WE

THE GREAT PACIFICATOR

HON. JOHN D. LONG

E are here to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of Abraham Lincoln-a great and good man in the simple, fundamental sense of the words. We recall that supreme life, that magnanimous soul full of charity and without malice. His rugged face, his lank, homely figure, rise before us transfigured to a beauty beyond that of the statued Apollo in yonder niche, as the beating heart transcends the lifeless marble.

The personal appearance of the famous men of history is always a factor in our ideal of them. In the mind's eye we picture Richard, the Lion Heart, riding in his coat of mail and swinging his ponderous battle-axe, and George Washington, in the dignified costume of a gentleman of the old school. But there are no adventitious aids to the effect of the personal appearance of Abraham Lincoln, nor did he need any. He was six feet four inches high, a little bent in the shoulders, with large hands and feet, a frame of great joints and bones, a prominent nose and mouth, a high forehead and coarse dark hair, and was dressed, when President, in homely and loosely fitting black. His furrowed and melancholy face and sad eyes were suggestive of a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," yet were capable of quickest transition into an expression of infinite humor. What depths of feeling and tenderness lay under that rugged visage, what divine sympathy with his fellow men, and an enslaved or weak and erring brother! And beneath that proverbial wit which so often lighted it, there lay also the fountain of tears. An exquisite pathos breathed from the chords of a sympathetic, softly attuned nature, as if you caught from them the sensitive wistful tones of Schumann's "Träumerei."

It is an unfounded notion that the conditions of our frontier

life-alas! we no longer have any frontier-are to be counted unfavorable. On the contrary, they have been, from the days when Massachusetts was herself a frontier, the best soil for characteristic American ambition and growth. There are those who express surprise that Lincoln was the product of what they deem the narrow and scanty environment from which he sprang. As well wonder at the giant of the forest, deep rooted, bathing its top in the upper air, fearless of scorch of sun or blast of tempest, sprung from the fertile soil and luxuriant growth of the virgin earth, and rich with the fragrance and glory of Nature's paradise! I can hardly think of a life more fortunate. The Lincolns settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, a few years after the coming of the Mayflower. The family ranks with our early Puritan nobility of worth and character. One branch of it migrated to Pennsylvania and thence to Virginia. More than a hundred years ago Lincoln's grandfather went thence to Kentucky, built a log cabin, cleared a farm, and was killed by Indians. Lincoln's father was of the same sort-pioneer, farmer, hunter, uneducated, but in touch with the sturdy qualities that were the mark of the Kentucky settlers. His mother, dying in his early boyhood, was a woman of beauty, of character, and of education enough to teach her husband to write his name. His stepmother, saintly Christian soul, sheltered the orphan under her loving care, and, scanty as was her lot, allured him to brighter worlds and led the way. Compared with the luxurious profusion of to-day, it was wretched and hopeless poverty; but, compared with the standard of the then neighborhood and time-the only right standard-it was the independence of men who owned the land, who strode masters of the soil, who were barons, not serfs, who were equal with their associates, and among whom the child Abraham Lincoln, eating his bread and milk from a wooden bowl as he sat on the threshold of his father's cabin-one side of it wide open to the weather-was no more an object of despair or pity than the babe who, cradled among the flags by the river's brink, dreamed of the hosts of Israel to whom he should reveal the Tables of the Law of God,

and whom he should lead to the green pastures of the Promised Land. It is not because the same or like qualities of character do not still inhere in human nature, that America -nay, the world-will never again see the like of Lincoln, but because the circumstances of his early and later life can never be reproduced. America, alas! had already grown old -old with power, with wealth, with the exhausting ravage and absorption of her territory, and with the infusions of what we used to call the Old World. The frame-setting of Abraham Lincoln's youth is as absolutely gone as the great American desert, now a garden, or the buffalo and his Indian chaser, now ghosts of a dream.

Nor is it true that Lincoln had no education in his boyhood. He, indeed, went little to school, yet he learned to read, write, and cipher; and what more does any school-boy learn to-day "Reading," says Bacon, summing up education, "maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.' All these had the youth, Abraham Lincoln. With them he stood at the gate of all treasures, key in hand, as much master of the future as a graduate of Yale or Harvard. He knew the Bible thoroughly, Esop's "Fables," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," the "Lives" of Washington and Henry Clay; Burns, and later, Shakespeare. He not only read them with the eye, but made them a part of his mind. The list is small, but it is a range of history and poetry. Washington and Clay may well have been the spur of Lincoln's ambitious Americanism; the Bible and Burns, of his inspiration and sentiment and unexcelled style; Esop's "Fables" and "Pilgrim's Progress," of his aptness of illustration.

The incidents of his early life are few, but suggestive. At nineteen he made a trip down the Mississippi River on a flatboat to New Orleans, and there sold a cargo-a trip of larger education than Thomas Jefferson had ever taken at the same age. A year later his father, who for four years had been living in Indiana, went to Illinois; and the boy, driving the ox-team which bore all the household goods, helping build the home of logs, and split the rails of the farm

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

ANN ARBOR, Oct 25

190

S

The lapse of time increases rather than

diminishes the fause of

is so remote from

ил

Lincoln. To nation

that. it does not

liberal

مل

us in admiration of hun. As the Givemments Even tendency to adopt in the oldest remarchies is greving. to peoples more and more couple his nance with that of Wasknegten and look great prisecenser Euxamplex of the republican leaders. The memory of Lincotics characte

Wohin and his

inflicenc

18 a

анд

Endowment

not only to as eat to the world.

James R. Migell

Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from James B. Angell, President Emeritus

of the University of Michigan