Peoria speech, and know that the two must have been compounded out of essentially the same ingredients.

Lincoln's speeches in his debates with Douglas can hardly be called eloquent. Their appeal is first to the intelligence rather than to the emotions. But they are not lacking in any quality which made them essential to their purpose. In them Lincoln emerged as a man capable of meeting on a common level one of the foremost leaders in the United States Senate, the most prominent of presidential candidates, and of holding his own in closely contested and sustained argument. These speeches met and sustained two different tests. They were effective in their appeal to the great crowds that heard them, and when printed and circulated throughout the country they won the approval of vast numbers of readers.

In a certain sense the Cooper Union address is the high-water mark of Lincoln's oratory. When delivered it astonished the people of New York, and when printed it found for itself a permanent place in political literature. It justified Abraham Lincoln's right to a foremost place among American orators.

As the Cooper Union speech was in some respects the greatest of Lincoln's orations, so was it the last of his supremely great oratorical achievements. The responsibilities of the position to which he was soon elected afforded him little opportunity for eloquence. From the time of his election as president his speeches must be judged chiefly as literature.

Lincoln had been one of the readiest of stump speakers. Although his ordinary intellectual processes were slow, there was that in the atmosphere of the court-room or the political arena that remarkably quickened his perception and made him a master of repartee. After his election to the presidency, however, his habitual caution became accentuated. He learned that he must give account for every idle word. He would not respond even to a serenade unless he had warning in advance and opportunity to prepare his address in writing.

Although a ready debater, and rather quick with a repartee

or a pat illustration suggested by an opposing argument or a passing incident, Lincoln was not a ready man in extempore address. His incidental speeches, delivered when he felt that he had nothing to say, were often disappointing. Thus R. E. Fenton wrote of him:*

Mr. Lincoln was not a successful impromptu speaker. He required a little time for thought and arrangement of the thing to be said. I give an instance in point. After the election to which I have referred, just before I resigned my seat in Congress to enter upon my official duties as Governor at Albany, New Yorkers and others in Washington thought to honor me with a serenade. I was the guest of ex-Mayor Bowen. After the music and speaking usual upon such occasions, it was proposed to call on the President. I accompanied the committee in charge of the proceedings, followed by bands and a thousand people. It was full nine o'clock when we reached the Mansion. The President was taken by surprise, and said he "didn't know just what he could say to satisfy the crowd and himself." Going from the library room down the stairs to the portico front, he asked me to say a few words first, and give him if I could "a peg to hang on." It was just when General Sherman was en route from Atlanta to the sea, and we had no definite news as to his safety or whereabouts. After one or two sentences, rather commonplace, the President farther said he had no war news other than was known to all, and he supposed his ignorance in regard to General Sherman was the ignorance of all; that "we all knew where Sherman went in, but none of us knew where he would come out." This last remark was in the peculiarly quaint, happy manner of Mr. Lincoln, and created great applause. He immediately withdrew, saying he "had raised a good laugh and it was a good time for him to quit." In all he did not speak more than two minutes, and, as he afterward told me, because he had no time to think of much to say.

In reading Lincoln's formal addresses one sometimes misses the power of a stately peroration. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates his addresses would have gained in power if each one had

*Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time,

PP. 70-71.

risen to a final climax. We owe to the suggestion of Seward the fact that the first inaugural has a climax with a ring of real eloquence, and the appeal of strong emotion. Lincoln was addressing his closing words to the people of the South. He said:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I have a most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.

As Lincoln originally wrote the address this was the conclusion except for two additional sentences:

You can forbear the assault upon it; I cannot shrink from the defense of it. With you and not with me is the solemn question of "Shall it be peace or a sword?"

This seemed to Seward too blunt and abrupt and provocative a close, and he suggested two alternatives, one of which Lincoln selected and with some modification, employed:

We

I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot's grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angel of our nation.

This peroration possessed the qualities of real eloquence. Whether it should be credited to Lincoln or Seward, or shared between them, we need not now discuss. Nor need we cite in this place what must later be considered in its historic order, Lincoln's second inaugural. That address belongs wholly to Lincoln and it is eloquence of very high character.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE HUMOR OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

BISHOP FOWLER in his noted lecture on Abraham Lincoln, told his millions of interested hearers that Lincoln, before presenting to his Cabinet the Proclamation of Emancipation, read to them a chapter from the Bible. That is precisely what Lincoln would have done if he had been Bishop Fowler. What he actually did read was a chapter from Artemus Ward, concerning the virtue of the people of Utica, who would not permit that honest showman to exhibit his wax figures of the twelve apostles in that city because Judas was among them.

John Drinkwater in his noted play represents Abraham Lincoln as reading this chapter, but he prefaces the reading with a little lecture explaining that this is to relieve the tension under which they have been living. That is what Lincoln would have done if he had been John Drinkwater. But Lincoln made no explanation and felt no occasion for any.

Lord Charnwood in his excellent biography of Lincoln tells us that "It was precisely that sort of relief to which Lincoln's mind when overwrought could always turn"; and that "having thus composed himself for business" he produced the Emancipation Proclamation. That is the way Lincoln would have done it had he been Lord Charnwood. But we have no reason to suppose that Lincoln at that moment felt any special need of composing himself for the business of the occasion. Lincoln read to his Cabinet this chapter because he thought it funny. He had just received the book, and this story had occasioned a good laugh on his part. He wanted his Cabinet to laugh with him and most

of them did laugh. All laughed, apparently, except Stanton and Chase. To Lincoln there was nothing inharmonious in this odd juxtaposition. To him the love of fun was so natural and the love of humanity so natural also, that he found nothing incongruous in the combination.

Lincoln's humor was an enormous relief to him from the over-strain of his presidential responsibility. But he did not turn from serious things to humor upon any schedule, or in accordance with any logical theory, as if the time had come to take a dose of medicine, and Artemus Ward or Petroleum V. Nasby had been the prescribed bottle. When anything funny came Lincoln's way, he stopped and enjoyed the fun and then went to work again. He could interrupt a solemn Cabinet meeting to answer the knock of Elijah Kellogg, of Illinois, and invite him to come in and tell the story of the stuttering justice. It was not because the Cabinet at that particular moment had reached the point where relief was a psychological necessity. It was simply because Elijah Kellogg was at the door, and Lincoln knew, for he had often heard, his story of the stuttering justice. Some good people have seemed to feel that they must show that Abraham Lincoln took his humor on a physician's prescription. He did nothing of the kind. When he lay awake at night reading Nasby and found something funny, he laughed because he enjoyed it; and if the enjoyment was more than usually great, he got out of bed and paraded around the White House in his shirt to discover if any one else was awake who could share the fun with him. He did not take up his humor as some men take up golf, for his health. It was good for his health, but he did it because he enjoyed it.

Many anecdotes are related in Illinois county-seats about the practical jokes which Lincoln is alleged to have played. For the most part, however, his humor survived in the form of stories. Several compilations of stories alleged to have been told by Lincoln are now in existence. Colonel Alexander K. McClure, of the Philadelphia Times, who knew Lincoln during