ALONZO ROTHSCHILD
THE morning that my father finished that concluding paragraph—the last that he ever wrote—he called mother into the study. With an air of mysterious solemnity, belied by the twinkle in his eye, he beckoned her to the desk.
“Meta, if you promise not to tell a soul, I’ll tell you a state secret,” he said. “I’ve got Lincoln to Congress at last.” Then more earnestly he continued: “It wasn’t an easy job either. I’ve fought all his battles side by side with him, and the world will probably never know how hard we toiled and moiled together.”
These words exactly expressed his relationship to his work. During the twenty-three years that he devoted to the study and interpretation of Abraham Lincoln, he lived with him in spirit as the great novelists have lived with the children of their fancies. Lincoln’s sorrows and triumphs and defeats were as real to him as those of his own life. It is small wonder, therefore, that when men who had known Lincoln read Lincoln, Master of Men, they frequently mistook its author for an intimate contemporary of the great President.
Though not of the same generation as Lincoln, my father’s life was, in a trivial way, associated with it at the start. He was born in New York City on the evening of a Lincoln rally at Cooper Union, October 30, 1862. The family physician was at the meeting when the time became ripe for his services, so my grandfather followed him there, somehow found him in the vast crowd, and worked upon his sense of duty so that he consented to forego the speeches, and returned with my grandfather to the Rothschild home.
One is tempted to speculate whether or not, as the doctor looked down at the boy whose birth had prevented him from hearing eminent men discuss the President,—whether or not some confiding Fate whispered to him a half-articulate prophecy that that same boy was one day to be among the most deep-seeing interpreters of Abraham Lincoln.