“Dear Sir: We have read your estimate of Abraham Lincoln. We tried our best to figure out some way by which it could be shaped around in a manner that would be suitable for our magazine. You see, first of all, in dealing with Lincoln or any Civil War subject we cannot afford in any way to stir up sectional feeling. I am afraid your article is open to criticism in this respect. If you were only in New York, and we could go over this thing personally, I have no doubt but what we might frame up an article that would be mutually satisfactory. The time is so limited that I suppose we will just have to give it up. Yours very truly,
Editorial Department.”)
When the editor of —— Magazine applied to me for an article on Abraham Lincoln, my first inclination was to decline the commission. Although it is high time that some one should strike a note of sanity in the universal laudation of Mr. Lincoln, a Southern man is not, perhaps, the proper person to do it. On further consideration, however, it occurred to me that my position was radically different from that of any other public man in the South. People on the other side of Mason and Dixon’s line cannot be ignorant or oblivious of the fact that for the last twenty years I have waged warfare upon the Bourbonism of my own section and the narrowness of my own people. In every possible way I have appealed to them to rise above sectional prejudice and party bigotry. While I, myself, have suffered terribly during this long series of years, some good has followed my work. Twenty years ago, a white man in the South who openly professed himself a member of the Republican party was socially ostracised. Every one realizes how completely that state of things has been revolutionized,—we see it in the heavy Republican vote cast in Southern States in the recent election; we see it in the ovations given to Mr. Roosevelt and to Mr. Taft in the Southern cities.
My part in bringing about this change for the better is so well known in the North that no well informed man or woman will attribute to sectionalism anything in my estimate of Mr. Lincoln which may appear to be harsh or unjust.
Let us see to what extent the adulation of Mr. Lincoln has gone.
In Harper’s Weekly for November 7th, 1908, a British gentleman of the name of P. D. Ross offers to amend the high estimate which Colonel Harvey had already placed upon Mr. Lincoln by classing our martyred President as “The greatest man the world has produced.” Colonel Harvey soberly accepts the amendment,—thus Miss Ida Tarbell is left far behind, and Hay and Nicolay eclipsed.
One of the more recent biographers of Mr. Lincoln hotly denounced as untrue the statement that “He used to sit around and tell anecdotes like a traveling man.”
Do we not all remember how, as children, we were fascinated with the story of “The Scottish Chiefs”, by Miss Jane Porter? Did not the Sir William Wallace of that good lady’s romance appeal to us as a perfect hero, an ideal knight, exemplifying in himself the loftiest type of chivalry? Yet, when we grew to be older, we were not surprised to learn that Sir Walter Scott—certainly a good judge of such matters, and certainly a patriotic Scotchman—wrathfully and contemptuously found fault with Miss Porter because she had made “a fine gentleman” out of a great, rugged, national hero. Every well balanced American, North and South, ought to feel the same way toward those authors who take Abraham Lincoln into their hands, dress him up, tone him down, polish him and change him until he is no longer the same man.
The outpouring of Lincolnian eulogy which will greet the country in February will probably be all of a sort—indiscriminate praise—each orator and speaker straining and struggling to carry the high water mark of laudation higher than it has ever yet gone.
Let us study Mr. Lincoln with an earnest desire to find out what he was. Let it be remembered that the biography of him written by his law partner, Mr. Herndon, was that biography in which the best picture of him might have been expected. His law partner was his friend, personally and politically. It was that law partner who converted him to abolitionism. To the task of writing the biography of the deceased member of the firm, Mr. Herndon brought devotion to the memory of a man whom he had respected and loved; yet, being honest, he told the truth about Mr. Lincoln,—painting his portrait with the warts on. The fact that this record, written by a sorrowing friend, was destroyed, and a spurious, after-thought Herndon biography put in its place, must always be a fact worthy of serious consideration.