“Boys, let’s get away from this. If I ever get a chance to hit that thing (slavery) I’ll hit it hard!”
So Lawyer Lincoln became the champion of the negro and lifted his voice against slavery. “This country cannot exist half slave and half free,” he exclaimed. His ringing words in the famous debates with Senator Douglas pleased the people of the north so much that Lincoln was elected President next time. Within six weeks after he went to live in the White House, the Civil War broke out.
The tender heart of President Lincoln was often hurt when the news of a battle came to Washington with its list of killed and wounded. He tried to keep up his own spirits and the heart of the nation by his constant flow of stories which made the people smile through their tears. To him it was an awful thing for his brothers in the north to be fighting and slaying their brothers down south.
When Abraham Lincoln saw that the time was right, he gave out the Emancipation Proclamation—his order to free four million slaves. He now had “a chance to hit that thing,” and he did “hit it hard.”
Grand as it was to write that great paper and free all the slaves, it was even greater to show the people of the United States and of the whole world how to look on the bright side of the hardest trials, and even to laugh in the face of trouble.
President Lincoln had the supreme joy of seeing the purpose of the war accomplished. His Gettysburg Address—which every boy and girl should know by heart—and the words from the Second Inaugural, “With malice toward none; with charity for all,” are ever-living witnesses of the kind heart and unselfish spirit of Abraham Lincoln.
William Cullen Bryant, one of the first of American poets, wrote these lines for the Martyr President’s funeral:
“O, slow to smite and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just!
Who in the fear of God didst bear
The sword of power, a nation’s trust.
Pure was thy life; its bloody close
Has placed thee with the Sons of Light,
Among the noble hearts of those
Who perished in the cause of Right.”