GENERAL COMMITTEE.

SMITH D ATKINS, Charmoso.

LH BURRELL, Secretary.

WH WAGNER

C W HARDEN

H POFFENBERGER

K P ECKERT

WC MILNER

Fiftieth Anniversary

Lincoln and Douglas Debate

Thursday, August 27th, 1908.

he went

I knew Abrahame Lineale before to Washington as President; he studied every question thoroughly, and intely honest, not only with others, with himself; he had fully the courage of his individual opinion, and ouse his opinion was fully made up, he could not be swerved from it. He defended sponhimmelf.. He met the National crisis better than

great

other

assy

because he was

Could have done,

infinitely patient, always kindly, yielding to others in non-erentials, but

never yeahding

one iota of principle.

Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from Gen. Smith D. Atkins, of Illinois

you could do. It was an aristocracy of worth, not of birth. They had to do things out on the frontier, and Abraham Lincoln was trained in that compelling environment.

What did this frontier do for the man? In the first place, it taught him to investigate. We do little investigating now. Why? Because we have so many books. "What is the use, we say, "of spending time investigating, when we can read it in the books?" Abraham Lincoln had very few books. In all his youthful life he had to look into things himself. The lawyers who travelled with him around the circuit told that frequently when he would see a tree of unusual dimensions or some peculiarity of growth, he would dismount from his horse and examine the tree. When his little son received a mechanical toy, the father was not satisfied until he took it to pieces. He wanted to see how it worked-investigating always. When he came back from serving his second session in Congress, a number of members came with him. They came over the Great Lakes, around by Niagara Falls. Most of the party stayed on deck, talking politics, smoking, and telling stories; but Lincoln was always down in the engineroom, even amongst the stokers, examining everything, finding out how it worked. He showed a natural talent for investigating.

Soon after this Lincoln took out his patent. How many of our Presidents have taken out a patent? I must sometime try to ascertain the answer to that question by looking over the records in the Patent Office, which is a task of no small dimensions. Lincoln took out a patent. What was that patent? Was it applicable to Europe? Was it applicable to the Atlantic coast, or the plains? No, it was something needed over here, in the valley, on the frontier. It was a scheme for navigating the Western waters at times when the rivers were low. During the Summer season, the rivers divided and sandbars appeared. Lincoln's plan was to put buoys under the keels of vessels, and when the vessels came to obstructions, like sandbars in the river, they would inflate these buoys with air, which would lift the vessel over the bar and take it on. That was Lincoln's patent. He never sold

one, so far as I know, but it serves to illustrate my point, that he was an investigator. And, all during the Civil War, diplomats, financiers, ambassadors and others testified to the wonderful way in which Lincoln investigated every matter brought before him. He investigated it in advance. That was what the frontier environment had taught him.

This frontier environment also taught the man extreme caution. One man never went alone to plough in the field; two men always went together, and while one man ploughed, the other man watched against the Indians. And it was said in later times, after the country was settled, if two of these frontiersmen met in town, that, remembering the old habit, when they talked together they stood with their backs to each other, on the lookout for danger. I am not sure, in these automobile days, whether we will not return to that habit.

The frontiersman, when ploughing, had to plough so carefully that he would not break his plough, because he could not probably buy another plough within twenty miles, or find a blacksmith within a ten miles' journey. The thing which characterized Abraham Lincoln as President, if there was one characteristic above another, was his extreme caution. He moved so slowly in the Civil War that he never had occasion to wish to retrace his steps.

I see, scattered in the audience, some people who perchance remember the days of the Civil War, and they will bear me witness that Horace Greeley and other hot-headed men constantly urged Lincoln to more haste. Mr. Greeley called him, "Mr. Ready-to-Wait"; "Mr. Faint-Heart"; "Mr. Man-Afraid-of-His-Shadow." They said, "Why don't you do something? Free the slaves! Close the War! Do something! Do something!" No, Lincoln, from his frontiersman training, was moving so slowly that he never had occasion to retrace his steps. He even gave a hundred days' warning in advance before he issued his Emancipation Proclamation. His slow motion saved the Union from breaking its plough!

All this frontier training taught a man to be an all-round man. Think what an all-round man Lincoln was. There

was no piece-work on the frontier. You had to make the whole machine out there. A shoemaker made a whole shoe; he did not punch a hole in a partly made shoe and then pass it on to another man to punch the next hole. The blacksmith made a whole plough. That was frontier work; they had to be all-round men-and of such was Lincoln. He was a railsplitter; he was a farmer; in a small way, he was a soldier; he was a miller; he was a flat-boat man; he was a lawyerhe was an all-round man. And in that crucial time, when he became President of the United States, it needed a man who was an all-round man. It needed a general; it needed a financier; it needed a diplomat. The environment of the frontier made Lincoln equal to the demands of the position— for he was an all-round man.

The frontier taught him self-help. The education of the frontier was something different from our education now-adays, when we frequently seek first aid to the injured in our schools; where we can have pre-digested food, and a crutch under each arm to try to help us along. What facilities for education did Lincoln have on the frontier? He had to teach himself for the most part. He was in the school of Nature. Nature was the teacher, and Lincoln was the only student in the room

"Then Nature, the dear old nurse, took the child upon her knee, Saying: 'Here is a story book Thy father has written for thee."

The frontier life also taught him self-reliance. When he floated his flat-boat down the Sangamon River, taking his flour to market, he had no chart of that river. The Sangamon was so small and insignificant that it had never been surveyed by the United States Government. The navigator had to meet each sand-bar, snag, and stump as he came to it. Likewise, when he took hold of the helm of the great Ship of State, whatever charts preceding pilots had used were useless to him, because the vessel was in danger of wreck. He had to meet each obstacle as he came to it. He was self-reliant and confident always, because he had been taught selfreliance. One time when some general said to him, "Now,

Mr. President, if we do thus and so now, what is going to happen next year?" what did Lincoln answer? Lincoln said, "You know, my friend, out in Illinois we never cross the Sangamon River until we come to it." And that was true. Self-reliant always "We never cross the Sangamon until we come to it."

His environment taught the man also to speak very simple language. They had no time out on the frontier for sesquipedalian words. You must say what you had to say in short words, of one syllable mostly. I wonder what Mark Antony would have done with an audience of frontiersmen? He could not have held them for hours by his subterfuge. They would have said, "Here, Mark, show us the body or shut up; one of the two."

But the frontiersmen spoke simple language, and that was the most marked trait of this great American. His language was simple. Many times the language he used was so plain, so original, so American, that it distressed those learned gentlemen with whom he surrounded himself in his Cabinet. After his second election, the election which occurred in the midst of the War, what should he have said? A man drawn from ordinary life would have said: "The people have decided by an appeal to the ballot box that it would be extremely hazardous to chance a change of executive in a time of great national peril." Did Lincoln say that? No. What did he say? He said, "The people have decided not to swap horses in the middle of the stream." Everybody could understand that; they all knew what that meant.

I see here, lying upon the table, a tablet bearing Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; and that reminds me of another evidence of his simplicity of composition. What were the circumstances of its delivery? The Government had purchased some of the ground on which was fought, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the high-tide battle of that great four years' contest. A committee was appointed to make preparations for its dedication. Of course they must have an orator, and they asked the Honorable Edward Everett of Massachusetts,