It was in that picturesque campaign that Lincoln, coming with his company to a fence gate and not remembering the military word of command necessary to get his company in order through such a narrow space, instantly showed his ingenuity by shouting, “This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.”
A poor, old half-starved Indian crept into Lincoln’s camp for shelter. The excited soldiers insisted on killing him. But Lincoln stood between them and the frightened fugitive. At the risk of his own life he saved the Indian. The soul of chivalry was in him.
He had no chance to fight, and he was compelled to wear a wooden sword for two weeks because his company got drunk—he who afterwards commanded Grant, Sherman and Sheridan—yet he returned to his village a hero without having shed blood, for the world honors courage and patience even in those who fail to reach the firing line.
V
After the war of 1812, which was fought while Lincoln was in his rude Kentucky cradle, the continental spirit of the American people gradually rose to a high pitch, which was intensified in 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine was born and the Holy Alliance—not to say all Europe—was warned against armed interference with even the humblest republic of the Western Hemisphere.
A new sense of power inspired swaggering, bragging American politics. So the Greeks bragged when Alexander overthrew Persia; so Christendom bragged when Charles Martel smashed the Saracens and made possible the Empire of Charlemagne; so the British bragged after Trafalgar and Waterloo; so the Puritans bragged when Cromwell struck off the head of King Charles.
The boastful spirit of America was encouraged by spread-eagle statesmen in blue coats, brass buttons and buff waistcoats, who spoke as though history began at Bunker Hill. Andrew Jackson, whose frontiersmen had thrashed the trained British regiments at New Orleans, had succeeded John Quincy Adams, the polished Harvard professor, in the White House. It was a time of grand talk. The People—with a capital P—puffed out their unterrified bosoms and made faces at the miserable rulers of Europe. It was brave and honest, this strutting, defiant democracy, but it took Charles Dickens some years later to show us the ridiculous side of it, even though he went too far.
“Do you suppose I am such a d—d fool as to think myself fit for President of the United States? No, sir!” was Jackson’s estimate of himself in 1823. Yet there was the rough old hero in Washington’s chair at last.
Hayne had talked in the United States Senate of nullifying the nation’s laws in South Carolina, and Webster had thundered back his majestic defence of the indivisible Union. Then South Carolina had attempted nullification and threatened secession, to be promptly answered by President Jackson with an effective promise of cold steel and powder, and a gruff hint of the hangman’s noose.