



Produced by Al Haines










ABRAHAM LINCOLN


BY LORD CHARNWOOD





GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.




COPYRIGHT, 1917

BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY




GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE

Statesmen--even the greatest--have rarely won the same unquestioning
recognition that falls to the great warriors or those supreme in
science, art or literature.  Not in their own lifetime and hardly to
this day have the claims to supremacy of our own Oliver Cromwell,
William III. and Lord Chatham rested on so sure a foundation as those
of a Marlborough or a Nelson, a Newton, a Milton or a Hogarth.  This is
only natural.  A warrior, a man of science, an artist or a poet are
judged in the main by definite achievements, by the victories they have
won over foreign enemies or over ignorance and prejudice, by the joy
and enlightenment they have brought to the consciousness of their own
and succeeding generations.  For the statesman there is no such exact
measure of greatness.  The greater he is, the less likely is his work
to be marked by decisive achievement which can be recalled by
anniversaries or signalised by some outstanding event: the chief work
of a great statesman rests in a gradual change of direction given to
the policy of his people, still more in a change of the spirit within
them.  Again, the statesman must work with a rough and ready
instrument.  The soldier finds or makes his army ready to yield
unhesitating obedience to his commands, the sailor animates his fleet
with his own personal touch, and the great man in art, literature or
science is master of his material, if he can master himself.  The
statesman cannot mould a heterogeneous people, as the men of a
well-disciplined army or navy can be moulded, to respond to his call
and his alone.  He has to do all his work in a society of which a large
part cannot see his object and another large part, as far as they do
see it, oppose it.  Hence his work at the best is often incomplete and
he has to be satisfied with a rough average rather than with his ideal.

Lincoln, one of the few supreme statesmen of the last three centuries,
was no exception to this rule.  He was misunderstood and underrated in
his lifetime, and even yet has hardly come to his own.  For his place
is among the great men of the earth.  To them he belongs by right of
his immense power of hard work, his unfaltering pursuit of what seemed
to him right, and above all by that childlike directness and simplicity
of vision which none but the greatest carry beyond their earliest
years.  It is fit that the first considered attempt by an Englishman to
give a picture of Lincoln, the great hero of America's struggle for the
noblest cause, should come at a time when we in England are passing
through as fiery a trial for a cause we feel to be as noble.  It is a
time when we may learn much from Lincoln's failures and success, from
his patience, his modesty, his serene optimism and his eloquence, so
simple and so magnificent.

BASIL WILLIAMS.

BISCOT CAMP,

LUTON,

March, 1916.




  CONTENTS

  GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE


  CHAP.

  I. BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN

  II. THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION
      1. The Formation of a National Government
      2. Territorial Expansion
      3. The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government
      4. The Missouri Compromise
      5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth
      6. Slavery and Southern Society
      7. Intellectual Development

  III. LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER
      1. Life at New Salem
      2. In the Illinois Legislature
      3. Marriage

  IV. LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT
      1. The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress
      2. California and the Compromise of 1850
      3. Lincoln in Retirement
      4. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise

  V. THE RISE OF LINCOLN
      1. Lincoln's Return to Public Life
      2. The Principles and the Oratory of Lincoln
      3. Lincoln against Douglas
      4. John Brown
      5. The Election of Lincoln as President


  VI. SECESSION
      1. The Case of the South against the Union
      2. The Progress of Secession
      3. The Inauguration of Lincoln
      4. The Outbreak of War

  VII. THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR

  VIII. THE OPENING OF THE WAR AND LINCOLN'S ADMINISTRATION
      1. Preliminary Stages of the War
      2. Bull Run
      3. Lincoln's Administration Generally
      4. Foreign Policy and England
      5. The Great Questions of Domestic Policy

  IX. THE DISASTERS OF THE NORTH
      1. Military Policy of the North
      2. The War in the West up to May, 1862
      3. The War in the East up to May, 1863

  X. EMANCIPATION

  XI. THE APPROACH OF VICTORY
      1. The War to the End of 1863
      2. Conscription and the Politics of 1863
      3. The War in 1864
      4. The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864

  XII. THE END

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

  INDEX




ABRAHAM LINCOLN


CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN

The subject of this memoir is revered by multitudes of his countrymen
as the preserver of their commonwealth.  This reverence has grown with
the lapse of time and the accumulation of evidence.  It is blended with
a peculiar affection, seldom bestowed upon the memory of statesmen.  It
is shared to-day by many who remember with no less affection how their
own fathers fought against him.  He died with every circumstance of
tragedy, yet it is not the accident of his death but the purpose of his
life that is remembered.

Readers of history in another country cannot doubt that the praise so
given is rightly given; yet any bare record of the American Civil War
may leave them wondering why it has been so unquestioningly accorded.
The position and task of the American President in that crisis cannot
be understood from those of other historic rulers or historic leaders
of a people; and it may seem as if, after that tremendous conflict in
which there was no lack of heroes, some perverse whim had made men
single out for glory the puzzled civil magistrate who sat by.  Thus
when an English writer tells again this tale, which has been well told
already and in which there can remain no important new facts to
disclose, he must endeavour to make clear to Englishmen circumstances
and conditions which are familiar to Americans.  He will incur the
certainty that here and there his own perspective of American affairs
and persons will be false, or his own touch unsympathetic.  He had
better do this than chronicle sayings and doings which to him and to
those for whom he writes have no significance.  Nor should the writer
shrink too timidly from the display of a partisanship which, on one
side or the other, it would be insensate not to feel.  The true
obligation of impartiality is that he should conceal no fact which, in
his own mind, tells against his views.

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America,
was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the
backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called
Hodgensville in what is now La Rue County.

Fifty years later when he had been nominated for the Presidency he was
asked for material for an account of his early life.  "Why," he said,
"it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early
life.  It