The Portrait Life of Lincoln PART IV The Nine Great Speeches that Mark the as an Orator and Leader of the People FIRST PUBLIC SPEECH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN Delivered at twenty-three years of age when "Honest Abe" the country store I am FELLOW-CITIZENS: I presume you all know who I am. humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same. INCOLN left his own written record of his character and intellect in his speeches. They are the living witnesses that remain long after human lips are silent. In them is woven the true life-story of the man. Oratory has always been the forerunner of the world's civilization. It is the resounding voice of the future. In modern times, oratory has not aroused the people as it did of old, owing to the democracy of the public press which now speaks to the whole world while the human voice can reach but the few who are within its hearing. The art of oratory will, nevertheless, always remain one of the greatest gifts of genius. Lincoln lived in a day when oratory was the road to greatness. His first public speech, in its homely candor, is much like the first experiences of most men when they find themselves before their first audience. He was the backwoods youth, but twenty-three years of age, when he delivered this first speech; he neither knew nor was known by the world. In it, however, is the beginning of his journey. It epitomizes the political principles that were the foundation of his strength and character throughout his life. In these pages are recorded the nine great speeches that mark the rise of Lincoln as the leader of his people. He occupied the platform on nearly all public occasions and spoke on all the varied subjects from temperance to invention. It was not until he met Douglas in debate that his speeches were very widely known. He was fifty-one years of age when he made his first appearance in the East as an orator, and delivered his first national speech at the Cooper Union mass meeting in New York. From this time he became one of the great American orators and his speeches had a deeper effect upon the trend of events than those of any other man of the generation. His inaugural addresses inspired the nation, while his speech at Gettysburg has taken its place as one of the world's greatest orations. Lincoln was not the turgid rhetorician of the old-school of statesmanship, but a simple, logical reasoner. His words did not inflame the imagination; they carried conviction. While it is estimated that Lincoln delivered nearly a hundred speeches many of them were extemporaneous and cannot be recorded. Others were not reported at the time and there are various versions of them. The nine speeches given here are the result of long research through authori、 tative sources. They represent the turning points in Lincoln's life and accurately establish the nine progressive steps through which he rose from a backwoodsman to the highest political honor in the world. FIRST GREAT PATRIOTIC SPEECH OF LINCOLN Delivered at twenty-eight years of age, while a member of the Legislature of N the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running the date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of the civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed to us by once a hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of our ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only to transmit these— the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation-to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform. How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. I hope I am not over wary; but if I am not there is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country-the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slave-holding or the non-slave-holding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country. It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of them. Mob Law Is the Greatest Danger of the Nation Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are perhaps the most dangerous in example, and the most revolting to humanity. In the Mississippi case, they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblersa set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws was actually licensed by an act of the legislature passed but a single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers, until dead men were seen literally dangling from boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery to the forest. Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim was only sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time when he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world. Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark. But you are perhaps ready to ask, "What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, "It has much to do with it." Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil, and much of its danger consists in the proneness of our minds to regard its direct as its only consequences. Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of population that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example is set by it, is never a matter of reasonable regret by anyone. If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the plague or smallpox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the operation. Similar, too is the correct reasoning in regard to the burning of the negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life by the perpetration of an outrageous murder upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens of the city, and had he not died as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law a short time afterward. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was as it could otherwise have been. But the example in either case was fearful. When men take it into their heads to-day to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is, and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, 'til all the walls erected for the defense |