His advancement in the astonishing career which carried him from obscurity to world-wide fame; from postmaster of New Salem village to President of the United States; from captain of a backwoods volunteer company to commander-in-chief of the army and navy, was neither sudden, nor accidental, nor easy. He was both ambitious and successful, but his ambition was moderate and his success was slow. And because his success was slow, his ambition never outgrew either his judgment or his powers. From the day when he left the paternal roof and launched his canoe on the head waters of the Sangamon River to begin life on his own account, to the day of his first inauguration, there intervened full thirty years of toil, of study, self-denial, patience; often of effort baffled, of hope deferred; sometimes of bitter disappointment. Given the natural gift of great genius, given the condition of favorable environment, it yet required an average lifetime and faithful unrelaxing effort to transform the raw country stripling into a competent ruler for this great nation.
Almost every success was balanced—sometimes overbalanced by a seeming failure. Reversing the usual promotion, he went into the Black Hawk War a captain and, through no fault of his own, came out a private. He rode to the hostile frontier on horseback, and trudged home on foot. His store "winked out." His surveyor's compass and chain, with which he was earning a scanty living, were sold for debt. He was defeated in his first campaign for the legislature; defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for Congress; defeated in his application to be appointed commissioner of the General Land Office; defeated for the Senate in the Illinois legislature of 1854, when he had forty-five votes to begin with, by Trumbull, who had only five votes to begin with; defeated in the legislature of 1858, by an antiquated apportionment, when his joint debates with Douglas had won him a popular plurality of nearly four thousand in a Democratic State; defeated in the nomination for Vice-President on the Frémont ticket in 1856, when a favorable nod from half a dozen wire-workers would have brought him success.
Failures? Not so. Every seeming defeat was a slow success. His was the growth of the oak, and not of Jonah's gourd. Every scaffolding of temporary elevation he pulled down, every ladder of transient expectation which broke under his feet accumulated his strength, and piled up a solid mound which raised him to wider usefulness and clearer vision. He could not become a master workman until he had served a tedious apprenticeship. It was the quarter of a century of reading thinking, speech-making and legislating which qualified him for selection as the chosen champion of the Illinois Republicans in the great Lincoln-Douglas joint debates of 1858. It was the great intellectual victory won in these debates, plus the title "Honest old Abe," won by truth and manhood among his neighbors during a whole generation, that led the people of the United States to confide to his hands the duties and powers of President.
And when, after thirty years of endeavor, success had beaten down defeat; when Lincoln had been nominated elected, and inaugurated, came the crowning trial of his faith and constancy. When the people, by free and lawful choice, had placed honor and power in his hands; when his signature could convene Congress, approve laws, make ministers, cause ships to sail and armies to move; when he could speak with potential voice to other rulers of other lands, there suddenly came upon the government and the nation the symptoms of a fatal paralysis; honor seemed to dwindle and power to vanish. Was he then, after all, not to be President? Was patriotism dead? Was the Constitution waste paper? Was the Union gone?
The indications were, indeed, ominous. Seven States were in rebellion. There was treason in Congress, treason in the Supreme Court, treason in the army and navy. Confusion and discord rent public opinion. To use Lincoln's own forcible simile, sinners were calling the righteous to repentance. Finally, the flag, insulted on the Star of the West, trailed in capitulation at Sumter and then came the humiliation of the Baltimore riot, and the President practically for a few days a prisoner in the capital of the nation.
But his apprenticeship had been served, and there was no more failure. With faith and justice and generosity he conducted for four long years a civil war whose frontiers stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; whose soldiers numbered a million men on each side; in which, counting skirmishes and battles small and great, was fought an average of two engagements every day; and during which every twenty-four hours saw an expenditure of two millions of money. The labor, the thought, the responsibility, the strain of intellect and anguish of soul that he gave to this great task, who can measure?
The sincerity of the fathers of the Republic was impugned he justified them. The Declaration of Independence was called a "string of glittering generalities" and a "self-evident lie"; he refuted the aspersion. The Constitution was perverted; he corrected the error. The flag was insulted; he redressed the offense. The government was assailed? he restored its authority. Slavery thrust the sword of civil war at the heart of the nation? he crushed slavery, and cemented the purified Union in new and stronger bonds.
And all the while conciliation was as active as vindication was stern. He reasoned and pleaded with the anger of the South; he gave insurrection time to repent; he forbore to execute retaliation; he offered recompense to slaveholders; he pardoned treason.
What but lifetime schooling in disappointment; what but the pioneer's self-reliance and freedom from prejudice; what but the patient faith, the clear perceptions of natural right, the unwarped sympathy and unbounding charity of this man with spirit so humble and soul so great, could have carried him through the labors he wrought to the victory he attained?
As the territory may be said to be its body, and its material activities its blood, so patriotism may be said to be the vital breath of a nation. When patriotism dies, the nation dies, and its resources as well as its territory go to other peoples with stronger vitality.