THE ABILITY OF LINCOLN TO OVERCOME DEFEAT

HERE is one quality that always comes to the aid of man in time of adversity-it is patience. This has never been demonstrated more forcibly than in the experience of Lincoln during the early days when the American people were in fratricidal war. Congress authorized an army of a half million men, with a half billion dollars to support it. The Confederacy marshaled its strongest sons to defend its capital at Richmond. The North, with the courage of its great army and wealth, was eager to pit itself against the new republic and appealed to Lincoln to strike the fatal blow. But Lincoln, always with hope in his heart that some unforeseen power would avert the tragedy, waited patiently. The North, in its impatience, charged him with being a coward.

Lincoln listened to the abuse without reply. It was now July— the twenty-first day. The sun rose hot on that Sunday morning. Lincoln went to church. Suddenly the city was aroused. The two great armies were standing face to face at Manassas, but thirty-two miles from Washington. Couriers hurried to the White House. There was deep anxiety on the face of the President. The North and South were in battle. The two great fighting forces were in deadly combat.

"The Union army is victorious!" Crowds waited anxiously for the next word. The dispatches ceased coming. The prolonged silence perplexed the watchers and they were seized with a strange fear.

It was six o'clock in the evening. A statesman hurried to the White House and asked excitedly for Lincoln.

"The battle is lost," he exclaimed. "The Confederates are coming!" Lincoln quietly turned, and, without a word, went to the War Department. The telegraph instruments were ticking the story of the fearful disaster and the probable capture of Washington. Turning to the door," he returned to the White House, and threw himself onto a lounge.

It was midnight when the routed army staggered across Long Bridge into the city, and when morning dawned the defeated soldiers were pouring into Washington in great streams of frightened humanity.

Lincoln still lay on the lounge. His deep set eyes had not closed during the long night. But beneath them there seemed to brood a new strength. He arose and greeted the disheartened soldiers with the grasp of a warm heart. On his face was a fixed expression of determination— the determination of a man who had learned how to grow strong in defeat.

Photograph of Lincoln seated with his secretaries, Nicolay and Hay-Taken in Springfield, Illinois, in 1861, just before leaving for Washington-Print in the Brady-Gardner Collection at Springfield, Massachusetts

THE HOPEFULNESS OF LINCOLN IN MISFORTUNE

A

MAN who spends his time fighting over old battles is surely lost. Life, in its shortness, gives us no opportunity to re-live the lost days. The only value of yesterday is the experience that we learned from it; otherwise nature would never have given us memory.

Lincoln understood life. Bull Run was nothing more than the price that is paid for experience. His life had been full of Bull Runs, and from every defeat he had gained a great victory.

The wrath of the North now fell upon him. Famine began to lay its hand upon the country. The nation was overwhelmed in debt. The army was costing more than two millions of dollars a day-and yet no battles were being won. Men pressed about him with conflicting advice. Cabinet ministers charged him with incompetency. His friends appealed to him to resign, or to march his armies against the capital of the Confederacy and conquer it by overwhelming numbers.

The generals upon whom he relied, failed to meet the emergencies. The mighty Confederacy strengthened its power of government and slowly but firmly drew its lines more tightly around the nation's capital.

As Lincoln sat surrounded by his family, the battle-line crossed the very threshold of his home. A Southerner by birth, he found many of his dearest friends under the flag of the Confederacy. Mrs. Lincoln's own family were arrayed against the Union. Her sisters were parted from her by the war, and their husbands were fighting against her husband's cause. When the news came of the Union victory at Shiloh, and Mrs. Lincoln found it her duty to receive in honor of the victorious soldiers, one of her own brothers, the darling of her heart, lay dead in a uniform of gray on that battlefield.

Lincoln, with the terrible imprint of it all being written upon his countenance, stood for hours with his big white gloved hand grasping the hands of the passing throng, but his eyes were looking far beyond into the trenches of the humanity that he loved. And when he received the news of the terrible slaughter at Antietam, where, in defense of the nation's capital, the army in blue withstood the army in gray and forced it back on to its own soil, Lincoln, with his heart overflowing with hope in the belief that now the war was to cease, went to the battlefield and looked into the faces of the soldiers upon whom he relied in this hour of need.