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Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 to 1865 by Abraham Lincoln

A >> Abraham Lincoln >> Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 to 1865



SPEECHES & LETTERS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1832-1865

Edited by

MERWIN ROE

London: Published
by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd
and in New York
by E.P. Dutton & Co

First issue of this Edition 1907; Reprinted 1909, 1910, 1912

Mr. Bryce's Introduction to 'Lincoln's Speeches' is printed from plates
made and type set by the University Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.

Taken by permission from 'The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln,'
Century Company, 1894







[Illustration: WHEN HE SENT HIS GREAT VOICE FORTH OUT OF HIS BREAST, &
HIS WORDS FELL LIKE THE WINTER SNOWS, NOR THEN WOULD ANY MORTAL CONTEND
WITH ULYSSES--HOMER. ILIAD.]





INTRODUCTION


No man since Washington has become to Americans so familiar or so
beloved a figure as Abraham Lincoln. He is to them the representative
and typical American, the man who best embodies the political ideals of
the nation. He is typical in the fact that he sprang from the masses of
the people, that he remained through his whole career a man of the
people, that his chief desire was to be in accord with the beliefs and
wishes of the people, that he never failed to trust in the people and to
rely on their support. Every native American knows his life and his
speeches. His anecdotes and witticisms have passed into the thought and
the conversation of the whole nation as those of no other statesman have
done.

He belongs, however, not only to the United States, but to the whole of
civilized mankind. It is no exaggeration to say that he has, within the
last thirty years, grown to be a conspicuous figure in the history of
the modern world. Without him, the course of events not only in the
Western hemisphere but in Europe also would have been different, for he
was called to guide at the greatest crisis of its fate a State already
mighty, and now far more mighty than in his days, and the guidance he
gave has affected the march of events ever since. A life and a character
such as his ought to be known to and comprehended by Europeans as well
as by Americans. Among Europeans, it is especially Englishmen who ought
to appreciate him and understand the significance of his life, for he
came of an English stock, he spoke the English tongue, his action told
upon the progress of events and the shaping of opinion in all British
communities everywhere more than it has done upon any other nation
outside America itself.

This collection of Lincoln's speeches seeks to make him known by
his words as readers of history know him by his deeds. In
popularly-governed countries the great statesman is almost of necessity
an orator, though his eminence as a speaker may be no true measure
either of his momentary power or of his permanent fame, for wisdom,
courage and tact bear little direct relation to the gift for speech. But
whether that gift be present in greater or in lesser degree, the
character and ideas of a statesman are best studied through his own
words. This is particularly true of Lincoln, because he was not what may
be called a professional orator. There have been famous orators whose
speeches we may read for the beauty of their language or for the wealth
of ideas they contain, with comparatively little regard to the
circumstances of time and place that led to their being delivered.
Lincoln is not one of these. His speeches need to be studied in close
relation to the occasions which called them forth. They are not
philosophical lucubrations or brilliant displays of rhetoric. They are a
part of his life. They are the expression of his convictions, and derive
no small part of their weight and dignity from the fact that they deal
with grave and urgent questions, and express the spirit in which he
approached those questions. Few great characters stand out so clearly
revealed by their words, whether spoken or written, as he does.

Accordingly Lincoln's discourses are not like those of nearly all the
men whose eloquence has won them fame. When we think of such men as
Pericles, Demosthenes, AEschines, Cicero, Hortensius, Burke, Sheridan,
Erskine, Canning, Webster, Gladstone, Bright, Massillon, Vergniaud,
Castelar, we think of exuberance of ideas or of phrases, of a command of
appropriate similes or metaphors, of the gifts of invention and of
exposition, of imaginative flights, or outbursts of passion fit to stir
and rouse an audience to like passion. We think of the orator as gifted
with a powerful or finely-modulated voice, an imposing presence, a
graceful delivery. Or if--remembering that Lincoln was by profession a
lawyer and practised until he became President of the United States--we
think of the special gifts which mark the forensic orator, we should
expect to find a man full of ingenuity and subtlety, one dexterous in
handling his case in such wise as to please and capture the judge or the
jury whom he addresses, one skilled in those rhetorical devices and
strokes of art which can be used, when need be, to engage the listener's
feelings and distract his mind from the real merits of the issue.

Of all this kind of talent there was in Lincoln but little. He was not
an artful pleader; indeed, it was said of him that he could argue well
only those cases in the justice of which he personally believed, and was
unable to make the worse appear the better reason. For most of the
qualities which the world admires in Cicero or in Burke we should look
in vain in Lincoln's speeches. They are not fine pieces of exquisite
diction, fit to be declaimed as school exercises or set before students
as models of composition.

What, then, are their merits? and why do they deserve to be valued and
remembered? How comes it that a man of first-rate powers was deficient
in qualities appertaining to his own profession which men less
remarkable have possessed?

To answer this question, let us first ask what were the preparation and
training Abraham Lincoln had for oratory, whether political or forensic.

Born in rude and abject poverty, he had never any education, except what
he gave himself, till he was approaching manhood. Not even books
wherewith to inform and train his mind were within his reach. No school,
no university, no legal faculty had any part in training his powers.
When he became a lawyer and a politician, the years most favourable to
continuous study had already passed, and the opportunities he found for
reading were very scanty. He knew but few authors in general literature,
though he knew those few thoroughly. He taught himself a little
mathematics, but he could read no language save his own, and can have
had only the faintest acquaintance with European history or with any
branch of philosophy.

The want of regular education was not made up for by the persons among
whom his lot was cast. Till he was a grown man, he never moved in any
society from which he could learn those things with which the mind of an
orator or a statesman ought to be stored. Even after he had gained some
legal practice, there was for many years no one for him to mix with
except the petty practitioners of a petty town, men nearly all of whom
knew little more than he did himself.

Schools gave him nothing, and society gave him nothing. But he had a
powerful intellect and a resolute will. Isolation fostered not only
self-reliance but the habit of reflection, and, indeed, of prolonged and
intense reflection. He made all that he knew a part of himself. He
thought everything out for himself. His convictions were his own--clear
and coherent. He was not positive or opinionated, and he did not deny
that at certain moments he pondered and hesitated long before he decided
on his course. But though he could keep a policy in suspense, waiting
for events to guide him, he did not waver. He paused and reconsidered,
but it was never his way either to go back upon a decision once made, or
to waste time in vain regrets that all he expected had not been
attained. He took advice readily, and left many things to his ministers;
but he did not lean upon his advisers. Without vanity or ostentation, he
was always independent, self-contained, prepared to take full
responsibility for his acts.

That he was keenly observant of all that passed under his eyes, that his
mind played freely round everything it touched, we know from the
accounts of his talk, which first made him famous in the town and
neighbourhood where he lived. His humour, and his memory for anecdotes
which he could bring out to good purpose, at the right moment, are
qualities which Europe deems distinctively American, but no great man of
action in the nineteenth century, even in America, possessed them in the
same measure. Seldom has so acute a power of observation been found
united to so abundant a power of sympathy.

These remarks may seem to belong to a study of his character rather than
of his speeches, yet they are not irrelevant, because the interest of
his speeches lies in their revelation of his character. Let us, however,
return to the speeches and to the letters, some of which, given in this
volume, are scarcely less noteworthy than are the speeches.

What are the distinctive merits of these speeches and letters? There is
less humour in them than his reputation as a humorist would have led us
to expect. They are serious, grave, practical. We feel that the man does
not care to play over the surface of the subject, or to use it as a way
of displaying his cleverness. He is trying to get right down to the very
foundation of the matter and tell us what his real thoughts about it
are. In this respect he sometimes reminds us of Bismarck's speeches,
which, in their rude, broken, forth-darting way, always go straight to
their destined aim; always hit the nail on the head. So too, in their
effort to grapple with fundamental facts, Lincoln's bear a sort of
likeness to Cromwell's speeches, though Cromwell has far less power of
utterance, and always seems to be wrestling with the difficulty of
finding language to convey to others what is plain, true and weighty to
himself. This difficulty makes the great Protector, though we can
usually see what he is driving at, frequently confused and obscure.
Lincoln, however, is always clear. Simplicity, directness and breadth
are the notes of his thought. Aptness, clearness, and again, simplicity,
are the notes of his diction. The American speakers of his generation,
like most of those of the preceding generation, but unlike those of that
earlier generation to which Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Marshall and
Madison belonged, were generally infected by a floridity which made them
a by-word in Europe. Even men of brilliant talent, such as Edward
Everett, were by no means free from this straining after effect by
highly-coloured phrases and theatrical effects. Such faults have to-day
virtually vanished from the United States, largely from a change in
public taste, to which perhaps the example set by Lincoln himself may
have contributed. In the forties and fifties florid rhetoric was
rampant, especially in the West and South, where taste was less polished
than in the older States. That Lincoln escaped it is a striking mark of
his independence as well as of his greatness. There is no superfluous
ornament in his orations, nothing tawdry, nothing otiose. For the most
part, he addresses the reason of his hearers, and credits them with
desiring to have none but solid arguments laid before them. When he does
appeal to emotion, he does it quietly, perhaps even solemnly. The note
struck is always a high note. The impressiveness of the appeal comes not
from fervid vehemence of language, but from the sincerity of his own
convictions. Sometimes one can see that through its whole course the
argument is suffused by the speaker's feeling, and when the time comes
for the feeling to be directly expressed, it glows not with fitful
flashes, but with the steady heat of an intense and strenuous soul.

The impression which most of the speeches leave on the reader is that
their matter has been carefully thought over even when the words have
not been learnt by heart. But there is an anecdote that on one occasion,
early in his career, Lincoln went to a public meeting not in the least
intending to speak, but presently being called for by the audience, rose
in obedience to the call, and delivered a long address so ardent and
thrilling that the reporters dropped their pencils and, absorbed in
watching him, forgot to take down what he said. It has also been stated,
on good authority, that on his way in the railroad cars, to the
dedication of the monument on the field of Gettysburg, he turned to a
Pennsylvanian gentleman who was sitting beside him and remarked, "I
suppose I shall be expected to say something this afternoon; lend me a
pencil and a bit of paper," and that he thereupon jotted down the notes
of a speech which has become the best known and best remembered of all
his utterances, so that some of its words and sentences have passed into
the minds of all educated men everywhere.

That famous Gettysburg speech is the best example one could desire of
the characteristic quality of Lincoln's eloquence. It is a short speech.
It is wonderfully terse in expression. It is quiet, so quiet that at the
moment it did not make upon the audience, an audience wrought up by a
long and highly-decorated harangue from one of the prominent orators of
the day, an impression at all commensurate to that which it began to
make as soon as it was read over America and Europe. There is in it not
a touch of what we call rhetoric, or of any striving after effect. Alike
in thought and in language it is simple, plain, direct. But it states
certain truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so
forcible, that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in
no other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all
time. Words so simple and so strong could have come only from one who
had meditated so long upon the primal facts of American history and
popular government that the truths those facts taught him had become
like the truths of mathematics in their clearness, their breadth, and
their precision.

The speeches on Slavery read strange to us now, when slavery as a living
system has been dead for forty years, dead and buried hell deep under
the detestation of mankind. It is hard for those whose memory does not
go back to 1865 to realize that down till then it was not only a
terrible fact, but was defended--defended by many otherwise good men,
defended not only by pseudo-scientific anthropologists as being in the
order of nature, but by ministers of the Gospel, out of the sacred
Scriptures, as part of the ordinances of God. Lincoln's position, the
position of one who had to induce slave-owning fellow-citizens to listen
to him and admit persuasion into their heated and prejudiced minds, did
not allow him to denounce it with horror, as we can all so easily do
to-day. But though his language is calm and restrained, he never
condescends to palter with slavery. He shows its innate evils and
dangers with unanswerable force. The speech on the Dred Scott decision
is a lucid, close and cogent piece of reasoning which, in its wide view
of Constitutional issues, sometimes reminds one of Webster, sometimes
even of Burke, though it does not equal the former in weight nor the
latter in splendour of diction.

Among the letters, perhaps the most impressive is that written to Mrs.
Bixley, the mother of five sons who had died fighting for the Union in
the armies of the North. It is short, and it deals with a theme on which
hundreds of letters are written daily. But I do not know where the
nobility of self-sacrifice for a great cause, and of the consolation
which the thought of a sacrifice so made should bring, is set forth with
such simple and pathetic beauty. Deep must be the fountains from which
there issues so pure a stream.

The career of Lincoln is often held up to ambitious young Americans as
an example to show what a man may achieve by his native strength, with
no advantages of birth or environment or education. In this there is
nothing improper, nothing fanciful. The moral is one which may well be
drawn, and in which those on whose early life Fortune has not smiled may
find encouragement. But the example is, after all, no great
encouragement to ordinary men, for Lincoln was an extraordinary man.

He triumphed over the adverse conditions of his early years because
Nature had bestowed on him high and rare powers. Superficial observers
who saw his homely aspect and plain manners, and noted that his
fellow-townsmen, when asked why they so trusted him, answered that it
was for his common-sense, failed to see that his common-sense was a part
of his genius. What is common-sense but the power of seeing the
fundamentals of any practical question, and of disengaging them from the
accidental and transient features that may overlie these
fundamentals--the power, to use a familiar expression, of getting down
to bed rock? One part of this power is the faculty for perceiving what
the average man will think and can be induced to do. This is what keeps
the superior mind in touch with the ordinary mind, and this is perhaps
why the name of "common-sense" is used, because the superior mind seems
in its power of comprehending others to be itself a part of the general
sense of the community. All men of high practical capacity have this
power. It is the first condition of success. But in men who have
received a philosophical or literary education there is a tendency to
embellish, for purposes of persuasion, or perhaps for their own
gratification, the language in which they recommend their conclusions,
or to state those conclusions in the light of large general principles,
a tendency which may, unless carefully watched, carry them too high
above the heads of the crowd. Lincoln, never having had such an
education, spoke to the people as one of themselves. He seemed to be
saying not only what each felt, but expressing the feeling just as each
would have expressed it. In reality, he was quite as much above his
neighbours in insight as was the polished orator or writer, but the
plain directness of his language seemed to keep him on their level. His
strength lay less in the form and vesture of the thought than in the
thought itself, in the large, simple, practical view which he took of
the position. And thus, to repeat what has been said already, the
sterling merit of these speeches of his, that which made them effective
when they were delivered and makes them worth reading to-day, is to be
found in the justness of his conclusions and their fitness to the
circumstances of the time. When he rose into higher air, when his words
were clothed with stateliness and solemnity, it was the force of his
conviction and the emotion that thrilled through his utterance, that
printed the words deep upon the minds and drove them home to the hearts
of the people.

What is a great man? Common speech, which after all must be our guide to
the sense of the terms which the world uses, gives this name to many
sorts of men. How far greatness lies in the power and range of the
intellect, how far in the strength of the will, how far in elevation of
view and aim and purpose,--this is a question too large to be debated
here. But of Abraham Lincoln it may be truly said that in his greatness
all three elements were present. He had not the brilliance, either in
thought or word or act, that dazzles, nor the restless activity that
occasionally pushes to the front even persons with gifts not of the
first order. He was a patient, thoughtful, melancholy man, whose
intelligence, working sometimes slowly but always steadily and surely,
was capacious enough to embrace and vigorous enough to master the
incomparably difficult facts and problems he was called to deal with.
His executive talent showed itself not in sudden and startling strokes,
but in the calm serenity with which he formed his judgments and laid his
plans, in the undismayed firmness with which he adhered to them in the
face of popular clamour, of conflicting counsels from his advisers,
sometimes, even, of what others deemed all but hopeless failure. These
were the qualities needed in one who had to pilot the Republic through
the heaviest storm that had ever broken upon it. But the mainspring of
his power, and the truest evidence of his greatness, lay in the nobility
of his aims, in the fervour of his conviction, in the stainless
rectitude which guided his action and won for him the confidence of the
people. Without these things neither the vigour of his intellect nor the
firmness of his will would have availed.

There is a vulgar saying that all great men are unscrupulous. Of him it
may rather be said that the note of greatness we feel in his thinking
and his speech and his conduct had its source in the loftiness and
purity of his character. Lincoln's is one of the careers that refute
this imputation on human nature.

JAMES BRYCE


The following is a list of Lincoln's published works:

SELECTIONS.--Letters on Questions of National Policy, etc., 1863;
Dedicatory Speech of President Lincoln, etc., at the Consecration of
Gettysburg Cemetery, Nov. 19th, 1863, 1864; The Last Address of
President Lincoln to the American People, 1865; The Martyr's Monument,
1865; In Memoriam, 1865; Gems from A. Lincoln, 1865; The President's
Words, 1866; Emancipation Proclamation--Second Inaugural
Address--Gettysburg Speech, 1878; Two Inaugural Addresses and Gettysburg
Speech, 1889; The Gettysburg Speech and other Papers, with an essay on
Lincoln by J.R. Lowell (Riverside Literature Series, 32), 1888; The
Table Talk of Abraham Lincoln, ed. W.O. Stoddard, 1894; Political
Debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas in the celebrated
campaign of 1858 in Illinois, etc. Also the two great speeches of
Abraham Lincoln at Ohio in 1859, 1894; Political Speeches and Debates of
Abraham Lincoln and S.A. Douglas, 1854-1861, edited by A.T. Jones, 1895;
Lincoln, Passages from his Speeches and Letters, with Introduction by
R.W. Gilder, 1901.

COMPLETE EDITIONS OF WORKS, LETTERS, AND SPEECHES.--H.J. Raymond,
History of the Administration of Abraham Lincoln (Speeches, Letters,
etc.), 1864; Abraham Lincoln, Pen and Voice, being a Complete
Compilation of his Letters, Public Addresses, Messages to Congress, ed.
G.M. Van Buren, etc., 1890; Complete Works, ed. J.G. Nicolay and J. Hay,
2 vols., 1894; enlarged edition, with Introduction by R.W. Gilder, etc.,
1905, etc.; A. Lincoln's Speeches, compiled by L.E. Chittenden, 1895;
The Writings of A. Lincoln, ed. A.B. Lapsley, with an Introduction by
Theodore Roosevelt, and a life by Noah Brooks, etc. (Federal Edition),
1905; etc.

LIFE.--H.J. Raymond; The Life and Public Services of A.L., etc., with
Anecdotes and Personal Reminiscences, by F.B. Carpenter, 1865; J.H.
Barrett, 1865; J.G. Holland, 1866; W.H. Lamon, 1872; W.O. Stoddard,
1884; I.N. Arnold, 1885; J.G. Nicolay and J. Hay, 1890; Condensed
Edition, 1902; Recollections of President Lincoln and his
Administration, 1891; C.C. Coffin, 1893; J.T. Morse, 1893; J. Hay (The
Presidents of the United States), 1894; C.A. Dana, Lincoln and his
Cabinet, etc., 1896; J.H. Choate, 1900; Address delivered before the
Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, Nov. 13, 1900; I.M. Tarbell, 1900;
W.E. Curtis, The True Abraham Lincoln, 1903; J.H. Barrett, A. Lincoln
and his Presidency, 1904; J. Baldwin, 1904. A. Rothschild, Lincoln,
Master of Men, 1906; F.T. Hill, Lincoln the Lawyer, 1906.

Among those who have written short lives are: Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe,
D.W. Bartlett, C.G. Leland, J.C. Power, etc.




CONTENTS


Lincoln's First Public Speech--From an Address to the People of Sangamon
County, March 9, 1832

Letter to Col. Robert Allen, June 21, 1836

From a Letter Published in the Sangamon "Journal," June 13, 1836

From his Address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Jan. 27,
1837

Letter to Mrs. O.H. Browning, Springfield, April 1, 1838

From a Political Debate, Springfield, Dec, 1839

Letter to W.G. Anderson, Lawrenceville, Ill., Oct. 31, 1840

Extract from a Letter to John T. Stuart, Springfield, Ill., Jan. 23,
1841

From his Address before the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance
Society, Feb. 22, 1842

From a Circular of the Whig Committee, March 4, 1843

From a Letter to Martin M. Morris, Springfield, Ill., March 26, 1843

From a Letter to Joshua F. Speed, Springfield, Ill., Oct. 22, 1846

From a Letter to Wm. H. Herndon, Washington, Jan. 8, 1848

From a Letter to Wm. H. Herndon, Washington, June 22, 1848

From a Letter to Wm. H. Herndon, Washington, July 10, 1848

Letter to John D. Johnston, Jan. 2, 1851

Letter to John D. Johnston, Shelbyville, Nov. 4, 1851

Note for Law Lecture--Written about July 1, 1850

A Fragment--Written about July 1, 1854

A Fragment on Slavery, July 1854

From his Reply to Senator Douglas, Peoria, Oct. 16, 1854

From a Letter to the Hon. Geo. Robertson, Lexington, Ky.; Springfield,
Ill., Aug. 15, 1855

From a Letter to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855

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