“I watched Lincoln closely while he set on his log awaiting the signal to fight. His face was grave and serious. I could discern nothing suggestive of ‘old Abe,’ as we knew him. I never knew him to go so long without making a joke, and I began to believe he was getting frightened. But presently he reached over and picked up one of the swords, which he drew from its scabbard. Then he felt along the edge of the weapon with his thumb, like a barber feels of the edge of his razor, raised himself to his full height, stretched out his long arms and clipped a twig from above his head with the sword. There wasn’t another man of us who could have reached anywhere near that twig, and the absurdity of that long-reaching fellow fighting with cavalry sabres with Shields, who could walk under his arm, came pretty near making me howl with laughter. After Lincoln had cut off the twig he returned the sword to the scabbard.”
Before the combat could begin, friends arrived in a canoe, Shields was induced to make a concession, and presently Lincoln and his opponent returned to town fast friends.
VII
We love Lincoln because his life plucks every harp-string in true democracy. Lincoln is the answer to Socialism. He represents individualism, justifying opportunity. Self-government stands vindicated in his name. The thought of him is at once an inspiration and challenge to the poorest and most ignorant boy or man in America.
But we love him most of all because he saved the nation which Washington began, and, in the bloody act of salvation, brought human slavery to an end in the great Republic.
In following Lincoln through his picturesque and gaunt youth and through his service in the Illinois Legislature and in Congress to the point where the inner and outer influences of his life, his soul and its environments, merged into one supreme idea—the preservation of the Union—we must not forget the things that preceded the final test of his life.
Up to Lincoln’s time it had not been determined whether the fathers of the Republic had really produced a nation, or merely a contract or treaty between independent and sovereign States. The system of separated, incoordinate and aloof colonies—a shrewd and stubborn British device for keeping their American subjects weak by disunion—grew into the system of States which formed the Republic.
When the Constitution of the United States was framed, ten of the thirteen States had prohibited the importation of slaves. Georgia and the two Carolinas still permitted the slave trade with Africa. In order not to leave these three States out of the Union, the Constitution permitted the importation of slaves until 1808. But the conscious horror of that concession is to be recognized in the care with which the word slavery is avoided. To satisfy all the slave-owning States, whose consent was necessary to the adoption of the Constitution, slavery itself, within those States, was recognized and sanctioned by a clause providing that five slaves should equal three free persons as a basis of representation in the national House of Representatives.
So that, whether we like the remembrance or not, it is a fact that the founders of the nation actually did sanction slavery, although there was some righteous talk in the Constitutional Convention over the reluctant compromise.