The dread hour had now struck, and civil broils meant to fill the page of history were at hand. Then it was that, in a middle-sized city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, not yet a world-famous one, Chicago by name, the Republican convention, assembled there for the first time, met to choose a candidate for the presidency, and on Friday, 18th of May, 1860, selected a man whom my predecessor of those days, announcing in an unprinted report the news to his government, described as "a man almost unknown, Mr. Abraham Lincoln." And so he was; his own party had hesitated to nominate him; only on the third ballot, after two others in which he did not lead, the convention decided that the fate of the party, of abolitionism, and of the Union would be placed in the hands of that "man almost unknown," Mr. Abraham Lincoln.
The search-light of history has since been turned on the most obscure parts of his career; every incident of it is known; many sayings of his to which neither he nor his hearers attributed any importance at the moment have become household words. Biographies innumerable, in pamphlet form or in many volumes, have told us of the deeds of Abraham Lincoln, of his appearance, of his peculiarities, of his virtues, and of the part he played in the history of the world, not alone the world of his day, but that of after-time. For not only the souvenir of his personality and of his examples, and the consequences of what he did, survive among us, but so do also a number of his clean-cut, memorable, guiding sentences which continue alive and active among men. His mind is still living.
Few suspected such a future at the time of his election. "We all remember," wrote, years later, the French Academician, Prévost-Paradol, "the anxiety with which we awaited the first words of that President then unknown, upon whom a heavy task had fallen, and from whose advent to power might be dated the ruin or regeneration of his country. All we knew was that he had sprung from the humblest walks of life; that his youth had been spent in manual labor; that he had then risen, by degrees, in his town, in his county, and in his State. What was this favorite of the people? Democratic societies are liable to errors which are fatal to them. But as soon as Mr. Lincoln arrived in Washington, as soon as he spoke, all our doubts and fears were dissipated, and it seemed to us that destiny itself had pronounced in favor of the good cause, since in such an emergency it had given to the country an honest man."
Well indeed might people have wondered and felt anxious when they remembered how little training in greatest affairs the new ruler had had, and the incredible difficulty of the problems he would have to solve: to solve, his heart bleeding at the very thought, for he had to fight, "not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies!"
No romance of adventure reads more like a romance than the true story of Lincoln's youth and of the wanderings of his family, from Virginia to Kentucky, from Kentucky to Indiana, from Indiana to the newly-formed State of Illinois, having first to clear a part of the forest, then to build a doorless, windowless, floorless log cabin, with beds of leaves, and one room for all the uses of the nine inmates: Lincoln, the grandson of a man killed by the Indians, the son of a father who never succeeded in anything, and whose utmost literary accomplishment, taught him by his wife, and which he had in common with the father of Shakespeare, consisted in "bunglingly writing his own name," the whole family leading a life in comparison with which that of Robinson Crusoe was one of sybaritic enjoyment. That in those trackless, neighborless, bookless parts of the country the future President could learn and educate himself was the first great wonder of his life. His school-days, in schools as primitive as the rest of his surroundings, attended at spare moments, did not amount, put together, to so much as one year, during which he learned, as he stated afterward, how "to read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all ... till within his twenty-third year, he was almost constantly handling that most useful instrument"—an axe, not a pen.[231] The event proved once more that learning does not so much depend upon the master's teaching as upon the pupil's desire. This desire never left him; as recorded by himself, he "nearly mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress."
But no book, school, nor talk with refined men would have taught him what this rough life did. Confronted every day and every hour of the day with problems which had to be solved, problems of food, of clothing, of shelter, of escaping disease—"ague and fever ... by which they [the people of the place] were greatly discouraged"[232]—of developing mind and body with scarcely any books but those borrowed from distant neighbors, in doubt most of the time as to what was going on in the wide world, he got the habit of seeing, deciding, and acting for himself. Accustomed from childhood to live surrounded by the unknown and to meet the unexpected, in a region "with many bears," he wrote later, "and other wild animals still in the woods," his soul learned to be astonished at nothing and, instead of losing any time in useless wondering, to seek at once the way out of the difficulty. What the forest, what the swamp, what the river taught Lincoln cannot be overestimated. After long years of it, and shorter years at now-vanished New Salem, then at Springfield, at Vandalia, the former capital of Illinois, where he met some descendants of his precursors in the forest, the French "coureurs de bois,"[233] after years of political apprenticeship which had given him but a limited notoriety, almost suddenly he found himself transferred to the post of greatest honor and greatest danger. And what then would say the "man almost unknown," the backwoodsman of yesterday? What would he say? What did he say? The right thing.
He was accustomed not to be surprised, but to ponder, decide, and act. The pondering part was misunderstood by many who never ceased in his day to complain and remonstrate about his supposed hesitancy; many of Napoleon's generals, and for the same cause, spoke with disgust, at times, of their chief's hesitations, as if a weak will were one of his faults. Confronted with circumstances which were so extraordinary as to be new to all, Lincoln was the man least astonished in the government. His rough and shrewd instinct proved of better avail than the clever minds of his more-refined and better-instructed seconds. It was Lincoln's instinct which checked Seward's complicated schemes and dangerous calculations. Lincoln could not calculate so cleverly, but he could guess better.
In writing the words quoted above, Prévost-Paradol was alluding to the now famous first inaugural address. But even before Lincoln had reached Washington he had, so to say, given his measure. Passing through Philadelphia on his way to the capital, he had been entertained at Independence Hall and, addressing the audience gathered there, had told how he had often meditated on the virtues and dangers of the men who used to meet within those walls in the days when the existence of the nation was at stake, and on the famous Declaration signed there by them. The purport of it, said the new President, is "that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance." And he added: "Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest of men in the world if I can help to save it.... If it cannot be saved upon that principle ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it."[234]