Ida Tarbell
McClure’s Magazine/September, 1899
THE first edition of the morning papers in all the cities and towns of the North told their readers on Saturday, April 15, 1865, that Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, lay mortally wounded in Washington. The extras within the next two hours told them he was dead. The first impulse of men everywhere seems to have been to doubt. It could not be. They realized only too quickly that it was true! There was no discrediting the circumstantial accounts of the later telegrams. There was no escape from the horror and uncertainty which filled the air, driving out the joy and exultation which for days had inundated the country.
In the great cities like New York a deathlike silence followed the spreading of the news—a silence made the more terrible by the presence of hundreds of men and women walking in the streets with bent heads, white faces, and knit brows. Automatically, without thought of what their neighbors were doing, men went to their shops only to send away their clerks and close their doors for the day. Stock exchanges met only to adjourn. By ten o’clock business had ceased. It was not only in the cities, where the tension of feeling is always greatest, that this was true. It was the same in the small towns.
“I was a compositor then, working in a printing-office at Danville, Illinois,”’ says Professor Amos Draper, of Washington, D. C. “The editor came into the room early in the forenoon with a telegram in his hand; he was regarding it intently, with a pale face. Without saying a word he passed it to one and another of the compositors. I noticed that as the men read it they laid down their sticks, and without a word went, one after another, took their coats and hats off the nails where they were hanging, put them on, and went into the street. Finally the telegram was passed to me. It was the announcement that Lincoln had been shot the night before and had died that morning. Automatically I laid down my stick, took my hat and coat, and went into the street. It seemed to me as if every man in town had dropped his business just where it was and come out. There was no sound; but the people, with pale faces and tense looks, regarded one another as if questioning what would happen next.”
Just as the first universal impulse seems to have been to cease all business, so the next was to drag down the banners of victory which hung everywhere and replace them by crepe. New York City before noon of Saturday was hung in black from the Battery to Harlem. It was not only Broadway and Washington Square and Fifth Avenue which mourned. The soiled windows of Five Points tenements and saloons were draped, and from the doors of the poor hovels of upper Manhattan west of Central Park bits of black weed were strung; and so it was in all the cities and towns of the North.
“About nine o’clock on Saturday the intelligence reached us of the assassination of Mr. Lincoln and the attempt upon Mr. Seward’s life,” wrote Senator Grimes from Burlington, Iowa. “Immediately the people began to assemble about the ‘Hawkeye’ office, and soon Third Street became packed with people. And such expressions of horror, indignation, sorrow, and wonder were never heard before. Shortly, someone began to decorate his house with the habiliments of mourning; and soon all the business parts of the town, even the vilest liquor dens, were shrouded with the outward signs of sorrow. All business was at once suspended, and not resumed during the day; but every one waited for further intelligence from Washington.”
And this was true not only of the towns; it was true of the distant farms. There the news was slower in coming. A traveler journeying from the town stopped to tell it at a farm-house. The farmer, leaving his plow, walked or rode across lots to repeat it to a neighbor. Everywhere they dropped their work, and everywhere they brought out a strip of black and tied it to the doorknob.
The awful quiet of the North through the first few hours after the tragedy covered not grief alone; below it was a righteous anger, which, as the hours passed, began to break out. It showed itself first against those of Southern sympathy who were bold enough to say they were “glad of it.” In New York a man was heard to remark that “it served old Abe right.”’ Cries of “Lynch him, lynch him!” were raised. He was set upon by the crowd, and escaped narrowly. All day the police were busy hustling suspected Copperheads away from the mobs which seemed to rise from the ground at the first word of treason.
“I was kept busy last night,”’ further wrote Senator Grimes from Burlington, “trying to prevent the destruction of the store of a foolish woman who, it was said, expressed her joy at Mr. Lincoln’s murder. Had she been a man, so much was the old Adam aroused in me, I would not have uttered a word to save her.”
In Cincinnati, which had spent the day and night before in the most elaborate jubilation, the rage against treason broke out at the least provocation. “Some individuals of the ‘butternut’ inclination,” says a former citizen, in recalling the scenes, “were knocked into the gutters and kicked, because they would make no expression of sorrow, or because of their well-known past sympathy with the rebellion. Others as loyal as any suffered also, through mistaken ideas of meanness on the part of personal enemies. Junius Brutus Booth, a brother of the assassin, was closing a two-weeks’ engagement at Pike’s Opera House. He was stopping at the Burnet House. While there was no violent public demonstration against him, it was well known that his life would not be worth a farthing should he be seen on the streets or in public. Of course the bills were taken down, and there was no performance that night. Mr. Booth was well pleased to quietly escape from the Burnet and disappear.”
In one New Hampshire town, where a company of volunteers from the country had gathered to drill, only to be met by the news, it was rumored that a man in a factory nearby had been heard to say, “The old abolitionist ought to have been killed long ago.” The volunteers marched in a body to the factory, entered, and dragged the offender out into the road. There they held a crude court martial. “The company surrounded him,” says one of the men, “in such military order as raw recruits could get into, and questioned him as to his utterances. He was willing to do or say anything. ‘Duck him!’ was the cry raised on every hand. The canal was close at hand, but there were voices heard saying: ‘He’s an old man. Don’t duck him. Send him out of town.’ And so it was done. He was compelled to give three cheers for the Stars and Stripes. I shall never forget his pitiful little ‘Hooray!’ He was made to kneel down and repeat something in praise of Abraham Lincoln that one of the officers dictated to him, and then he was marched to his boarding-place, given certain minutes to pack up his effects, and escorted to the railroad station, where he was sent off on the next train. This was a very mild example of the feeling there was. Had the man been a real American Copperhead, he would scarcely have escaped a ducking, and perhaps a drubbing also; but many said: ‘He’s only an Englishman, and doesn’t know any better.’”
The most important expression of the feeling was that at a great noon meeting held at the Custom House in New York. Among the speakers were General Butler, E. L. Chittenden, Daniel S. Dickinson, William P. Fessenden, and General Garfield. The awful, righteous indignation of the meeting is indicated in the following citations from the speeches:
“If rebellion can do this to the wise, the kind, the benevolent Abraham Lincoln,” said Butler, “what ought we to do to those who from high places incited the assassin’s mind and guided the assassin’s knife? [Applause, and cries of ‘Hang them!’] Shall we content ourselves with simply crushing out the strength, the power, the material resources of the rebellion? [‘Never, never.’] Shall we leave it yet unsubdued to light the torch of conflagration in our cities? Are we to have peace in fact or peace only in name? [‘Cries of ‘In fact’ and applause.] Is this nation hereafter to live in peace, or are men to go about in fear and in dread, as in some of the countries of the Old World, in times past, when every man feared his neighbor, and no man went about except he was armed to the teeth or was clad in panoply of steel? This question is to be decided this day, and at this hour, by the American people. It may be that this is a dispensation of God, through His providence, to teach us that the spirit of rebellion has not been broken with the surrender of its arms.” [Applause.]
“Fellow-citizens,” said Garfield, “they have slain the noblest and most generous spirit that ever put down a rebellion on this earth. [Applause.] It may be almost impious to say it; but it does seem to me that his death almost parallels that of the Son of God, Who cried out, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ But in taking away that life they have left the iron hand of the people to fall upon them. [Great applause.] Peace, forgiveness, and mercy are the attributes of this government, but Justice and Judgment with inexorable tread follow behind, and when they have slain love, when they have despised mercy, when they have rejected those that would be their best friends, then comes justice with hoodwinked eyes and the sword.”
The tense despair and rage of the people on Saturday had not broken when they gathered on Sunday for worship. Never, perhaps, in any sorrow, any disaster that this nation has suffered, was there so spontaneous a turning to the church for consolation as on this Sabbath day. Never, perhaps, did the clergy of a country rise more universally to console the grief of the people than on this day. Everywhere, from East to West, the death of the President was the theme of the sermons, and men who never before in their lives had said anything but commonplaces rose this day to eloquence. One of the most touching of the Sunday gatherings was at Bloomington, Illinois. Elsewhere it was only a President, a national leader, who had been lost; here it was a personal friend, and people refused to be comforted. On Sunday morning there were sermons in all the churches, but they seemed in no way to relieve the tension. Later in the day word was circulated that a general out-of-door meeting would be held at the courthouse, and people gathered from far and near, townspeople and country people, in the yard about the court-house, where for years they had been accustomed to see Lincoln coming and going; and the ministers of the town, all of them his friends, talked one after another, until finally, comforted and resigned, the people separated silently and went home.
On Monday a slight distraction came in the announcement of the plan for the funeral ceremonies. After much discussion, it had been decided that a public funeral should be held in Washington, and that the body should then lie in state for brief periods at each of the larger cities on the way to Springfield, whither it was to be taken for burial. The necessity of at once beginning preparations for the reception of the funeral party furnished the first real relief to the universal grief which had paralyzed the country.
The dead President had lain in an upper chamber of the White House from the time of his removal there on Saturday morning until Tuesday morning, when he was laid under a magnificent catafalque in the center of the great East Room. Although there were in Washington many citizens who sympathized with the South, although the plot for assassination had been developed there, yet no sign appeared of any feeling but grief and indignation. It is said that there were not fifty houses in the city that were not draped in black, and it seemed as if every man, woman, and child were seeking some souvenir of the tragedy. A child was found at the Tenth Street house staining bits of soft paper with the half-dried blood on the steps. Fragments of the stained linen from the bed on which the President died were passed from hand to hand; locks of the hair cut away by the surgeons were begged; his latest photograph, the papers of the day, programmes of the funeral, a hundred trivial relics were gathered together, and are treasured to-day by the original owners or their children. They
“dip their napkins in his sacred blood;
Yea, beg a hair of him for memory,
And, dying, mention it within their wills,
Bequeathing it, as a rich legacy.
Unto their issue.”
On Tuesday morning, when the White House was opened, it was practically the whole population, augmented by hundreds from the North, who waited at the gates. All day long they surged steadily through the East Room, and at night, when the gates were closed, Lafayette Park and the adjoining streets were still packed with people waiting for admission. In this great company of mourners two classes were conspicuous, the soldiers and the negroes. One had come from camp and hospital, the other from country and hovel, and both wept unrestrainedly as they looked on the dead face of the man who had been to one a father, to the other a liberator.
Wednesday had been chosen for the funeral, and every device was employed by the Government to make the ceremony fitting in pomp and solemnity. The greatest of the nation—members of the cabinet, senators, Congressmen, diplomats; representatives of the churches, of the courts, of commerce, of all that was distinguished and powerful in the North, were present in the East Room. Mr. Lincoln’s friend, Bishop Simpson, and his pastor, Dr. Gurley, conducted the services. More than one spectator noted that in the great assembly there was but one person bearing the name of Lincoln and related to the President—his son Robert. Mrs. Lincoln was not able to endure the emotion of the scene, and little Tad could not be induced to be present.
At two o’clock in the afternoon, the booming of cannon and the tolling of bells announced that the services were ended. A few moments later, the coffin was borne from the White House and placed in a magnificent funeral car, and under the conduct of a splendid military and civilian escort, conveyed slowly to the Capitol, attended by thousands upon thousands of men and women. At the east front of the Capitol the procession halted, and the body of Abraham Lincoln was borne across the portico, from which six weeks before, in assuming for the second time the Presidency, he had explained to the country his views upon reconstruction: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
The rotunda of the Capitol, into which the coffin was now carried, was draped in black, and under the dome was a great catafalque. On this the coffin was placed, and after a simple service there left alone, save for the soldiers who paced back and forth at the head and foot.
But it was not in Washington alone that funeral services were held that day. All over the North, in Canada, in the Army of the Potomac, even in Richmond, business was suspended, and at noon people gathered to listen to eulogies of the dead. Twenty-five million people literally participated in the funeral rites of that Wednesday.
On Thursday the Capitol was opened, and here again, in spite of a steady rain, were repeated the scenes of Tuesday at the White House, thousands of persons slowly mounting the long flight of steps leading to the east entrance and passing through the rotunda.
From Washington to Springfield
At six o’clock on the morning of April 21st, there gathered in the rotunda the members of the cabinet, Lieutenant-General Grant and his staff, many senators, army and navy officers, and other dignitaries. After a prayer by Dr. Gurley, the party followed the coffin to the railway station, where the funeral train which was to convey the remains of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield now stood. A great company of people had gathered for the last scene of the tragedy, and they waited in absolute silence and with uncovered heads while the coffin was placed in the car. At its foot was placed a smaller coffin, that of Willie Lincoln, the President’s beloved son, who had died in February, 1862. At Mrs. Lincoln’s request father and son were to make together this last earthly journey.
Following the remains of the President came the party which was to serve as an escort to Springfield. It included several of Lincoln’s old-time friends, among them Judge David Davis and Ward Lamon; a Guard of Honor, composed of prominent army officers; a large Congressional committee, several governors of States, a special delegation from Illinois, and a Body-guard. From time to time on the journey this party was joined for brief periods by other eminent men, though it remained practically the same throughout. Three of its members—Judge Davis, General Hunter, and Marshal Lamon—had been with Mr. Lincoln when he came on to Washington for his first inauguration.
Precisely at eight o’clock, the train of nine cars pulled out from the station. It moved slowly, almost noiselessly, not a bell ringing nor a whistle sounding, through a mourning throng that lined the way to the borders of the town. The line of the journey begun on this Friday morning was practically the same that Mr. Lincoln had followed four years before when he came to Washington for his first inauguration. It led through Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago, to Springfield. The entire programme of the journey, including the hours when the train would pass certain towns where it could not stop, had been published long enough beforehand to enable the people along the way to arrange, if they wished, to pay a tribute to the dead President. The result was a demonstration which in sincerity and unanimity has never been equaled in the world’s history. The journey began at six o’clock on the morning of April 21st, and lasted until nine o’clock of the morning of May 3d; and it might almost be said that during the whole time there was not an hour of the night or day, whether the coffin lay in state in some heavily draped public building or was being whirled across the country, when mourning crowds were not regarding it with wet eyes and bowed heads. Night and darkness in no way lessened the number of the mourners. Thus it was not until eight o’clock on Saturday evening (April 22d) that the coffin was placed in Independence Hall, at Philadelphia. The building was at once opened to the public, and through the whole night thousands filed in to look on the dead man’s face. It was at one o’clock in the morning, on Monday, that the coffin was carried from Independence Hall to the train, but thousands of men, women, and children stood in the streets while the procession passed, as if it were day. In New York, on the following Tuesday, City Hall, where the coffin had been placed in the afternoon, remained open the whole night. The crowd was even greater than during the day, filling the side streets around the square in every direction. It was more impressive, too, for the men and women who were willing to watch out the night in the flare of torches and gaslights were laborers who could not secure release in daytime. Many of them had come great distances, and hundreds were obliged, after leaving the hall, to find a bed in a doorway, so overfilled was the town. The crowd was at its greatest at midnight, when, as the bells were tolling the hour, a German chorus of some seventy voices commenced suddenly to sing the Inter vitae. The thrilling sweetness of the music coming unexpectedly upon the mourners produced an effect never to be forgotten.
Nor did rain make any more difference with the crowd than the darkness. Several times during the journey there arose heavy storms; but the people, in utter indifference, stood in the streets, often uncovered, to see the catafalque and its guard go by, or waiting their turn to be admitted to view the coffin.
The great demonstrations were, of course, in the cities where the remains lay in state for a few hours. These demonstrations were perforce much alike. The funeral train was met at the station by the distinguished men of the city and representatives of organizations. The coffin was transferred to a stately hearse, draped in velvet and crape, surmounted by heavy plumes, ornamented in silver, and drawn by six, eight, ten, or more horses. Then, to the tolling of the bells and the regular firing of minute guns, followed by a vast concourse of people, it was carried to the place appointed for the lying in state. Here a crowd which seemed unending filed by until the time came to close the coffin, when the procession reformed to attend the hearse to the funeral train.
The first of these demonstrations was in Baltimore, the city which a little over four years before it had been thought unsafe for the President to pass through openly, the city in which the first troops called out for the defense of the Union had been mobbed. Now no offering was sufficient to express the feeling of sorrow. All buildings draped in black, all business suspended, the people poured out in a driving rain to follow the catafalque to the Exchange, where for two hours, on April 21st, the public was admitted.
As was to be expected, the most elaborate of the series of funeral ceremonies was in New York. There, when the funeral train arrived on Tuesday, April 25th, the whole city was swathed in crape, and vast crowds filled the streets. The climax of the obsequies was the procession which, on Wednesday, followed the hearse up Broadway and Fifth Avenue to Thirty-fourth Street and thence to the Hudson River station. For a week this procession had been preparing, until finally it included representatives of almost every organization of every nature in the city and vicinity. The military was represented by detachments from scores of different regiments, and by many distinguished officers of the army and navy, among them General Scott and Admiral Farragut. Companies of the Seventh Regiment were on each side of the funeral car. The city sent its officials—educational, judicial, protective. The foreign consuls marched in full uniform. There were scores of societies and clubs, including all the organizations of Irish, Germans, and Hebrews. The whole life of the city was, in fact, represented in the solid column of men which marched that day through the streets of New York in such numbers that it took four hours to pass a single point. Deepest in significance of all the long rank was the rear body in the last division: 200 colored men bearing a banner inscribed with the words, “Abraham Lincoln—Our Emancipator.” A platoon of police preceded, another followed the delegation, for the presence of these freedmen would, it was believed by many, cause disorder, and permission for them to march had only been obtained by an appeal to the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton. Several white men walked with them, and at many points sympathizers took pains to applaud. With this single exception, the procession passed through a silent multitude, the only sound being from the steady tramp of feet and the music of the funeral dirges.
At four o’clock the funeral car reached the station, and the journey was continued toward Albany. But the obsequies in New York did not end then. A meeting was held that night in Union Square, at which George Bancroft delivered an oration that will remain as one of the great expressions of the day upon Lincoln and the ideas for which he worked. It was for this gathering that Bryant wrote his “Ode for the Burial of Abraham Lincoln,”’ beginning:
“Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare,
Gentle and merciful and just;
Who in the fear of God did’st bear
The sword of power, a Nation’s trust.”
Imposing, solemn, and sincere as was this series of municipal demonstrations over the bier of Lincoln, there was another feature of the funeral march which showed more vividly the affectionate reverence in which the whole people held the President. This was the outpouring at villages, country crossroads, and farms to salute, as it passed, the train bearing his remains. From Washington to Springfield the train entered scarcely a town that the bells were not tolling, the minute guns firing, the stations draped, and all the spaces beside the track crowded with people with uncovered heads. At many points arches were erected over the track; at others the bridges were wreathed from end to end in crepe and evergreens and flags. And this was not in the towns alone; every farm-house by which the train passed became for the time a funeral house; the plow was left in the furrow, crepe was on the door, the neighbors were gathered, and those who watched from the train as it flew by could see groups of weeping women, of men with uncovered heads, sometimes a minister among them, his arms raised in prayer. Night did not hinder them. Great bonfires were built in lonely country-sides, around which the farmers waited patiently to salute their dead. At the towns the length of the train was lit by blazing torches. Storm as well as darkness was unheeded. Much of the journey was made through the rain, in fact, but the people seemed to have forgotten all things but that Abraham Lincoln, the man they loved and trusted, was passing by for the last time.
In Illinois
At eleven o’clock on the morning of Monday, May 1st, the funeral train reached Chicago, and here the mourning began to take on a character distinctly different from what had marked it through the East. The people who now met the coffin, who followed it to the court-house, who passed in endless streams by it to look on Lincoln’s face, dated their trust in him many years earlier than 1861. Man after man of them had come to pay their last tribute, not to the late President of the United States, but to the genial lawyer; the resourceful, witty political debater who had educated Illinois to believe that a country could not endure half slave and half free, and who, after defeat, had kept her faithful to the “durable struggle” by his counsel. The tears these men shed were the tears of long-time friends and personal followers.
As the train advanced from Chicago toward Springfield the personal and intimate character of the mourning grew. The journey was made at night, but the whole population of the country lined the route. Nearly every one of the towns passed—indeed, one might almost say every one of the farms passed—had been visited personally by Lincoln on legal or political errands, and a vast number of those who thus in the dead of night watched the flying train he had at some time in his life taken by the hand.
It was nine o’clock on the morning of May 3d that the funeral train stopped at the station where, four years and two months be fore, Abraham Lincoln had bidden his friends farewell, as he left them to go to Washington. Nearly all of those who on that dreary February morning had listened to his solemn farewell words were present in the May sunshine to receive him. Their hearts had been heavy as he departed; they were broken now, for he was more than a great leader, an honored martyr, to the men of Springfield. He was their neighbor and friend and helper, and as they bore his coffin to the State House, in the center of the city, their minds were busy, not with the greatness and honor that had come to him and to them through him, but with the scenes of more than a quarter of a century in which he had always been a conspicuous figure. Every corner of the street suggested that past. Here was the office in which he had first studied law; here, draped in mourning, the one before which his name still hung. Here was the house where he had lived, the church he had attended, the store in which he had been accustomed to tell stories and to discuss politics. His name was written everywhere, even on the walls of the Hall of Representatives in the State House, where they placed his coffin, for here he had spoken again and again.
During the time that the body lay in state—from the noon of May 3d until the noon of May 4th—the place Lincoln held in Springfield and the surrounding country was shown as never before. The men and women who came to look on his face were many of them the plain farmers of Sangamon and adjacent counties, and they wept as over the coffin of a father. Their grief at finding him so changed was inconsolable. In the days after leaving Washington the face changed greatly, and by the time Springfield was reached it was black and shrunken almost beyond recognition. To many the last look at their friend was so painful that the remembrance has never left them. The writer has seen men weep as they recalled the scene, and heard them say repeatedly, “If I had not seen him dead; if I could only remember him alive!”
It was on May 4th, fifteen days after the funeral in Washington, that Abraham Lincoln’s remains finally rested in Oakland Cemetery, a shaded and beautiful spot, two miles from Springfield. Here, at the foot of a woody knoll, a vault had been prepared; and thither, attended by a great concourse of military and civic dignitaries, by governors of States, members of Congress, officers of the army and navy, delegations from orders, from cities, from churches, by the friends of his youth, his young manhood, his maturer years, was Lincoln carried and laid, by his side his little son. The solemn rite was followed by dirge and prayer, by the reading of his last inaugural address, and by a noble funeral oration by Bishop Simpson. Then, as the beautiful day drew toward evening, the vault was closed, and the great multitudes slowly returned to their duties.
The funeral pageant was at an end, but the mourning was not silenced. From every corner of the earth there came to the family and to the Government tributes to the greatness of the character and the life of the murdered man. Medals were cast, tablets engraved, parchments engrossed. At the end of the year, when the State Department came to publish the diplomatic correspondence of 1865, there was a volume of over 700 pages, containing nothing but expressions of condolence and sympathy on Lincoln’s death. Nor did the mourning and the honor end there. From the day of his death until now, the world has gone on rearing monuments to Abraham Lincoln.
The first and inevitable result of the emotion which swept over the earth at Lincoln’s death was to enroll him among martyrs and heroes. Men forgot that they had despised him, jeered at him, doubted him. They forgot his mistakes, forgot his plodding caution, forgot his homely ways. They saw now, with the vision which an awful and sudden disaster so often gives, the simple, noble outlines on which he had worked. They realized how completely he had sunk every partisan and personal consideration, every non-essential, in the tasks which he had set for himself—to prevent the extension of slavery, to save the Union. They realized how, while they had forgotten everything in disputes over this man, this measure, this event, he had seen only the two great objects of the struggle. They saw how slowly, but surely, he had educated them to feel the vital importance of these objects, had resolved their partisan warfare into a moral struggle. The wisdom of his words, the sincerity of his acts, the steadfastness of his life were clear to them at last. With this realization came a feeling that he was more than a man. He was a prophet, they said, a man raised up by God for a special work, and they laid then the foundation of the Lincoln myth which still enthralls so many minds.
The real Lincoln, the great Lincoln, is not, however, this prophet and martyr. He is the simple, steady, resolute, unselfish man whose supreme ambition was to find out the truth of the questions which confronted him in life, and whose highest satisfaction was in following the truth he discovered. He was not endowed by nature with the vision of a seer. His power of getting at the truth of things he had won by incessant mental effort. From his boyhood he would understand, though he must walk the floor all night with his problem. Nor had nature made him a saint. His lofty moral courage in the Civil War was the logical result of life-long fidelity to his own conscience. From his boyhood he would keep faith with that which his mind told him was true, though he lost friend and place by it. When he entered public life these qualities at first won him position; but they cost him a position more than once. They sent him to Congress; but, in 1849, they forced him out of public life. They brought him face to face with Douglas from 1854 to 1858, and enabled him to shape the moral sentiment of the Northwest; but later they defeated him. They made him Illinois’s candidate for the Presidency in 1860; but they brought upon him as President the distrust and hatred of even his own party. It took four years of dogged struggle, of constant repetitions of the few truths which he believed to be essential, to teach the people of the United States that they could trust him; it took a murderer’s bullet to make them realize the surpassing greatness of his simplicity, his common sense, and his resolution. It is this man who never rested until he had found what he believed to be the right, and who, having found it, could never be turned from it, who is the Real Lincoln.
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