The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

These two examples illustrate not only the form of his speech and writing, but the sympathy and the temper of the soul of the man. They need only the supplement of a comment on the strength of his thought in expression. It is said of his Cooper Union speech (his first speech before a large eastern urban audience, I think): "From the first line to the last, from his premises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled, an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning…. A single, easy, simple sentence … contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire…. Commencing with this address as a political pamphlet, the reader will leave it as an historical work, brief, complete, profound, truthful—which will survive the time and occasion that called it forth and be esteemed hereafter, no less for its intrinsic worth than its unpretending modesty." [Footnote: Pamphlet edition with notes and prefaces by C. C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, September, 1860. Quoted in Nicolay and Hay, "Abraham Lincoln," 2:225.]

His first wide fame grew from a speech which he delivered on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, the city that had grown on the Illinois River by the side of La Salle's Fort Crèvecoeur. "When the white man governs himself," he said there, "that is self-government; but when the white man governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government— that is despotism." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works," ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 2:227.] Two years later he made near there an address so irresistible in its eloquence that the reporters forgot why they were there and failed to take notes. So there are but fragments preserved of what is known as "the lost speech."

The minor anecdotes of his life that are treasured and the stories which he is said to have told would fill a volume—perhaps volumes. They all tell of a genius who through adversity became resourceful, who through the neighborly exchanges of a village learned a sympathy as wide as humanity, and who with an infinite patience and kindliness and good sense dealt with a divided people.

The world outside the valley at first thought him a buffoon because it heard only the echo of the hoarse laughter after his stories. They found when he spoke in Cooper Union that he had a mind that would have sat unembarrassed and luminous in the company of the men of the age of Pericles. But he had a sense of humor that, had he been there, would have saved Socrates from the hyssop. Mr. Bryce says, that all the world knows the Americans to be a humorous people. [Footnote: Bryce, "American Commonwealth," 2:286.] "They are," he has said, "as conspicuously the purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as the French were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth…. [This sense] is diffused among the whole people; it colors their ordinary life and gives to their talk that distinctively new flavor which a European palate enjoys." And he adds: "Much of President Lincoln's popularity, and much also of the gift he showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so." Yet it was no mask, it was instinctive.

On one of those days when the anxiety was keenest and the sky darkest a delegation of prohibitionists came to him and insisted that the reason the north did not win was because the soldiers drank so much whiskey and thus brought the curse of the Lord down upon them. There was, we are told, a mischievous twinkle in his eye when he replied that he considered it very unfair on the part of the Lord, because the southerners drank a good deal worse whiskey and more of it than the soldiers of the north.

Most of these stories and parables had a flavor of the west and of the fields where they were collected in the days when, as a lawyer, he followed the court from one town to another, and spent the nights in talk around the tavern stove.

When asked one day how he disposed of a caller who had come to him in a towering rage, he told of the farmer in Illinois who announced one Sunday to his neighbors that he had gotten rid of a great log in the middle of his field. They were anxious to know how, since it was too big to haul out, too knotty to split, too wet and soggy to burn. And the farmer announced: "I ploughed around it." "And so," he said, "I got rid of General——. I ploughed around him, but it took me three hours to do it."

This, then, was the lank boatman who came down the river (that was once the River Colbert) and who, seeing the horrors of the slave markets in New Orleans, went back to the Sangamon with a memory of them that was a "continual torment," as he said, and with a vow to hit that institution hard if ever he had a chance. It was this boatman who was twenty years later to have, of all men, the chance.

One cannot tell here, even in outline, the story of that irrepressible conflict in which this western ploughman and lawyer became commander-in- chief of an army of a million men and carried on a war involving the expenditure of three billion dollars. One need not tell it. It need only to be recalled that it was this man of the western waters who first saw clearly, or first made it clearly seen, that the nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved," he said, "but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other." And it was he who more than any one single force brought the fulfilment of his prophecy—of a nation reunited and all free.

He hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong." But he wanted to get rid of it without injustice to those to whom it was an inherited, if cherished, institution. If he saw a venomous snake in the road he would take the nearest stick and kill it, but if he found it in bed with his children, "I might hurt the children," he said, "more than the snake and it might bite them." He was as tender and considerate of the south as ever he was of an erring neighbor in Illinois, where it is remembered that he carried home with his giant strength one whom his comrades would have left to freeze, and nursed him through the night. So he sat almost sleepless, sad-hearted, through the four dark years, but resolute, cheering his own heart and those about him with a broad humor that came as "Aesop's Fables" out of the fields and their elemental wisdoms.