The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

Such was the land-holding, slave-holding, office-holding aristocracy, against which the first directly and avowedly antagonistic movement was that of the Republican party. Young and weak in its first Presidential contest of 1856, the new organization gathered strength steadily; and when, on April 29, 1860, the Democratic Convention at Baltimore was rent asunder by the Secessionists, it became clear that the Republicans would have to face the threatened disruption of the Union.

The Republican Convention met at Chicago and chose, in preference to the able and experienced Seward, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, a man who, then comparatively unknown, was to take rank as perhaps the noblest and greatest of all America’s sons.

Lincoln, when asked for an account of his boyhood, said that it might be summed up in Crabbe’s famous line: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” J. G. Holland thus reviews the career of the man who led the struggle that began in 1860: “Born in the humblest and remotest obscurity, subjected to the rudest toil in the meanest offices, achieving the development of his powers by means of his own institution, he had, with none of the tricks of the demagogue, with none of the aids of wealth and social influence, with none of the opportunities for exhibiting his powers which high official position bestows, against all the combinations of genius and eminence and interest, raised himself by force of manly excellence of heart and brain into national recognition, and had become the local center of the affectionate interest and curious inquisition of thirty millions of people.”

To the end of his life, Lincoln was the very incarnation of democratic simplicity. He was never at home in a drawing-room; he never could dispose gracefully his hands and feet—appendages whose size was proportionate to his huge stature. After his nomination for the Presidency, he used to answer his own bell at his little house in Springfield, Illinois.

The people’s man of 1860, Abraham Lincoln! The pulse of patriotism quickens at the pronunciation of the name. The people’s plain Abe Lincoln; one of them, a commoner, of them, with them, like them. To foreign nations, he may have appeared as “President Abraham Lincoln, Chief Magistrate of the United States.” He may have been “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,” in the minds of his subordinates in those two important branches of his administration from ’61 to ’65. History may record him as the “wise, able, and philanthropical.” But his memory will last enshrined in a temple more lasting than bronze or stone—the hearts of the people.

To them he was Abe Lincoln—one of them, feeling their sensations, a common bond between him and them. He was a democrat by birth, by experience, by sentiment, reason, and patriotism. He was a President of the masses, and how well and loyally did they love him! His homely ways and phrases, his unadorned and vigorous speeches, were the ways of the people, speeches of the people; loved by the people for the very enemies he had made, for his enemies were the enemies of the people. Every caricature of Lincoln was a caricature of the people; every attack upon his personality was an attack upon the personality of the “mudsills” of the people, and his call to arms was their call to arms, and they sprang forward, responsive to his appeal, recognizing in it their appeal, as no sham aristocrat or autocrat can ever hope to have a nation do.

His memory will not remain green in the minds of the masses by his martyrdom; but dear will the picture be, from generation to generation, of the boy studying by the light of a flickering fire, and splitting rails for daily bread; fighting his way onward and upward without wealth, or powerful friends, until at last, in the supreme hour of the people’s need, he comes to bear their standard in the battle which they waged against “caste.” He did not come to the contest as a hired soldier, but as a volunteer, feeling all that was felt by the common soldier. It was his battle, for he had felt the sting of class distinction, as did every private soldier of his army.

Loving, loyal, faithful Abe Lincoln! May your name never be belittled by any of your descendants adopting a crest or coat-of-arms. Your coat-of-arms is engraved in figures as lasting as the eternal hills of America upon the minds of the people. Should a degenerate descendant seek a coat-of-arms, let him make it an axe and rail, surrounded by the laurel wreath bestowed by the loving, trusting people; for Abe Lincoln was best and only loved by the very term by which the aristocrats attempted to disparage him—“the rail-splitter.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, while he remained at Springfield, the chosen representative of the people, he was the most approachable man in America; even though at that time he must have felt the heavy weight of responsibility thrust upon him, viewing as he could the mass which, like a snowball, was increasing as it progressed under the weak administration of his predecessor. Think of the anxious hours that this man spent, knowing what the people expected of him, and seeing the number of his difficulties being added to, day by day, while those who had the burden to bear were obliged, until the fourth of the succeeding March, to sit still and watch the accumulation. Yet in those anxious hours, while receiving counsel of the mighty of the political world, many of whom were strangers to him and to whom he was a stranger, yet, still, while watching thus, the pillar of the Union, stone by stone falling away; while thus counselled, advised by those he knew not whether to trust or not; while his mind must necessarily have been weighed down with the thought of his own possible inability to meet the expectations of his friends, the people, in that great new sphere to which they had called him, Abe Lincoln still had time to grasp the hand and wish good cheer to an old friend, neighbor, or one of the people. From birth to death, his life will form a lesson that the new Chief of the people whom they have called to be President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, could well study, and Abe Lincoln’s example emulate, if he would hold the love of those who, by their votes, put him into the Presidential chair.

This man, Abraham Lincoln, represented that class of people who had been dubbed “mudsills” by the orators who represented the believers in “caste” in the South. He stood as the very personification of “mudsillism,” which, read in the light of recently written history, meant the Common People—that is, the majority; and the majority ruled after his election in 1860, even though it required the use of bullets against the aristocratic class, just as the majority will rule in 1892, after the election of Grover Cleveland as representative of the Common People.

The South sought by secession to absolve itself from the domination of the masses. It was like the patricians of Rome seeking the Sacred Hill to build a new city. It failed, as will ever the minority, representing a false idea of American society and a false conception of the spirit with which every American is imbued, do in the future. But, be it said to the credit of the believers in aristocracy in 1860, that they had the courage of their convictions, and they fought a manly battle to establish that which is impossible in America. The history of the Southerners’ sufferings and dangers, endured uncomplainingly, forms a bright and shining exception to the conduct of the typical believer in “caste.” Sham aristocracy, which has disregarded the rights and wounded the feelings of the people for the past twenty-five years, that sham aristocracy which is a direct outgrowth resulting from the suppression of the Southern aristocracy, if tested as the Southern aristocracy has been, would be found deficient in those qualities of courage and determination which made even the Southerners’ false ideas respected and respectable.