There was still another obligation, of a less lofty character, however, that neither parties nor principles could make this alert politician wholly forget. No matter how freely he gave himself up to the public, his thoughts were rarely withdrawn long from what seemed due, as the phrase goes, to number one. The appetite for distinction, so frankly avowed in that maiden address sent out from New Salem, had grown by the very efforts made to satisfy it. For those efforts were of no laggard quality. When a young man, eager to rise in the world, must first free himself from the triple clog of so many youthful aspirations,—lowly birth, ignorance, and narrow fortunes,—he sometimes acquires a degree of momentum that is not diminished even after the need for it has ceased. This happened to Lincoln. The “little engine that knew no rest” stirred him to political action through the greater portion of his life, and when he did not hold a public place, he appears to have been engaged, with occasional lulls, in hot pursuit of one. Here was no reluctant patriot of the Washington-Marshall order, waiting in dignified retirement for the office to seek the man. On the contrary, Lincoln went out to meet his honors more—much more—than halfway. And of all the faulty pictures presented by intrepid eulogists to a trustful world, none perhaps is further from the fact than that which depicts him as regretfully interrupting the practice of the law in order to enter public life at the call of duty. The sober, unromantic truth presents quite another view. It reveals the real Lincoln who ardently desired political preferment, and, with characteristic candor, said so. Indeed, few, if any, among the vote-getting campaigners of his time plunged into the ruck of a canvass with more spirited self-assertion. “Do you suppose,” he once wrote to a grumbling young politician, “that I should ever have got into notice if I had waited to be hunted up and pushed forward by older men?”[v-45]
No! Lincoln saw to his own pushing—coat off and sleeves rolled up. He did so, moreover, in the downright, honest way we should expect from him. And some idea of how it was done—in one direction, at least—may be gathered from an illuminating little anecdote told recently by John W. Bunn, another fledgling during those early Springfield days, who sought office, to use his own phrase, “under the political wing” of that same energetic leader.
“A day or two after my first nomination for city treasurer,” writes Mr. Bunn, “I was going uptown and saw Mr. Lincoln ahead of me. He waited until I caught up and said to me, ‘How are you running?’ I told him I didn’t know how I was running. Then he said, ‘Have you asked anybody to vote for you?’ I said I had not. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if you don’t think enough of your success to ask anybody to vote for you, it is probable they will not do it, and that you will not be elected.’ I said to him, ‘Shall I ask Democrats to vote for me?’ He said, ‘Yes; ask everybody to vote for you.’ Just then a well-known Democrat by the name of Ragsdale was coming up the sidewalk. Lincoln said, ‘Now, you drop back there and ask Mr. Ragsdale to vote for you.’ I turned and fell in with Mr. Ragsdale, told him of my candidacy, and said I hoped he would support me. To my astonishment, he promised me that he would. Mr. Lincoln walked slowly along and fell in with me again, and said, ‘Well, what did Ragsdale say? Will he vote for you?’ I said, ‘Yes; he told me he would.’ ‘Well, then,’ said Lincoln, ‘you are sure of two votes at the election, mine and Ragsdale’s.’ This was my first lesson in practical politics, and I received it from a high source.”[v-46]
The source may indeed be called “high,” from more than one point of view. For that term does not overstate the matter when it applies to a politician who could zealously press his own interests or those of his party amidst the hurly-burly of many a closely contested field, as Lincoln did, and at the same time keep clear of the mud in the low places. Confuting a common fallacy, he demonstrated, once for all, that there is no essential connection between public life and personal corruption. His career puts to shame those smug gentlemen who, cloistered in spotless self-love, hold themselves aloof from active civic service, on the plea that politics would contaminate them. Of course, in their cases such fears may not be groundless. Perhaps these respectable citizens may know themselves to be weak-kneed. Perhaps their stumbling feet could not avoid the mire. In any event, they may as well be reminded that merely to keep clean, while shirking the work, is to practice a virtue of doubtful value. This man, on the other hand, spending his best years in the thick of things, and giving to each task what the task demanded, came through it all unsullied.
But to infer from these activities that Lincoln was unduly obtrusive in advancing his political interests would be wide of the mark. When he did blow his own trumpet, it struck a note which gave no offense. For from an early day he had mastered the art, so difficult to acquire, of pushing one’s self forward without overstepping the bounds of decorum. There was an air of reserve in his demeanor at the very moment when those rising fortunes were urged upward most eagerly. In fact, whatever he did seemed tinged with the lambent modesty that serves, under some conditions, to light up rather than to obscure true merit. It clearly helped Lincoln to know himself and his deserts. One might say that the insight which made the man conscious of extraordinary powers left him painfully aware, as well, of their limitations. He could look himself in the face with a certain detached candor not often found among ambitious politicians. What is more, he could stand erect against other men and check off his own shortcomings. Conceit in any form—need we add?—cannot thrive under such clarity of vision. At the same time, if this faculty for seeing things squarely as they are had failed Lincoln, an abiding simplicity of character—to say nothing about an ever-ready sense of humor—would doubtless have saved him from any exaggerated opinion of his own importance. He certainly manifested no craving for what might be called honorary distinctions. Purely formal or ornamental functions, such as the chairmanship of a meeting, the leading part in a civic ceremony, and the like, were exceedingly distasteful to him; while the master of ceremonies at some social entertainment, strutting about “drest in a little brief authority,” aroused his good-natured disdain. With all the politician’s fondness for public life and public office, he shrank from the mere display of himself on public occasions. At times, moreover, some of those personal tributes, so dear to the hearts of professional big-wigs, actually distressed him. He seemed annoyed, to cite an instance, by a tendency to name children for him that set in among certain admirers long before his fame had become more than local. And even the honor of standing sponsor to a whole community apparently brought this unassuming man no elation. For, when his friend Whitney asked whether the town of Lincoln was named after him, he answered dryly: “Well, yes, I believe it was named after I was.”[v-47]
Obviously, all this is not of a piece, with the oft-quoted pride that apes humility. It should be described rather as the genuine modesty which had its origin down deep in the man’s honest soul, in his own appraisal of his true value, made on his own sensitive scales. He could not mislead himself or others by false pretensions, during those aspiring times, any more than he had found it possible, in the old grocery-store days, to cheat customers with false weights. He frankly rated his merits quite as low as those around him were likely to have placed them; and it may be doubted whether even his intimates had a less exalted opinion of Abraham Lincoln than in the last analysis had Abraham Lincoln himself.
This freedom from egotism impressed, sooner or later, all who came in contact with the man. His political associates, somewhat after the manner, as the reader may remember, of his colleagues on circuit, bore witness to the almost humble spirit in which he ordinarily conducted himself. That such a course is likely to win popular support, disarm criticism, and turn aside the shafts of envy, might lay almost any politician so behaving open to the suspicion of assuming a pose—any politician but a Lincoln. In his case, the posture accords too closely with what we have seen of him from other angles to leave any doubt concerning its sincerity. For instance, the same kindly fellowship that encouraged beginners in the law, when they happened to approach him after he had become a leader of the bar, was manifested under parallel circumstances toward budding politicians. Among the most brilliant of these may be ranked the young German refugee, Carl Schurz, who had interested himself in American public affairs even before he could have been eligible to American citizenship. Having made some speeches in Lincoln’s behalf during a memorable canvass, the newcomer improved an early opportunity for meeting the Sangamon chief; and much to his surprise, found himself received, as he relates, with “offhand cordiality, like an old acquaintance.”
This must have made a vivid impression on the tyro’s mind. Recalling the interview toward the close of his life, Mr. Schurz tells us, with renewed wonder, how unreservedly Lincoln discussed the campaign, and then goes on to say: “When, in a tone of perfect ingenuousness, he asked me—a young beginner in politics—what I thought about this and that, I should have felt myself very much honored by his confidence had he permitted me to regard him as a great man. But he talked in so simple and familiar a strain, and his manner and homely phrase were so absolutely free from any semblance of self-consciousness or pretension to superiority, that I soon felt as if I had known him all my life and we had long been close friends.”[v-48]
Among strangers, Lincoln carried himself, it is perhaps needless to say, equally free from any suggestion of the grand air. His commonplace—at times uncouth—appearance, together with his unassuming ways, gave the chance comer no hint of the man’s importance, even after he had obtained some measure of fame beyond the State border. On more than one occasion he might have exclaimed, as did the famous Achæan general when they found him meekly cutting up firewood for the hostess of Megara: “I am paying the penalty of my ugly looks.”
So different, in truth, was Lincoln’s manner from the breezy, bumptious swagger not seldom seen among the public personages of his day, that only an observer of rare discernment would have taken him, at first glance, for a prominent politician. Even nimble-witted members of the guild themselves “smelt no royalty,” as he once quaintly expressed it, in his presence. And one of them has handed down an amusing tale which relates how the big man’s modest bearing hoaxed a brace of jocund statesmen to the top of their bent. Here is the story, as Thomas H. Nelson of Terre Haute, tells it on himself:—