I. HELPFULNESS AND KINDNESS OF A WORTH-WHILE CHARACTER
It would take a whole book to tell the stories of kindness and sympathy told by those who were neighbors and friends of Lincoln. All who knew him agree in saying how much he loved children and how considerate he was for the comfort of others.
While living in the Rutledge tavern he often took upon himself all kinds of discomforts to accommodate travellers. The Great Book says, “He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.” Lincoln seemed most of the time to forget that he had any life of his own in trying to do good to others. Many times he served ungrateful people, and many persons mistreated him who mistook his kindness for servility, but that didn’t change Lincoln. He kept right on doing good to others, until at last he lost his life, in the full meaning of that phrase, but we may be sure that somewhere else he has found it.
If a traveller became stuck in the mud, literally or figuratively, Lincoln always seemed to be the first to see his need. If widows and orphans were suffering, he was the first to know it and relieve their wants.
Deeds of kindness often look like “bread cast upon the waters,” but we are assured that such is not lost, for it “shall return after many days.”
The effective way in which Lincoln sometimes turned upon those who “run him down” by sarcastic references to his poverty or looks is illustrated by his reply to George Forquer. Lincoln was to make his first speech in the Court House at Springfield, and he was to be answered by Forquer, a rather aristocratic citizen of the town who had been a Whig, but who had recently turned over to the Democrats and received the appointment to an important office. Incidentally, he had also put up a lightning rod to protect his rather showy house, and this fact was quite well known, because it was the first lightning rod to be put upon a house in that county.
Forquer rose to speak as Lincoln sat down, and his smile of derision seemed to show that he expected to demolish with ridicule the backwoodsman from New Salem.
Turning to Lincoln, he said, “The young man must be taken down, and I am truly sorry that the task devolves upon me.”
He was a witty and sarcastic speaker. He did not try to argue but ridiculed Lincoln in the most offensive way. Lincoln’s friends feared for this onslaught, not knowing what Lincoln could say. But Lincoln said it so effectively in a few words, as he always seemed able to do, that his opponent lost and never recovered.
In closing a very short reply, Lincoln said, pointing his long, accusing finger at Forquer in a scathing rebuke:
“Live long or die young, I would rather die now than, like this gentleman, change my politics, and with the change receive an office with a salary of three thousand dollars a year, and then feel obliged to erect a lightning rod over my house to protect a guilty conscience from the fear of an angry God.”