American Men of Action

by Burton Egbert Stevenson

LINCOLN

The emancipation of the slaves, which has loomed so large in history, was in reality, merely an incident, a war measure, taken to weaken the enemy and justifiable, perhaps, only on that ground; the preliminary proclamation, indeed, proposed to liberate the slaves only in such states as were in rebellion on the following first of January. Nor did emancipation create any great popular enthusiasm. The congressional elections which followed it showed a great reaction against anti-slavery. The Democrats carried Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois. For a time the administration was fighting for its life, and won by an alarmingly small margin.

Before the year had elapsed, however, there was a great reversal in public opinion, and at the succeeding election, Lincoln received 212 out of 233 electoral votes. The end of the Confederacy was by this time in sight. A month after his second inauguration, Richmond fell, and five days later, Lee surrendered his army to General Grant. Lincoln at once paid a visit to Richmond and then returned to Washington for the last act of the drama.

The fourteenth of April was Good Friday, and the President arranged to take a small party to Ford's theatre to witness a performance of a farce comedy called "Our American Cousin." The President entered his box about nine o'clock and was given a tumultuous reception. Then the play went forward quietly, until suddenly the audience was startled by a pistol shot, followed by a woman's scream. At the same instant, a man was seen to leap from the President's box to the stage. Pausing only to wave a dagger which he carried in his hand and to shout, "Sic semper tyrannis!" the man disappeared behind the scenes. Amid the confusion, no efficient pursuit was made. The President had been shot through the head, the bullet passing through the brain. Unconsciousness, of course, came instantly, and death followed in a few hours.

Eleven days later, the murderer, an actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth, was surrounded in a barn where he had taken refuge; he refused to come out, and the barn was set on fire. Soon afterwards, the assassin was brought forth with a bullet at the base of his brain, whether fired by himself or one of the besieging soldiers was never certainly known.

It is startling to contemplate the fearful responsibility which Booth assumed when he fired that shot. So far from benefiting the South, he did it incalculable harm, for the North was thoroughly aroused by the deed. Thousands and thousands flocked to see the dead President as he lay in state at the Capitol, and in the larger cities in which his funeral procession paused on its way to his home in Springfield. The whole country was in mourning, as for its father; business was practically suspended, and the people seemed stunned by the great calamity. That so gentle a man should have been murdered wakened, deep down in the heart of the North, a fierce resentment; the feelings of kindliness for a vanquished foe were, for the moment, swept away in anger; and the North turned upon the South with stern face and shining eyes. The wild and foolish assassin brought down upon the heads of his own people such a wrath as the great conflict had not awakened. We shall see how bitter was the retribution.

Not then so fully as now was Lincoln's greatness understood. He has come to personify for us the triumphs and glories, the sadness and the pathos, of the great struggle which he guided. His final martyrdom seems almost a fitting crown for his achievements. It has, without doubt, done much to secure him the exalted niche which he occupies in the hearts of the American people, whom, in a way, he died to save. Had he lived through the troubled period of Reconstruction which followed, he might have emerged with a fame less clear and shining; and yet the hand which guided the country through four years of Civil War, was without doubt the one best fitted to save it from the misery and disgrace which lay in store for it. But speculations as to what might have been are vain and idle. What was, we know; and above the clouds of conflict, Lincoln's figure looms, serene and venerable. Two of his own utterances reveal him as the words of no other man can—his address on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and his address at his second inauguration—but two months after he was laid to rest, James Russell Lowell, at the services in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of Harvard College, paid him one of the most eloquent tributes ever paid any man, concluding with the words:

"Great captains, with their guns and drums;
Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes;
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man;
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame;
New birth of our new soil, the first American."

On the ticket with Lincoln, the Republicans had placed, as a sop to such pro-slavery sentiment as still existed at the North, a southerner and state rights Democrat named Andrew Johnson. By one of those singular chances of history, Johnson's origin and early years had been very much like Lincoln's. He, too, was born of a "poor white" family; first seeing the light in North Carolina about six weeks before Abraham Lincoln opened his eyes in that rude log cabin in Kentucky. His condition was, if anything, even more hopeless and degraded than Lincoln's, and if any one had prophesied that these two ignorant and poverty-stricken children would one day rise, side by side, to the greatest position in the Republic, he would have been regarded, and justly, as a hopeless madman. But not even to a madman did any such wild idea occur. "Poor whites" were despised throughout the South, even by the slaves; if there was, in the whole United States, any law of caste, it was against these ignorant and shiftless people; and Andrew Johnson, at the age of fifteen, was little better than a young savage. He had never gone to school, he had never seen a book. But one day, he heard a man reading aloud, and the wonder of it quickened a new purpose within him. He induced a friend to teach him the alphabet, and then, borrowing the book, he laboriously taught himself to read. So there was something more than "poor white" in him, after all.