When Lincoln visited New Orleans he attended a slave sale. A beautiful girl, almost white, was placed upon the auction block and exposed to the grossest indignities. As he turned to leave, boiling with indignation, he exclaimed:
"By God, if I ever get a chance to hit that institution, I will hit it hard" (Arnold's Life of Lincoln, Note).
Thirty years later the chance came. He struck the blow—a mortal one.
The following is a prayer which Lincoln, while at the White House, put into the mouth of a belated traveler who was caught in a violent thunderstorm:
"O Lord, if it is all the same to you, give us a little more light and a little less noise!" (Six Months at the White House, p. 49).
Is it possible that a Christian and a Calvinist would repeat such an irreverent, not to say blasphemous, supplication? According to the Brooklyn Calvinist, God visits such supplicants with paralysis and petrifaction.
Like most Freethinkers, Lincoln was a genuine reformer. The Antislavery reform was not the only reform that enlisted his support. At an early day he espoused the Temperance cause. When the church was the ally of intemperance as it was of slavery—when, to use his own words, "From the sideboard of the parson down to the ragged pocket of the houseless loafer intoxicating liquor was constantly found," he was laboring and lecturing in behalf of the Washingtonian movement. With the fervor of an enthusiast, he exclaims in true Free-thought language: "Happy day, when, all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matter subjugated, mind, all-conquering mind, shall live and move, the monarch of the world! Glorious consummation! Hail, fall of fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!" (Lincoln Memorial Album, p. 96).
To sumptuary laws and to the denunciatory methods so common among orthodox Christians to-day, he was, however, strenuously opposed. He says: "It is not much in the nature of man to be driven to anything; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his own business" (Ibid, p. 86).
"When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted" (lb., p. 87).
His nephew, Mr. Hall, informed me that Lincoln once made it cost a meddlesome clergyman, of Coles County, eighty dollars for seizing and destroying a quart of whisky, valued at twelve and a half cents, and belonging to a relative of theirs.