Someone has well said that we remember Washington for what he did, but we remember Lincoln for what he was. Although Abraham Lincoln did not make a loud profession, his virtues were pre-eminently the Christian virtues.
Lincoln was honest. In his law office one day, after listening to a would-be client for some time, he said bluntly: “Well, you have got a good case in technical law, but a pretty bad one in equity and justice. You’ll have to get some other fellow to win this case for you. I couldn’t do it. All the time while standing talking to that jury, I’d be thinking: ‘Lincoln, you’re a liar,’ and I believe I should forget myself and say it out loud.”
Lincoln was self-controlled. He grew up in rough frontier communities where practically everybody loved liquor and tobacco and made a joke of gluttony, but young Abe had no use for any of these. True, he good-naturedly ignored the bad habits of his friends and would not reprove them. His own abstemiousness he modestly attributed to the fact that he just didn’t like the taste of tobacco or alcohol; and as to over-eating, he just wasn’t that much interested in food. But whatever his motives, Lincoln remained throughout life a temperate man.
Lincoln was a man of integrity. When he became president, the people knew they had a man whom they could trust. The day before the convention which was to nominate him for the U. S. Senate, he read to a group of friends the speech he had prepared for the occasion. It was the one on the theme, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” They all warned him that it would defeat him in the election. He replied simply: “Friends, the time has come when these sentiments should be uttered, and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked with the truth.” He never reached the Senate, but he reached the White House. And he did not take the presidency for personal gain. He was interested in the people. Subjected to a thousand temptations in the rough-and-tumble of politics, he veered not an inch from his white-souled incorruptibility.
Lincoln was gentle. Amazing as it seems when one considers his uncouth exterior, his raw humor, and his lack of educational and social advantages, the man was as tenderhearted as any woman. While traveling with friends on the old judicial circuit in Illinois, he is said to have turned aside at the piteous cries of two little fledglings that had fallen out of their nest. He couldn’t bear to pass them by. He had to put them tenderly back with their mother. To his political opponents, some of whom criticized him mercilessly, he was incredibly good-natured. At home he was such an indulgent father that it is a wonder his boys were not completely spoiled. Neighborhood pranksters took advantage of his gentle ways to lie in ambush near the sidewalk and knock off his hat has he passed. All he did was to turn about, pick up the hat, and go on. In the White House this softness sometimes betrayed him into unwise appointments and too-generous pardons. It has well been said that the only criticism of his use of his vast powers which stand today is his lavish exercise of the pardoning power. Yet his gentleness also produced some of his finest actions. Said he, “After all, the one meaning of life is simply to be kind.”
Lincoln was firm. Imbued with a keen sense of justice, he stove mightily to make the right prevail. When the seceding states left the Union, certain fuzzy-minded individuals in the North naively thought that the chief problem of the Nation was solved. Said Horace Greeley, for instance, “Let the erring sisters depart in peace.” To Lincoln such a notion was silly. This great Nation, “conceived in liberty,” was being disrupted. His plain duty as chief executive was to hold it together. Much as he hated ware, the terrible struggle that ensued, “testing whether the nation, or any nation so conceived … can long endure,” represented the pangs of “a new birth of freedom.” It is interesting to imagine what he would say today to the “peace-at-any-price” folks….
Lincoln was humble. On that dark February morning when he stood on the rear platform of the train which was to take him to Washington for his inauguration, he removed his hat and gazed at the little crowd of neighbors in a moment of silence. When he spoke, his voice husky with emotion, his brief farewell message included these words: “I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed.” More than once, as the gloom of civil strife deepened around him, he called in a trusted minister of the Gospel for counsel and prayer. Later he confessed: “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for the day.”
Lincoln was compassionate. There were nights during the war when he could not sleep because thoughts of the wounded and dying overwhelmed his tender spirit. Many a court-martialed soldier boy, pardoned by the president, went willingly into battle to prove his loyalty. Late one night a man came to Lincoln to plead for a 19-year-old boy condemned to be shot the next morning for sleeping at his post. Lincoln arose from his bed and sat down in his night clothes to write an order suspending the execution. Then, troubled by the thought that the telegram might go astray, he dressed himself, when over to the War Department, and got into direct communication with the army. In the pocket of a dead soldier after the battle of Fredericksburg they found a photograph of the commander-in-chief. By the president’s mercy he had been spared a dishonorable death to die in battle. Under the picture was written: “God bless President Lincoln.”
Lincoln was forgiving. Northerners of ability who had belittled him were invited without hesitation into his official family. Edwin M. Stanton had ignored him and even insulted him when the two were practicing law, and continued to do so after Lincoln became president; nevertheless he was made Secretary of War, and continued in that position to the end. A congressman who once went to Stanton with an order from the President came back to report that Stanton had ignored the order and had called Lincoln a fool. The magnanimous answer: “If Stanton says I’m a fool, I must be a fool, because Stanton is nearly always right and generally says what he means.”
As to the rebelling Southerners, Lincoln was never known to belittle or berate them. He did his best to convince them that he desired only reconciliation and reunion. He long hoped for compensated emancipation as a solution of the slavery question, a plan that would not have required the slave owners to bear the entire economic loss. At the end of the war he was for welcoming the seeded states back into the Union with a minimum of penalty of delay.
The oft-quoted words from Lincoln’s second inaugural address admirably reveal his Christian graces-the graces which made him truly great: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us fight on to finish the work we are in-to bind up the nation’s wounds, to call for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphans, to do all that may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
By Allen Bowman
No comments:
Post a Comment