Chapter I

Beginnings

Introductory - Origins of the Family- Early years in Kentucky — Migration to Indiana — Life at Gentryville — Begins anew in Illinois.

FOR the great majority of those who are not Americans, the story of the New World is symbolized, if it is not summed up, in three illustrious names-Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln. It is true that other figures

are visible, but rather as shadows, than as historical persons. And of these three, all but the last are now so heavily cloaked in legend that their faces are hardly to be recognized. Even that of Abraham Lincoln, as plain and full of character as any man's, has been already changed, and in a sense, transfigured. To many who have "fastened their eyes upon him," as to those at Antioch who looked upon the first Christian martyr, his face has become "as it had been the face of an angel." The extraordinary part he played in the drama of his nation's life, and especially in the act of Emancipation, read in the light of his humble birth and of his tragic death, has made Lincoln something more than a great public character. He has become a national possession, and as such the outlines of his story have inevitably been drawn by the hand of national sentiment. Like Columbus and Washington,

he too has become, for the general, a symbol and type of his people.

But while America may seek and find in this nationalized portrait, the face of one whom she delights to call "the first American," and while those of us who are not Americans, may also see in that face, as in perhaps no other, an indication of the meaning and purpose of the Republic in the middle of the nineteenth century, yet it is time the world should be able to look at him from a point of view more human and universal. "He was a man, take him for all in all" and a man whose character and story contributes something original to our common stock of manhood. 1

We cannot then allow America to monopolise Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, it would be absurd, if it were possible, to suppose that the most typical citizen of the most cosmopolitan of States, had any other country than the world.

From another point of view, the English have a claim upon him prior even to the American; for if in tracing back his path to its starting place, we pause at his first home in Kentucky, we must there take up the quest again, till we find ourselves among the Lincolns on this side of the sea in some farmstead of East Anglia.

In spirit, as by origin, he is of that household of liberty which sojourned for so many centuries in this England of ours; his republicanism comes of the stock of that of our Pims and Hampdens, it is of the same spirit as are the songs of his favourite Burns; while, in spite of all that is original and unexpected in him, yet essentially, in temper and sentiment, he is unmistakably a Briton. The best of his papers and addresses

have become an inalienable part of that English literature which is the common possession of a people who share too intimately both in blood and aspirationthe greatest of all bonds—to be sundered by anything that is less vital than they. And in his own person he presents one of the most striking examples of our ultimate identity of purpose. During his presidency, the relations between the two countries were severely strained by the incidence of a war which proved disastrous to one of the principal branches of English industry. But it was at this period, when thousands of the men of Lancashire were thrown out of employment, and with their wives and children to the number of half a million were cast upon charity by the blockading of the cotton ports, that our northern artizans proclaimed their faith in Lincoln, and their recognition of the fact that it was their battle he was fighting across the sea.

During those dark days the portrait of John Bright, the English tribune of the people, was one of the two that adorned the business room of the American President. He knew, and the true leaders of the English working-men knew, that the cause of the peoples is one; that in preserving and renewing the life of the American republic, in breaking for ever the power of slavery within it, he was, as he so often repeated, upholding the cause of freedom for the whole world, and nobly saving "the last, best hope of earth."

In the largest sense of the phrase, a sense in which it has been applicable to very few, Abraham Lincoln was a man of the people."

Few have ever lived more continuously in the

eye of day. His life seems to have always been peculiarly open to inspection and a sort of publicity. Yet he never became common-place. He remains among the always unexpected persons whose thoughts and actions are the reverse of trite or obvious.

And thus, while the volumes which have been written about him already form "a literature," we, their readers, remain unsatisfied. The man himself baffles us. Before his portrait we still stand curious. No one is able to explain this man so that we can say to ourselves with flattering satisfaction, “Yes, we understand him very well," and so pass by. We read what has been written in explanation, and we know that neither we nor the writers really understand. So we come back to every word and instance of the man himself.

Some may ascribe this to the failure of his biographers; but it is really an evidence of their honesty, and is far better than a delusive success. Abraham Lincoln must remain, for all but the very few who are by nature of his spiritual kindred, an unsolved enigma. We can trace his history through almost all its details; we can question scores of witnesses who were in close relation to him; we can analyse the writings and actions in which he expressed himself. But at the end, we confess we are not satisfied with the explanations we have to offer. Like any other greatest man, he eludes our categories.

For all that, the inexplicable man himself with his boldly-cut characteristics, standing out clear and dominant against the background of events, is singularly satisfying. If we cannot explain him, neither can we really misunderstand him. He is