tinged with fancy, pure and free. In all his picturing of things yet to be, but not yet in hand, his eye was fastened with an anatomist's intentness upon the actual human nature imperishably present in every man. Nothing that Lincoln's idealism ever proposed ever diverged from the bounds of the original fiat creating all men equal and free. That undeniable initial verity, itself the keystone of our national Constitution and Bill of Rights, supplied to Lincoln's hope its total and only inspiration. In those ancient and elemental realities, realities that deeply underlie and long outlast all the cults and customs and centuries which human thought is so prone to differentiate and divide, Lincoln detected solid foundations and ample warrant for age-long, undissolving expectations. In every human face there are outlines that are forever indelible. These unfailing lineaments Lincoln had the eye to see. And what is vastly more, he had the courage and the honesty to adopt them as the pattern of the platform, and to voice them as the notes of the battle-peal of his statesmanship. And this he did right wittingly, knowing assuredly that therein his vision had caught the gleam of things eternal; that therein he had made discovery that man, even the humblest of his race, could claim to be, as he phrased it to a company of blacks, "kindred to the great God who made him." This amounts to saying that Lincoln's statesmanship may be completely and precisely defined as the studied and deliberate exploitation, upon the field of politics, of those forces, central and common in all mankind, that are Godlike, immortal, spiritual.

Here we reach a definition that outlines with close precision a trait of Lincoln's full-formed character that held a primary place in winning for Lincoln his immortal renown. He attached himself to things themselves immortal. His ideal hope had no admixture of clay, nor even of gold. He made no composition or compromise with anything that dies. His supreme desire was of a nature never to decay. It was pure with the deathless purity of the human soul. To this pure principle, eternal loyalty to the immortal dignity of man, he signed and sealed his soul's allegiance with bonds that even death could never relax. Such statements describe a primary co-efficient in Lincoln's ethical life. Abjuring the unnumbered allurements of the material world, allurements whose fascinations unfailingly fade, and reposing his confidence wholly in treasures that time and use only brighten and refine, Lincoln reveals in the realm of ethics the singular excellence of an ideal that can kindle in an immortal man an immortal hope. Purging every sort of baseness out of the central life, and enthroning an all-refining pureness in the sovereign desires and visions and designs, he has inaugurated in the field of civics an idealism that will honor every man, fit actual life, and endure forever. Personal pureness, this pervades the life of Lincoln as crystalline beauty pervades a block of marble.

This refining trait in Lincoln, this inner hunger for his living soul's true nutriment, this thirst for the pure, perennial springs, finds signal illustration in the closing sentence of this last inaugural, where he pleads with all his fellow-citizens to so conduct all civic interests as to secure among ourselves and with all Nations a "lasting peace." That craving after permanence in civic harmony betokens an impulse towards immortality; and rests down, as the entire inaugural explains, upon that only basis of enduring civic quietude, an honest and universal recognition and respect for those indelible and universal lineaments of personal dignity which the Creator of men has traced upon every human soul – lineaments from which the obscuring dross of centuries was being purged in the Providential fires of an awful war. Just this was the meaning of the war, as Lincoln understood its work. That earth-born sordidness which marked all slaves as common chattels, was being burnt out of our national life, as our basest national sin. Thenceforth, forevermore, it was Lincoln's living hope that all mankind might peacefully agree to supremely cherish and mutually respect those human values that human unfriendliness, and centuries of contempt, however deeply they may obscure, can never obliterate. Upon such enduring foundations, and upon such foundations alone, Lincoln clearly saw, could human peace endure.

And upon this same foundation rests his first inaugural as well. In all those months of special study, ensuing between his election in November of 1860 and his inauguration in March in 1861, and for an ample seven years before, Lincoln was feeling after civic perpetuity. And when he stood before the Nation to publish his first inaugural address, his supreme concern was fixed upon the threatened and impending ruin of the Republic. He there faced a menacing South, irreconcilable, and resolute for dissolution or blood. That outcrying situation brought final issues near. Must the Union perish? Could the Union endure? Civic dissolution or civic perpetuity – this was the immediate, the unrelieved, the ominous alternative. In the fiery heat of civic hate, flaming into civil war, Lincoln had to seek for civic principles that hate could not subvert, nor the fires of war consume; principles too strong to admit defeat, too pure to be dissolved.

Never did a statesman bend over a graver task, nor with a more honest and patient heart, nor with a mind more divinely fashioned and furnished to comprehend and penetrate the actual case in hand. As in a chemist's alembic, he fused and tried our Constitution and all our history. Into that first inaugural he incorporated the issues of his thought. And this was its simple, sole result: – Slavery is "the only substantial dispute." With the people is "ultimate justice." With God is "ultimate truth." We are not "enemies." We are "friends." In this supreme dispute let us confer and legislate as friends, and then as friends live together in an amity that shall be perpetual. This is the uncompounded essence of his first inaugural, as of all his political philosophy. In universal freedom, by mutual persuasion, and in even friendliness, let our Union forever endure. Here again is a statesman's publication and heroic defense of a pure, immortal hope, voiced in an appeal and upheld by arguments as spiritual and pure as the inmost being and utmost destiny of the living souls of men.

No study of the transcendent momentum in Lincoln's life of spiritual realities can fairly overlook his speech in Peoria, October 16, 1854. It is, as he said at the time, "substantially" a repetition of an address at Springfield, twelve days before. It "made Lincoln a power in national politics." It was the commanding beginning of his commanding career. That year, 1854, began the convulsion which made him president, involved the war, and ended in his violent death. As matters stood on New Year of 1854, slavery was, by act of Congress in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thenceforth forbidden to spread anywhere in United States territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri. In the early half of 1854 Senator Douglas drove through Congress a bill, creating the territory of Nebraska, which declared the Compromise prohibition of 1820 "inoperative and void." Thenceforth slavery might spread anywhere. This is the "repeal" of the Missouri Compromise.

That "repeal" brought Lincoln to his feet. And from the day of that Peoria speech Lincoln was, to seeing eyes, a man of destiny. For, not for that day, nor for that century, nor for this continent alone did Lincoln frame and join that speech. Let any logical mind attempt a logical synthesis of that address, marking well what affirmations are supreme. Not out of conditions that vary with the latitudes, nor out of opinions that change as knowledge improves, and not from sentiments that bloom and fade as do the passing flowers, was that address constructed. It handles things eternal. Its central propositions outwear the centuries. Its conclusions are compounded from stuff that is indestructible. And the piers upon which they rest are as steadfast as the everlasting hills. Freedom, union, perpetuity were its only positive themes. Let us "save the Union" was its central call; and "so" save it as to "make and keep it forever worth the saving" – so save it "that the succeeding generations of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed to the latest generations." The perpetual Union of freemen – this was his one pure hope. Of this freedom slavery was a "total violation." Such a Union the principle of secession made forever impossible. And in the continual presence of tyranny, and under ever impending threats of disruption, perpetuity in peace was an impossibility. Liberty, equality, loyalty – only upon these enduring verities could self-government ever be built, or ever abide. Here is stability. Here is harmony. Here are truths "self-evident." Against cruelty, disloyalty, and pride these eternal principles are in "eternal antagonism." And when the two collide, "shocks and throes and convulsions must continually follow." Against human slavery, and all that human slavery entails, humanity instinctively and universally revolts. It is condemned by human righteousness and human sympathy alike. "Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature."

Thus Lincoln bound together the arguments of this appeal. The irrepealability of the human sympathies in the nature of all men, the undeniable humanity of the black, self-government built upon the creative fiat of freedom and equality for all – upon these enduring propositions a Nation could be built whose resources either to eliminate all evils, pacify all convulsions, and resolve all debates, or to achieve a lasting progress, dignity and peace, would be inexhaustible. Thus, at the very start, his eye pierced through the political turmoil of his time, fixing in the central place before the Nation's gaze those "great and durable" elements which "no statesman can safely disregard."

Plainly notable in all this is that powerful and habitual proclivity in Lincoln to find out and publish abroad those civic propositions and principles that are inwrought with perpetuity. He was straining and toiling towards a triumph that time could never reverse. Foundations that were sure to shift, or disintegrate, or sink away, he was resolute to overturn, and clear away. He chose and strove to toil and speak for the immortal part in man, for ages yet to come, and for the immediate justice of Almighty God. And so he fashioned forth a programme that, like the programme of the Hebrew prophets, circumvented death.

His Constancy – Truth

This second inaugural contains a fine example of free and reasoned reliability. It is in fact, in its total stature, a stately exhibit of deliberate steadfastness. Let this short document be read, meanwhile remembering that other inaugural document, and not forgetting all the unspeakable strain and struggles of those four intervening years. The man who spoke in 1861, and the man who speaks now again in 1865, stands forth in the heart of those bewildering confusions of our political life, a living embodiment of civic constancy. In his person national firmness stands enshrined. In those ripe convictions, in those cool and poised determinations, in those ardent, prophetic desires – steadfast, consistent, and sure – are traceable the rock-like foundations of our confederate Republic. In those inaugurals stands a monument not liable soon to crumble away. But within that monument insuring its durability, rests as within and upon a steadfast throne, Lincoln's everlasting fidelity.

To win clear vision of this fine trait, let one read again this second inaugural, and locate truly the center of gravity of its second paragraph. There Lincoln is tracing in broad, plain strokes the origin and on-coming of the war. In the center of his steady thought the interest centrally at stake was the Union. On the one hand he recalls his own address at his first inauguration, "devoted," as he says, "altogether to saving the Union without war." On the other hand, he recalls "insurgent agents" seeking to destroy it without war. War was deprecated and dreaded by both parties. But one would make war rather than let the Nation survive. And the other would accept war rather than let the Nation perish. "And the war came." As a register of Lincoln's capacity for free, intelligent stability, no passing glance can in any sense exhaust or apprehend the depth and sweep and energy of those last four words. When loyalty to the Union was the issue and interest at stake, Lincoln would "accept war." "And the war came."

When Lincoln voiced those four words, his eye was looking back through four dreadful, bloody years – years, whether in prospect or in reminiscence, fit to make any human heart recoil. But as he surveys those scenes of hate and carnage and desolation, retracing and reckoning again the sum of their awful sorrow and cost, and rehearses again his resolution to "accept the war," it is without a shadow or a hint of wavering or remorse. In fact he is recalling that fateful day of four years before with an eye to review and vindicate that fateful resolve. At the end of those eventful and sorrow-laden years, he is as steady as at their start. Not by the breadth of a hair have his footing and purpose, his judgment and endeavor been made to swerve. Then as now, now as then, his loyalty is absolute. And in that sturdy loyalty of that lone man a seeing eye discerns nothing less than the unbending majesty of a Nation's self-respect. It is the Nation's sacred honor that he has in sacred charge. In him the integrity of the Nation at large finds a champion and a living voice. In his firm-set decision the Nation's destiny takes shape. In those short pregnant words the proud consistency of our total national career, and his superb reliability, become, instantly and for all time, freely, nobly, and completely identified. This is not to say that in the teeming history of those eventful years Lincoln's mind and will and sentiments had stood in stolid immobility. He freely concedes that the years have brought him lessons he had never foreseen. And his central attitude in this second scene is a reverent inquiry into the ways of Him whose purposes transcend all human wisdom, and require full centuries to complete. But strong and clear within his reverent and lowly acceptance of divine rebukes, stands unbent and unchanged his steadfast, invincible pledge to reveal, on his own and on his Nation's behalf, the sovereign grandeur of civic reliability.

In his first message to Congress this integral trait of his personal and official life finds majestic and most definite explication. It is the passage explaining to Congress, in precise and minute recital, just how the war began. It deals with those ominous events in Charleston harbor, centering about heroic Major Anderson, a federal officer, and within Fort Sumter, a federal fort. That assault upon a national garrison by Confederate guns was no haphazard event. At just that moment, and in just that spot the national crisis became acute. Upon that spot, and upon those events Lincoln's eye was fixed with a physician's anxiety. There he knew he could feel the pulse of the resentment and resolution of the South. Day and night he held his finger upon its feverish beat. And as the fever rose, he marked with exactest attentiveness its registration of one condition of the Southern heart: – Was that heart so hot with civic hate that, when every lesser issue was set aside, and the only issue under review was the right of the Republic to stand by its officers and its flag, then those Southern leaders would fire upon those officials in a federal fort, and pull down that flag upon federal soil? If in a federal fort the major in command, and his uniformed men, while making no aggression nor voicing any threat, but acting only as peaceful exponents of the Nation's authority, and being in exigent need of food, were to be visited by a national transport bearing nought but bread, upon such a ship, upon such a mission, would seceding soldiers open fire? If they would, and if that onslaught passed without rebuke, then that Nation's federal integrity was dissolved. Such was the unmixed issue, and so sharply edged was its final and decisive definition under Lincoln's hand. And on his part there was here no accident. With foresight, and by careful design Lincoln "took pains" to make the problem plain. With impressive and ideal carefulness he guided the action of his own heart to its final resolution, and predetermined the final verdict of the world.

In the last supreme alternative, when government agents stand in need of food, and citizens who repudiate all loyalty fire upon government transports freighted only with bread, what shall a government do? This was the naked question that Lincoln faced, when he decided to accept and prosecute the war. Upon this one plain question, and upon his one convinced determination he massed and compacted his first Congressional address. Right well he understood its point, its gravity, and its range. And surpassing well was he fitted to be the man to frame and demonstrate the true reply. In all the land no finer, firmer exemplar of elemental constancy could ever have been found to guide and cheer the Nation's course in this extremest test of elemental self-respect. Let those words be written and read again. It was a test of national self-respect, elemental and supreme. It was a question that concerned, as Lincoln saw and said, "the whole family of man." "Government of the people, by the same people" – can or cannot such a government "maintain its own integrity against its own domestic foes?" Can it "maintain its own integrity?" Can it master "its own domestic foes?" Can men who assume their self-control be trusted to maintain their self-respect? Here is a problem that is in verity elemental and supreme. What, in very deed and in solid fact, what is civic reliability? Where, among all the governments by men, where can steadfastness, civic steadfastness be found? Nowhere, Lincoln had the eyes to see; nowhere, but in the civic constancy of men at once governing and governed. Only thus and only there, only so and only here, in this heaven-favored land, did Lincoln see, can any government of men by men find fundamental base and final form that shall be consistent, stable, and real. This is government indeed. Here is elemental, civic verity. A community held in common self-control upon the basis of common self-respect – such a union alone has constancy. This is the sublime and radical civic truth that Lincoln forged out upon his steadfast heart, as he bent with mighty ponderings over those scenes in Charleston harbor, and reviewed and expounded their pregnant implications in his initial message to Congress in 1861.

In many ways this constancy of Lincoln rewards attentive thought. For one thing, it was radiant with intelligence. Indeed in him the two became identified. As thus conceived, it shows as pure and clear consistency. His fully tried reliability was the well-poised balance of a mind long-schooled in the art of steadiest deliberation. When Lincoln held immutably fast, it was due to his invincible faith that the conviction to which he clung involved abiding truth. This quality tempered all his firmness. Just here one finds the genesis and motive of all his skilled invention of reasoned, pleading speech. Lincoln's prevailing power of urgent argument roots in the deep persistency of his convinced belief. It was because of an impassioned confidence, an assurance that was vibrant with a note of triumph, that his grasp of any ruling purpose was so unwaveringly firm. This was his mood and attitude in all the major contentions of his life. To the central tenets that those contentions involved he held with all the firmness of the rooted hills. Touching those primary principles in his character and politics his mind and faith seem to have attained an absolute confirmation. And from those settled positions he could never be moved. Constancy in him was nothing more nor less than the energetic affirmation of intellectual rectitude.

His steadfastness, thus, was a mental poise. It can be defined as ripened judgment, a conclusion of thought, safeguarded on every side by a discernment not easily confused, by a penetration not easy to escape. This involved a wonderful flexibility. While steadfast unto the grade of immutability, where honor was involved, no student of his ways could call him obstinate. While firm and strong enough to hold the Nation to her predestined course upon an even keel, he held her helm with a gentle, pliant grasp. Being in every mental trait inherently honest and deliberate, he could at once be resolute and free.

This blend within his being of thoughtfulness and determination, of openness and immutability, this candid, conscientious, mental poise, this Godlike apprehension of the larger equilibrium, qualified him peculiarly to interpret the major movements of his time, to trace in the deep, prevailing sentiments of the human soul the chart of our national destiny.

Here is in Lincoln something wonderful. Among the millions of his fellowmen he counts but one. But in the range and grasp of his thought, in the eager passion of his heart, in the controlling power of his commanding will, he comprehends them all. Stable and heedful at once, he could challenge unanswerably every man's esteem. His symbol is the firm, benignant oak, the sheltering, abiding hills. Thus he stood to help and hold, to serve and rule among his fellowmen. Thus he wrought coherence into our great career. Thus he linked together those mighty political events with a logic which succeeding times have proved powerless to refute, but strong and glad to confirm. He had marvelous capacity to divine. With him to reason was to illuminate. Things bewilderingly obscure, within his thought and speech grew plain. He was our prime interpreter. He explained the Nation to itself. But in every such elucidation the Nation was made to co-operate. His instinctive, habitual attitude toward other men was that of a conferee. He was sensitively open to complaints and appeals. Delegations and private supplicants always found him courteous. This courtesy was never formal. To a degree altogether noteworthy the words of other men found entrance into the counselings of his mind. He was not merely accessible. He was impressible, sensitive, quick to appreciate and honor the sentiments of another man. With the earnest plea of balanced, honest argument, hailing from whatever source, he was facile to correspond. His judgments and decisions were amenable to estimates wholly novel to him. Indeed, to an almost astonishing degree his major movements were commensurate with the progress and pace of the national events that environed his life. In some of his mightiest accomplishments he seemed to do little more than register the conclusions of the national mind.

All this is to say that Lincoln's constancy was poise, not obstinacy; a well-reflected equilibrium, not a stiff rigidity. All his steadiness was studied. Never can it be said of Lincoln that his verdicts were snap judgments. On the contrary, with him deliberation and delay were so habitual and so excessively indulged, while pondering some massive, political perplexity, that the patience of some of our greatest statesmen repeatedly broke down, and he was charged repeatedly with criminal, and all but wanton indifference, inertia, and neglect. But never was sorer libel. Through it all he was only too intent. Through it all his eye refused to sleep, while his steady and steadying mind pursued the vexing task, until its permanent solution stood clear. And then, with his eye steadily single to the guiding hand of God, to the Nation's immortal weal, and to his own unsurrendered integrity, he would publish and fulfill his studied and sturdy resolve. Upon the basis of these internal mental conquests did all his firmness rest. Hence his life-long evenness and freedom from fluctuation.