Naturally, no verbatim report of that address can be recalled after sixty years. But the impression it made almost surpasses belief when told to those who were not there. There is no clearer descriptive term which could be applied to the speaker than to state, as some did, that “the orator was transfigured.” No one thought of his ill-fitting new suit, of his old hat, of his protruding wrists or the disheveled hair, of his long legs, his bony face, or the one-sided necktie. The natural Abraham Lincoln had disappeared and an angel spake in his place. Nothing but language which seems extravagant will tell the accurate truth.
All manner of theories were advanced by those who heard the speech to account for the gigantic mystery of eloquent power which he exhibited. One said it was mesmerism; another that it was magnetism; while the superstitious said there was “a distinct halo about his head” at one place in the speech. No analysis of the speech as he wrote it, nor any recollection of the words, shows anything remarkable in language, figures, or ideas. The subtle, magnetic, spiritual force which emanated from that inspired speaker revealed to his audience an altogether different man from the one who began to read a different speech. He did not approach the delicate sweetness of Mr. Bryant’s words of introduction, or reach the imaginative scenes and noble company which characterized Beecher’s addresses. Lincoln was less cutting than Wendell Phillips and had no definite style like Everett or Gough. As an orator he imitated no one, and surely no one could imitate him. Of the four Ohio voters who changed their votes in the Republican convention and made Lincoln’s nomination sure, two heard that Cooper Union speech and claimed sturdily that they knew “old Abe” was right, but could not tell why.
Thus it appears throughout Lincoln’s public life. He was larger than his task, wider than his party, ahead of his time as an inspired prophet, and he seemed to be a spiritual force without material limitations. He began to grow at his death, and is conquering now in lands he never saw and rules over nations which cannot pronounce his name. Such individual influence is next to the divine, and is of the same nature. Can we find a measure for such a man?
These facts and these thoughts were in my mind as I traveled to Washington to intercede for my condemned comrade. Such was the man to whom I was going. But it was to Lincoln the commander-in-chief, and not to Lincoln the impassioned orator, that I must make my plea.
Chapter II: President and Pilgrim
The reader will not be surprised to learn that getting into the presence of the President was no laughing matter, and that his own habit of occasionally using laughter during business hours did not always descend to those under him in the government.
I arrived in Washington early on a crisp December morning, just a few days before Christmas. I went straightway to the old Ebbit House, which was then the fashionable gathering place for military people stationed or sojourning in the capital. The contrast between “desk officers” and officers in the field was even greater then than in more recent days, because if the former were less smart in appearance than the modern “citified” officer, the latter were, as a rule, vastly more disheveled and disreputable in appearance than one would find in any army of to-day on campaign. There were good reasons for this, of course, but they did not greatly help to increase the confidence of a decidedly “seedy”-looking young officer fresh from the swamps and thickets of North Carolina. I was glad to get away from the environs of the Ebbit House after a brief but very earnest effort to “spruce up.”
When the time at last arrived that the ordeal was directly ahead, I plucked up courage and walked up the footpath to the White House with a tolerably certain step. Even at the height of the war President Lincoln did not surround himself by the barriers which later Executives have found necessary. One simply went to the White House, stated his business, and waited his turn for an interview.