After another pause: "Doesn't it appear strange that men can ignore the moral aspects of this contest? A revelation could not make it plainer to me that slavery or the government must be destroyed. The future would be something awful, as I look at it, but for this rock [the Testament which he was holding] on which I stand,—especially with the knowledge of how these ministers are going to vote. It seems as if God had borne with this thing [slavery] until the very teachers of religion had come to defend it from the Bible, and to claim for it a divine character and sanction; and now the cup of iniquity is full, and the vials of wrath will be poured out."
Lincoln did not wear his heart upon his sleeve. On the subject of religion, he was reticent to a degree. Peter Cartwright had called him an atheist. There was a wide, if not general, impression, that he was not a religious man. This did him great injustice. It is for this reason that his remarks to Mr. Bateman are here quoted at length. From his early boyhood, from before the time when he was at great pains to have a memorial sermon for his mother, he was profoundly, intensely religious. He did no injustice to any other man, he did not do justice to himself.
The election occurred on the sixth day of November. The vote was as follows: Lincoln received 1,866,452 popular votes, and one hundred and eighty electoral votes. Douglas received 1,375,157 popular votes, and twelve electoral votes. Breckinridge received 847,953 popular votes, and seventy-two electoral votes. Bell received 590,631 popular votes, and thirty-nine electoral votes.
Lincoln carried all the free states, excepting that in New Jersey the electoral vote was divided, he receiving four out of seven. In the fifteen slave states he received no electoral vote. In ten states not one person had voted for him.
Of the 303 electoral votes he had received 180, while the aggregate of all against him numbered 123, giving him an absolute majority of 57. The electoral vote was duly counted in the joint session of the two houses of congress February 13, 1861, and it was officially announced that Abraham Lincoln, having received a majority of the votes of the presidential electors, was duly elected President of the United States for four years, beginning March 4, 1861.
One circumstance is added which may be of interest to the reader. This was published, after his death, by his personal friend, Noah Brooks. It is given in Lincoln's own words: "It was just after my election, in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great 'Hurrah boys!' so that I was well tired out and went home to rest, throwing myself upon a lounge in my chamber. Opposite to where I lay was a bureau with a swinging glass upon it; and looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of the one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw it a second time, plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler—say five shades—than the other. I got up, and the thing melted away, and I went off, and, in the excitement of the hour, forgot all about it,—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang as though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home, I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, when, sure enough, the thing came back again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it somewhat. She thought it was 'a sign' that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not see life through the last term."
The incident is of no interest excepting in so far as everything about Lincoln is of interest. The phenomenon is an optical illusion not uncommon. One image—the "paler," or more indistinct, one—is reflected from the surface of the glass, while the other is reflected from the silvered back of the glass. Though Lincoln understood that it was an optical illusion, yet the thought of it evidently weighed on him. Otherwise he would not have repeated the experiment several times, nor would he have told of it to different persons.
CHAPTER XX.
FOUR LONG MONTHS.
Four months would not ordinarily be considered a long period of time. But when one is compelled to see the working of a vast amount of mischief, powerless to prevent it, and knowing one's self to be the chief victim of it all, the time is long. Such was the fate of Lincoln. The election was not the end of a life of toil and struggle, it was the beginning of a new career of sorrow. The period of four months between the election and inauguration could not be devoted to rest or to the pleasant plans for a prosperous term of service. There developed a plan for the disruption of the government. The excuse was Lincoln's election. But he was for four months only a private citizen. He had no power. He could only watch the growing mischief and realize that he was the ultimate victim. Buchanan, who was then President, had a genius for doing the most unwise thing. He was a northern man with southern principles, and this may have unfitted him to see things in their true relations. He certainly was putty in the hands of those who wished to destroy the Union, and his vacillation precisely accomplished what they wished. Had he possessed the firmness and spirit of John A. Dix, who ordered,—"If any man attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot;" had he had a modicum of the patriotism of Andrew Jackson; had he had a tithe of the wisdom and manliness of Lincoln; secession would have been nipped in the bud and vast treasures of money and irreparable waste of human blood would have been spared. Whatever the reason may have been,—incapacity, obliquity of moral and political vision, or absolute championship of the cause of disruption,—certain it is that the southern fire-eaters could not have found a tool more perfectly suited to their purpose than James Buchanan. He was the center of one of the most astonishing political cabals of all history.