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HERE have been ten thousand attempts at the life of Abraham Lincoln, whereof that of Wilkes Booth was perhaps the most atrocious; yet it stands by no means alone. Orators have harangued, preachers have sermonized, editors have canted and descanted; forty or fifty full-fledged biographies have been inflicted on a much-enduring public; yet the man, Abraham Lincoln, as I saw and thought I knew him, is not clearly depicted in any of these, so far as I have seen. I do not say that most or all of these are not better than my LincolnI only say they are not mine. Bear with me an hour and I will show you the man as he appeared to me--as he seems not to have appeared to any of them; and if he shall be shown to you as by no means the angel that some, or the devil that others, have portrayed him, I think he will be brought nearer to your apprehension and your sympathies than the idealized Lincoln of his panegyrists or his defamers. Nay, I do sincerely hope to make the real Lincoln, with his thoroughly human good and ill, his virtues and his imperfections, more instructive and more helpful to ordinary humanity, than his unnatural, celestial apotheosized shadow ever was or could be.

I shall pass rapidly over what I may distinguish as the rail-splitting era of his life. Born in a rude portion of Kentucky in 1809; removed into the still more savage, unpeopled wilderness, then the Territory of Indiana, in 1811; losing his mother and only brother while yet a child, and his only sister in later youth, he grew up in poverty and obscurity on the rugged outskirt of civilization, or a little beyond it, where there were no schools, post-offices few and far between, newspapers in those days seldom seen in the new and narrow clearings, and scarce worth the eyesight they marred when they were seen; the occasional stump speech of a candidate for office, and the more frequent sermon of some Methodist or Baptist

1 This interesting address by Horace Greeley was written either in 1868 or not far from that date; but for some reason it did not receive publication-and it is believed was never delivered. Mr. Greeley's manuscript, now in the possession of a former editor

itinerant-earnest and fervid, but grammatically imperfect, supplying most of the intellectual and spiritual element attainable. He did not attend school for the excellent reason that there was no school within reach-the poor whites from the Slave-States, who mainly settled Southern Indiana, being in no hurry to establish schools, and his widowed father being one of them. So he chopped timber, and split rails, and hoed corn, and pulled fodder, as did other boys around him (when they did anything); learning to read as he best might, and, thenceforth, reading from time to time such few books, good, bad, and indifferent, as fell in his way, and so growing up to be six feet four inches high by the time he was twenty years old. As no one ever publicly denied that he was an obedient, docile son, a kind, indulgent brother, and a pleasant, companionable neighbor, I will take these points as conceded.

About the time he became of age his father made a fresh plunge into the wilderness—this time into the heart of Illinois, halting for a year near the present city of Springfield, and then striking eastward seventymiles to Coles County, whither his son did not see fit to follow him; but having once already when nineteen years of age made a voyage down the Mississippi to New Orleans on a flat boat, laden with produce, he now helped build such a boat, and made his second journey thereon to the Crescent City; returning to serve a year as clerk in a store; then heading a company of volunteers for the Black Hawk War of 1832; and next becoming at once a law student and a candidate for the legislature; receiving an almost unanimous vote in the only precinct where he was known, but failing of an election in the county. He had already, since he became his own man, obtained some schooling, and the craft of a land surveyor; he was twentythree years old when he in the same season became a captain of volunteers, a candidate for representative, and a student at law.

Let me pause here to consider the surprise often expressed when a citizen of limited schooling is chosen to be, or is presented for one of

of the "Tribune," has been lent to me to decipher. Its frequent and closely and minutely written interlineations, and its general illegibility have made its reproduction a somewhat appalling task. Joel Benton.

the highest civil trusts. Has that argument any foundationin reason, any justification in history? Of our country's great men, beginning with Ben Franklin, I estimate that a majority had little if anything more than a common school education, while many had less. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison had rather more; Clay and Jackson somewhat less; Van Buren perhaps a little more; Lincoln decidedly less. How great was his consequent loss? I raise the question; let others decide it. Having seen much of Henry Clay, I confidently assert that not one in ten of those who knew him late in life would have suspected from aught in his conversation or bearing, that his education had been inferior to that of the college graduates by whom he was surrounded. His knowledge was different from theirs; and the same is true of Lincoln's as well. Had the latter lived to be seventy years old, I judge that whatever of hesitation or rawness was observable in his manner would have vanished, and he would have met and mingled with educated gentlemen and statesmen on the same easy footing of equality with Henry Clay in his later prime of life. How far his two flatboat voyages to New Orleans are to be classed as educational exercises above or below a freshman's year in college, I will not say; doubtless some freshmen know more, others less, than those journeys taught him. Reared under the shadow of the primitive woods, which on every side hemmed in the petty clearings of the generally poor, and rarely energetic or diligent, pioneers of the Southern Indiana wilderness, his first introduction to the outside world from the deck of a "broad-horn" must have been wonderfully interesting and suggestive. To one whose utmost experience of civilization had been a county town, consisting of a dozen or twenty houses, mainly log, with a shabby little court-house, including jail, and a shabbier, ruder, little church, that must have been a marvelous spectacle which glowed in his face from the banks of the Ohio and the lower Mississippi. Though Cairo was then but a desolate swamp, Memphis a wood-landing and Vicksburgh a timbered ridge with a few stores at its base, even these were in striking contrast to the somber monotony of the great woods. The rivers were enlivened by countless swiftspeeding steamboats, dispensing smoke by day and flame by night; while New Orleans, though scarcely one-fourth the city she now is, was the focus of a vast commerce, and of a civilization which (for America) might be deemed antique. I doubt not that our tall and green young backwoodsman needed only a piece of well-tanned sheepskin suitably (that is, learnedly) inscribed to have rendered those two boat trips memorable as his degrees in ca

pacity to act well his part on that stage which has mankind for its audience.

He learned and practised land-surveying because he must somehow live-not ultimately but presently-and he had no idolatrous affection for the wholesome exercise of rail-splitting. He studied law, giving thereto all the time that he could spare from earning his daily bread, for he aspired to political life; and seven-eighths of all the desirable offices in this country are monopolized by the legal profession-I will not judge how wisely. He stood for the legislature, as an election would have enabled him to study regularly without running in debt; whereas, land surveying must take him away from his books. Beaten then, though he received the votes of nearly all his neighbors, he was again a candidate in 1834, and now, when twenty-five years old, and not yet admitted to the bar, he was elected and took his seat-the youngest but one, and probably the tallest member on the floor. He was reëlected in 1836, in 1838, and in 1840, receiving after his fourth election the vote of his fellow Whigs for Speaker. He had thus practically, when but thirty-one years old, attained the leadership of his party in Illinois; and that position was never henceforth contested while he lived. When the party had an electoral ticket to frame, he was placed at its head; when it had a chance to elect a United States Senator, it had no other candidate but Lincoln, though under his advice it waived its preference, and united with the anti-Nebraska Democrats in choosing their leader, Lyman Trumbull; it presented him to the first Republican National Convention as its choice for vice-president, and the next, as its choice for president, which prevailed. Meantime, when his second seat in the Senate became vacant in 1858, there was not one Republican in the State who suggested any other name than his for the post. What was it, in a State so large as Illinois, and a party that was justly proud of its Browning, its Yates, its Davis, its Washburne, and others, gave him this unquestioned ascendancy?

I would say, first, his unhesitating, uncalculating, self-sacrificing devotion to the principles and aims of his party. When a poor, unknown youth he first proclaimed himself a Whig, Jacksonism was dominant and rampant throughout the land, and especially in Illinois, where it seemed to have the strength of Gibraltar. In 1836, Ohio and Indiana went for Harrison, but Illinois was not moved to follow them. In 1840, the Whigs carried every other free State, New Hampshire excepted; yet Illinois despite her many veterans who had served under Harrison, or been under his rule, as Governor of the Northwest Territory, went

for Van Buren. Again, in 1844, Mr. Lincoln traveled far and wide, speaking long and well as a Clay elector, yet the State rolled up a largely increased majority for Polk, and she went heavily for Pierce in 1852, likewise for Buchanan in '56. She never cast an electoral vote for any other than the Democratic nominee, till she cast all she had for her own Lincoln. I apprehend that throughout his political career Mr. Lincoln was the most earnest partizan, the most industrious, effective canvasser of his party in the State. Having espoused the Whig cause when it was hopeless, and struggled unavailingly for it, through twenty years of adversity, his compatriots had learned to repose implicit faith in him beyond that which they accorded to any other man, Henry Clay alone excepted.

Our presidential and State canvasses are often improvidently conducted. People wander to distant counties to listen to favorite orators, and swell processions at mass-meetings. They compel speakers to strain and crack their voices in addressing acres of would-be auditors; when, in fact, more effect is usually produced, so far as conviction is concerned, by a quiet, protracted talk in a log school-house than by half-a-dozen tempestuous harangues to a gathering of excited thousands. I perceive and admit the faults, the vices of our system of electioneering; and yet I hold that an American presidential canvass, with all its imperfections on its head, is of immense value, of inestimable utility, as a popular political university, whence even the unlettered, the ragged, the penniless may graduate with profit if they will. In the absence of the stump, I doubt the feasibility of maintaining institutions more than nominally republican; but the stump brings the people face to face with their rulers and aspirants to rule; compels an exhibition and scrutiny of accounts and projects, and makes almost every citizen, however heedless and selfish, an arbiter in our political controversies, · enlisting his interest and arousing his patriotism. The allowance of a monarch, exorbitant as it is, falls far below the cost of choosing a president; but the acquaintance with public affairs diffused through a canvass is worth far more than its cost. That falsehoods and distorted conceptions are also disseminated is unhappily true; but there was never yet a stirring presidential canvass which did not leave the people far better, and more generally, informed on public affairs than it found them. The American stump fills the place of the coup d'état, and the Spanish-American pronunciamento. It is, in an eminently practical sense, the conservator of American liberty, and the antidote to official tyranny and corruption. The canvasser, if fit to be a canvasser, is

teaching his hearers; fit or unfit, he can hardly fail to be instructed himself. He is day by day presenting facts and arguments and reading in the faces of his hearers their relative pertinence and effectiveness. If his statement of his case does not seem to produce conviction, he varies, fortifies, reënforces it; giving it from day to day new shapes until he has hit upon that which seems to command the hearty, enthusiastic assent of the great body of his hearers; and this becomes henceforth his model. Such was the school in which Abraham Lincoln trained himself to be the foremost convincer of his day— the one who could do his cause more good and less harm by a speech than any other living man.

Every citizen has certain conceptions, recollections, convictions, notions, prejudices, which together make up what he terms his politics. The canvasser's art consists in making him believe and feel that an over-ruling majority of these preconceptions ally him to that side whereof said canvasser is the champion. In other words, he seeks to belittle those points whereon his auditor is at odds with him and emphasizes those wherein they two are in accord; thus persuading the hearer to sympathize, act and vote with the speaker. And with this conception in view, I do not hesitate to pronounce Mr. Lincoln's speech at Cooper Institute, New York, in the spring of 1860, the very best political address to which I ever listened

and I have heard some of Webster's grandest. As a literary effort, it would not of course, bear comparison with many of Webster's speeches; but regarded simply as an effort to convince the largest possible number that they ought to be on the speaker's side, not on the other, I do not hesitate to pronounce it unsurpassed.

I first met Mr. Lincoln late in 1848 at Washington, as a representative in the Thirtieth Congress-the only one to which he was ever elected. His was, as apportioned under the census of 1840, a Whig district; and he was elected from it in 1846 by the largest majority it ever gave any one. He was then not quite forty years old; a genial, cheerful, rather comely man, noticeably tall, and the only Whig from Illinois-not remarkable otherwise, to the best of my recollection. He was generally liked on our side of the House; he made two or three moderate and sensible speeches which attracted little attention; he voted generally to forbid the introduction of slavery into the still untainted Territories; but he did not vote for Mr. Galt's resolve looking to the immediate abolition of slavery in the Federal district, being deterred by the somewhat fiery preamble thereto. He introduced a counter-proposition of his own, looking to

abolition by a vote of the people-that is by the whites of the district-which seemed to me much like submitting to the votes of the inmates of a penitentiary a proposition to double the length of their respective terms of imprisonment. In short, he was one of the very mildest type of Wilmot Proviso Whigs from the free States-not nearly so pronounced as many who long since found a congenial rest in the ranks of the pro-slavery democracy. But as I had made most of the members my enemies at an early stage of that short session, by printing an elucidated exposé of the iniquities of Congressional mileage; and as he did not join the active cabal against me, though his mileage figured conspicuously and by no means flatteringly in that exposé, I parted from him at the close of the Congress with none but grateful recollections. There were men accounted abler on our side of the House-such as Collamer, of Vermont; Palfrey, and Mann, of Massachusetts, and perhaps Schenck and Root, of Ohio-yet I judge that no other was more generally liked and esteemed than he. And yet had each of us been required to name the man among us who would first attain the presidency, I doubt whether five of us would have designated Abraham Lincoln.

He went home to his law office after trying, I think, to be commissioner of the General Land Office under the incoming Taylor régime and finding the place bespoken; and thenceforth, little was heard of him out of Illinois until the Northern uprising consequent on the introduction and passage of what is known as the "Nebraska Bill." He had hitherto been known as rather conservative than otherwise; this act had the same effect on him as on many others. He was henceforth an open, determined opponent of any extension of slavery to territory previously free. Thus he bore his part in the Illinois contests of 1854 and 1856; and thus when unanimously proclaimed the standard bearer of the Republican party of the State in the senatorial struggle of 1858, he opened the canvass in a speech to the convention which nominated him, which embodied these memorable words:

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not ex

pect the house to fall but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; become alike lawful in all the States, old as well or its advocates will push it forward till it shall as new, North as well as South.

Here is the famous doctrine of the "irrepressible conflict," which Governor Seward set forth four months later in his speech at Rochester, New York, which attracted even wider attention and fiercer denunciation than Mr. Lincoln's earlier avowal. "Shall I tell you what this collision means? " queried Governor S., with reference to the existing controversy respecting slavery in the Territory: "They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and, therefore, ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces; and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave holding nation, or entirely a free labor nation. . . . It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and the free States; and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises when made, vain and ephemeral."

Finer reading of a national horoscope no statesman ever made- - clearer glance into the dim-lit future has rarely been vouchsafed to holy prophet after long vigils of fasting and prayer at Sinai or Nebo. And yet what a stunning concert- or rather dissonance of shriek, and yell, and hostile brays these twin utterances evoked, from ten thousand groaning stumps, from a thousand truculent, shrewish journals! An open adhesion to atheism or anarchy could hardly have called forth fiercer or more scathing execrations. Yet looking back through an eventful interval of less than a decade we see that no truth is more manifest, and hardly one was at that moment more pertinent than that so clearly yet so inoffensively stated, first by the Western lawyer and candidate, then by the New York senator.

I invoke that truth to-day as a bar to harsh judgments and bitter denunciations-as a balm to the wounds of the nation. There was "an irrepressible conflict," the Union could not "endure half slave and half free." The interests of slave-holders and free labor were antagonistic, and it was by no contrivance of politicians, but in spite of their determined efforts that the slavery question was perpetually, with brief intervals, distracting Congress, and involving the North and the South in

fierce collision. Shallow talkers say "If it had not been for this or for that—if there had been no Calhoun or no Garrison, no Wendell Phillips or no Wise—if John Brown had died ten years sooner, or Jeff Davis had never been born there would have been no Nebraska question; no secession; no civil war." Idle, empty babble, dallying with surfaces and taking no account of the essential and inevitable! If none of the hundred best-known and most widely hated of our notables of the last twenty years had ever been born, the late struggle might have been postponed a few years or might have been hastened, but it could not have been averted. It broke out in God's good time because it had to be- because the elements of discord imbedded in our institutions could no longer be held passive, so far as its divine end had been fully accomplished. Such are the convictions which have impelled me to plead for amnesty, charity, and mercy, and oblivion, as I should have pleaded though with even less effect had the other party triumphed. Though there had never been a Missouri to admit, a Texas to annex, nor a Kansas to organize and colonize with free labor or with slaves, the "conflict between opposing and enduring forces" would, nevertheless, have wrought out its natural results.

I cannot help regarding that senatorial contest of 1858, between Lincoln and Douglas, as one of the most characteristic and at the same time most creditable incidents in our national history. There was an honest and earnest difference with regard to a most important and imminent public question; and Illinois was very equally divided thereon, with a United States senator for six years to be chosen by the legislature then to be elected. Henceforth each party selects its ablest and most trusted champion, nominates him for the coveted post, and sends him out as the authorized, indorsed, accredited champion of its principles and policy to canvass the State and secure a verdict for its cause. So the two champions traversed the prairies, speaking alternately to the same vast audiences at several central, accessible points, and speaking separately at others, until the day of election; when Douglas secured a small majority in either branch of the legislature, and was reelected, though Lincoln had the larger popular vote. But while Lincoln had spent less than a thousand dollars in all, Douglas in the canvass had borrowed and dispensed no less than eighty thousand dollars; incurring a debt which weighed him down to the grave. I presume no dime of this was used to buy up his competitor's voters, but all to organize and draw out his own; still the debt so improvidently, if not culpably, incurred remained to harass him out of this mortal life.

Lincoln it was said was beaten; it was a hasty, erring judgment. This canvass made him stronger at home, stronger with the Republicans of the whole country, and when the next national convention of his party assembled, eighteen months thereafter, he became its nominee for President, and thus achieved the highest station in the gift of his country; which but for that misjudged feat of 1858 he would never have attained.

A great deal of knowing smartness has been lavished on that Chicago nomination. If A had not wanted this, or had B been satisfied with that, or C not been offended because he had missed or been refused something else, the result would have been different, says Shallowpate. But know, O Shallowpate! that Lincoln was nominated for the one sufficient reason that he could obtain more electoral votes than any of his competitors! And that reason rarely fails in a national convention. It nominated Harrison in '39; Polk in '44; Taylor in '48; Pierce in '56; and Lincoln in '60. Those who compose national conventions are generally at least shrewd politicians. They want to secure a triumph if for no better reason than that they hope thereby to gratify their own personal aspirations. So they consult and compare and balance popularities, and weigh probabilities; and at last the majority center upon that candidate who can poll most votes. This may not be our noblest test of statesmanship, but it is at least intelligible. And thus Abraham Lincoln became President, having every electoral vote from the free States, but three of the seven cast from New Jersey.

Then followed secession, and confederation, and civil war, whereof the first scenes had been enacted before Mr. Lincoln commenced his journey to Washington, taking leave of his fellow-citizens of Springfield with prophetic tenderness and solemnity, and thenceforward addressing at almost every stopping place vast crowds who would have speeches, though he would and should have kept silence; and so meandering to the national capital, everywhere cheered and welcomed, though nearly half his auditors had voted against him, until he neared the slave line; and now he was over-persuaded by the urgent representations of Senator Seward and General Scott, based upon the espials and discoveries of Police-Superintendent Kennedy, to break his engagement to traverse Baltimore, as he had traversed New York and other cities which had given heavy majorities against him, and take instead a sleeping-car which, passing through Baltimore in the dead of night, landed him in Washington hours before that wherein he was expected publicly to enter Baltimore.

I have no doubt that there was a plot to