“ABE” ON A WOODPILE.
Lincoln’s attempt to make a lawyer of himself under adverse and unpromising circumstances—he was a bare-footed farm-hand—excited comment. And it was not to be wondered. One old man, who was yet alive as late as 1901, had often employed Lincoln to do farm work for him, and was surprised to find him one day sitting barefoot on the summit of a woodpile and attentively reading a book.
“This being an unusual thing for farm-hands in that early day to do,” said the old man, when relating the story, “I asked him what he was reading.
“‘I’m not reading,’ he answered. ‘I’m studying.’
“‘Studying what?’ I inquired.
“‘Law, sir,’ was the emphatic response.
“It was really too much for me, as I looked at him sitting there proud as Cicero. ‘Great God Almighty!’ I exclaimed, and passed on.” Lincoln merely laughed and resumed his “studies.”
TAKING DOWN A DANDY.
In a political campaign, Lincoln once replied to Colonel Richard Taylor, a self-conceited, dandified man, who wore a gold chain and ruffled shirt. His party at that time was posing as the hard-working bone and sinew of the land, while the Whigs were stigmatized as aristocrats, ruffled-shirt gentry. Taylor making a sweeping gesture, his overcoat became torn open, displaying his finery. Lincoln in reply said, laying his hand on his jeans-clad breast:
“Here is your aristocrat, one of your silk-stocking gentry, at your service.” Then, spreading out his hands, bronzed and gaunt with toil: “Here is your rag-basin with lily-white hands. Yes, I suppose, according to my friend Taylor, I am a bloated aristocrat.”
WHEN OLD ABE GOT MAD.
Soon after hostilities broke out between the North and South, Congress appointed a Committee on the Conduct of the War. This committee beset Mr. Lincoln and urged all sorts of measures. Its members were aggressive and patriotic, and one thing they determined upon was that the Army of the Potomac should move. But it was not until March that they became convinced that anything would be done.
One day early in that month, Senator Chandler, of Michigan, a member of the committee, met George W. Julian. He was in high glee. “‘Old’ Abe is mad,” said Julian, “and the War will now go on.”
WANTED TO “BORROW” THE ARMY.
During one of the periods when things were at a standstill, the Washington authorities, being unable to force General McClellan to assume an aggressive attitude, President Lincoln went to the general’s headquarters to have a talk with him, but for some reason he was unable to get an audience.
Mr. Lincoln returned to the White House much disturbed at his failure to see the commander of the Union forces, and immediately sent for two general officers, to have a consultation. On their arrival, he told them he must have some one to talk to about the situation, and as he had failed to see General McClellan, he wished their views as to the possibility or probability of commencing active operations with the Army of the Potomac.
“Something’s got to be done,” said the President, emphatically, “and done right away, or the bottom will fall out of the whole thing. Now, if McClellan doesn’t want to use the army for awhile, I’d like to borrow it from him and see if I can’t do something or other with it.
“If McClellan can’t fish, he ought at least to be cutting bait at a time like this.”
YOUNG “SUCKER” VISITORS.
After Mr. Lincoln’s nomination for the Presidency, the Executive Chamber, a large, fine room in the State House at Springfield, was set apart for him, where he met the public until after his election.
As illustrative of the nature of many of his calls, the following incident was related by Mr. Holland, an eye-witness: “Mr. Lincoln being in conversation with a gentleman one day, two raw, plainly-dressed young ‘Suckers’ entered the room, and bashfully lingered near the door. As soon as he observed them, and saw their embarrassment, he rose and walked to them, saying: ‘How do you do, my good fellows? What can I do for you? Will you sit down?’ The spokesman of the pair, the shorter of the two, declined to sit, and explained the object of the call thus: He had had a talk about the relative height of Mr. Lincoln and his companion, and had asserted his belief that they were of exactly the same height. He had come in to verify his judgment. Mr. Lincoln smiled, went and got his cane, and, placing the end of it upon the wall, said” ‘Here, young man, come under here.’ “The young man came under the cane as Mr. Lincoln held it, and when it was perfectly adjusted to his height, Mr. Lincoln said:
“‘Now, come out, and hold the cane.’
“This he did, while Mr. Lincoln stood under. Rubbing his head back and forth to see that it worked easily under the measurement, he stepped out, and declared to the sagacious fellow who was curiously looking on, that he had guessed with remarkable accuracy—that he and the young man were exactly the same height. Then he shook hands with them and sent them on their way. Mr. Lincoln would just as soon have thought of cutting off his right hand as he would have thought of turning those boys away with the impression that they had in any way insulted his dignity.”
“AND YOU DON’T WEAR HOOPSKIRTS.”
An Ohio Senator had an appointment with President Lincoln at six o’clock, and as he entered the vestibule of the White House his attention was attracted toward a poorly clad young woman, who was violently sobbing. He asked her the cause of her distress. She said she had been ordered away by the servants, after vainly waiting many hours to see the President about her only brother, who had been condemned to death. Her story was this:
She and her brother were foreigners, and orphans. They had been in this country several years. Her brother enlisted in the army, but, through bad influences, was induced to desert. He was captured, tried and sentenced to be shot—the old story.
The poor girl had obtained the signatures of some persons who had formerly known him, to a petition for a pardon, and alone had come to Washington to lay the case before the President. Thronged as the waiting-rooms always were, she had passed the long hours of two days trying in vain to get an audience, and had at length been ordered away.
The gentleman’s feelings were touched. He said to her that he had come to see the President, but did not know as he should succeed. He told her, however, to follow him upstairs, and he would see what could be done for her.
Just before reaching the door, Mr. Lincoln came out, and, meeting his friend, said good-humoredly, “Are you not ahead of time?” The gentleman showed him his watch, with the hand upon the hour of six.
“Well,” returned Mr. Lincoln, “I have been so busy to-day that I have not had time to get a lunch. Go in and sit down; I will be back directly.”
The gentleman made the young woman accompany him into the office, and when they were seated, said to her: “Now, my good girl, I want you to muster all the courage you have in the world. When the President comes back, he will sit down in that armchair. I shall get up to speak to him, and as I do so you must force yourself between us, and insist upon his examination of your papers, telling him it is a case of life and death, and admits of no delay.” These instructions were carried out to the letter. Mr. Lincoln was at first somewhat surprised at the apparent forwardness of the young woman, but observing her distressed appearance, he ceased conversation with his friend, and commenced an examination of the document she had placed in his hands.
Glancing from it to the face of the petitioner, whose tears had broken forth afresh, he studied its expression for a moment, and then his eye fell upon her scanty but neat dress. Instantly his face lighted up.
“My poor girl,” said he, “you have come here with no Governor, or Senator, or member of Congress to plead your cause. You seem honest and truthful; and you don’t wear hoopskirts—and I will be whipped but I will pardon your brother.” And he did.
LIEUTENANT TAD LINCOLN’S SENTINELS.
President Lincoln’s favorite son, Tad, having been sportively commissioned a lieutenant in the United States Army by Secretary Stanton, procured several muskets and drilled the men-servants of the house in the manual of arms without attracting the attention of his father. And one night, to his consternation, he put them all on duty, and relieved the regular sentries, who, seeing the lad in full uniform, or perhaps appreciating the joke, gladly went to their quarters. His brother objected; but Tad insisted upon his rights as an officer. The President laughed but declined to interfere, but when the lad had lost his little authority in his boyish sleep, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States went down and personally discharged the sentries his son had put on the post.
DOUGLAS HELD LINCOLN’S HAT.
When Mr. Lincoln delivered his first inaugural he was introduced by his friend, United States Senator E. D. Baker, of Oregon. He carried a cane and a little roll—the manuscript of his inaugural address. There was moment’s pause after the introduction, as he vainly looked for a spot where he might place his high silk hat.
Stephen A. Douglas, the political antagonist of his whole public life, the man who had pressed him hardest in the campaign of 1860, was seated just behind him. Douglas stepped forward quickly, and took the hat which Mr. Lincoln held helplessly in his hand.
“If I can’t be President,” Douglas whispered smilingly to Mrs. Brown, a cousin of Mrs. Lincoln and a member of the President’s party, “I at least can hold his hat.”
THE DEAD MAN SPOKE.
Mr. Lincoln once said in a speech: “Fellow-citizens, my friend, Mr. Douglas, made the startling announcement to-day that the Whigs are all dead.
“If that be so, fellow-citizens, you will now experience the novelty of hearing a speech from a dead man; and I suppose you might properly say, in the language of the old hymn:
“‘Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound.’”
MILITARY SNAILS NOT SPEEDY.
President Lincoln—as he himself put it in conversation one day with a friend—“fairly ached” for his generals to “get down to business.” These slow generals he termed “snails.”
Grant, Sherman and Sheridan were his favorites, for they were aggressive. They did not wait for the enemy to attack. Too many of the others were “lingerers,” as Lincoln called them. They were magnificent in defense, and stubborn and brave, but their names figured too much on the “waiting list.”
The greatest fault Lincoln found with so many of the commanders on the Union side was their unwillingness to move until everything was exactly to their liking.
Lincoln could not understand why these leaders of Northern armies hesitated.
OUTRAN THE JACK-RABBIT.
When the Union forces were routed in the first battle of Bull Run, there were many civilians present, who had gone out from Washington to witness the battle. Among the number were several Congressmen. One of these was a tall, long-legged fellow, who wore a long-tailed coat and a high plug hat. When the retreat began, this Congressman was in the lead of the entire crowd fleeing toward Washington. He outran all the rest, and was the first man to arrive in the city. No person ever made such good use of long legs as this Congressman. His immense stride carried him yards at every bound. He went over ditches and gullies at a single leap, and cleared a six-foot fence with a foot to spare. As he went over the fence his plug hat blew off, but he did not pause. With his long coat-tails flying in the wind, he continued straight ahead for Washington.
Many of those behind him were scared almost to death, but the flying Congressman was such a comical figure that they had to laugh in spite of their terror.
Mr. Lincoln enjoyed the description of how this Congressman led the race from Bull’s Run, and laughed at it heartily.
“I never knew but one fellow who could run like that,” he said, “and he was a young man out in Illinois. He had been sparking a girl, much against the wishes of her father. In fact, the old man took such a dislike to him that he threatened to shoot him if he ever caught him around his premises again.
“One evening the young man learned that the girl’s father had gone to the city, and he ventured out to the house. He was sitting in the parlor, with his arm around Betsy’s waist, when he suddenly spied the old man coming around the corner of the house with a shotgun. Leaping through a window into the garden, he started down a path at the top of his speed. He was a long-legged fellow, and could run like greased lightning. Just then a jack-rabbit jumped up in the path in front of him. In about two leaps he overtook the rabbit. Giving it a kick that sent it high in the air, he exclaimed: ‘Git out of the road, gosh dern you, and let somebody run that knows how.’
“I reckon,” said Mr. Lincoln, “that the long-legged Congressman, when he saw the rebel muskets, must have felt a good deal like that young fellow did when he saw the old man’s shot-gun.”
“FOOLING” THE PEOPLE.
Lincoln was a strong believer in the virtue of dealing honestly with the people.
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens,” he said to a caller at the White House, “you can never regain their respect and esteem.
“It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”
“ABE, YOU CAN’T PLAY THAT ON ME.”
The night President-elect Lincoln arrived at Washington, one man was observed watching Lincoln very closely as he walked out of the railroad station. Standing a little to one side, the man looked very sharply at Lincoln, and, as the latter passed, seized hold of his hand, and said in a loud tone of voice, “Abe, you can’t play that on me!”
Ward Lamon and the others with Lincoln were instantly alarmed, and would have struck the stranger had not Lincoln hastily said, “Don’t strike him! It is Washburne. Don’t you know him?”
Mr. Seward had given Congressman Washburne a hint of the time the train would arrive, and he had the right to be at the station when the train steamed in, but his indiscreet manner of loudly addressing the President-elect might have led to serious consequences to the latter.
HIS “BROAD” STORIES.
Mrs. Rose Linder Wilkinson, who often accompanied her father, Judge Linder, in the days when he rode circuit with Mr. Lincoln, tells the following story:
“At night, as a rule, the lawyers spent awhile in the parlor, and permitted the women who happened to be along to sit with them. But after half an hour or so we would notice it was time for us to leave them. I remember traveling the circuit one season when the young wife of one of the lawyers was with him. The place was so crowded that she and I were made to sleep together. When the time came for banishing us from the parlor, we went up to our room and sat there till bed-time, listening to the roars that followed each ether swiftly while those lawyers down-stairs told stories and laughed till the rafters rang.
“In the morning Mr. Lincoln said to me: ‘Rose, did we disturb your sleep last night?’ I answered, ‘No, I had no sleep’—which was not entirely true but the retort amused him. Then the young lawyer’s wife complained to him that we were not fairly used. We came along with them, young women, and when they were having the best time we were sent away like children to go to bed in the dark.
“‘But, Madame,’ said Mr. Lincoln, ‘you would not enjoy the things we laugh at.’ And then he entered into a discussion on what have been termed his ‘broad’ stories. He deplored the fact that men seemed to remember them longer and with less effort than any others.
“My father said: ‘But, Lincoln, I don’t remember the “broad” part of your stories so much as I do the moral that is in them,’ and it was a thing in which they were all agreed.”
SORRY FOR THE HORSES.
When President Lincoln heard of the Confederate raid at Fairfax, in which a brigadier-general and a number of valuable horses were captured, he gravely observed:
“Well, I am sorry for the horses.”
“Sorry for the horses, Mr. President!” exclaimed the Secretary of War, raising his spectacles and throwing himself back in his chair in astonishment.
“Yes,” replied Mr., Lincoln, “I can make a brigadier-general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses.”
MILD REBUKE TO A DOCTOR.
Dr. Jerome Walker, of Brooklyn, told how Mr. Lincoln once administered to him a mild rebuke. The doctor was showing Mr. Lincoln through the hospital at City Point.
“Finally, after visiting the wards occupied by our invalid and convalescing soldiers,” said Dr. Walker, “we came to three wards occupied by sick and wounded Southern prisoners. With a feeling of patriotic duty, I said: ‘Mr. President, you won’t want to go in there; they are only rebels.’
“I will never forget how he stopped and gently laid his large hand upon my shoulder and quietly answered, ‘You mean Confederates!’ And I have meant Confederates ever since.
“There was nothing left for me to do after the President’s remark but to go with him through these three wards; and I could not see but that he was just as kind, his hand-shakings just as hearty, his interest just as real for the welfare of the men, as when he was among our own soldiers.”
COLD MOLASSES WAS SWIFTER.
“Old Pap,” as the soldiers called General George H. Thomas, was aggravatingly slow at a time when the President wanted him to “get a move on”; in fact, the gallant “Rock of Chickamauga” was evidently entered in a snail-race.
“Some of my generals are so slow,” regretfully remarked Lincoln one day, “that molasses in the coldest days of winter is a race horse compared to them.
“They’re brave enough, but somehow or other they get fastened in a fence corner, and can’t figure their way out.”
LINCOLN CALLS MEDILL A COWARD.
Joseph Medill, for many years editor of the Chicago Tribune, not long before his death, told the following story regarding the “talking to” President Lincoln gave himself and two other Chicago gentlemen who went to Washington to see about reducing Chicago’s quota of troops after the call for extra men was made by the President in 1864:
“In 1864, when the call for extra troops came, Chicago revolted. She had already sent 22,000 troops up to that time, and was drained. When the call came there were no young men to go, and no aliens except what were bought. The citizens held a mass meeting and appointed three persons, of whom I was one, to go to Washington and ask Stanton to give Cook County a new enrollment. On reaching Washington, we went to Stanton with our statement. He refused entirely to give us the desired aid. Then we went to Lincoln. ‘I cannot do it,’ he said, ‘but I will go with you to the War Department, and Stanton and I will hear both sides.’
“So we all went over to the War Department together. Stanton and General Frye were there, and they, of course, contended that the quota should not be changed. The argument went on for some time, and was finally referred to Lincoln, who had been sitting silently listening.
“I shall never forget how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face.
“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, in a voice full of bitterness, ‘after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing war on this country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has.
“‘You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. Whatever you have asked, you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men, which I have made to carry out the war which you demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I have a right to expect better things of you.
“‘Go home and raise your six thousand extra men. And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men!’
“I couldn’t say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn’t have an answer. We all got up and went out, and when the door closed one of my colleagues said:
“‘Well, gentlemen, the old man is right. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Let us never say anything about this, but go home and raise the men.’
“And we did—six thousand men—making twenty-eight thousand in the War from a city of one hundred and fifty-six thousand. But there might have been crape on every door, almost, in Chicago, for every family had lost a son or a husband. I lost two brothers. It was hard for the mothers.”
THEY DIDN’T BUILD IT.
In 1862 a delegation of New York millionaires waited upon President Lincoln to request that he furnish a gunboat for the protection of New York harbor.
Mr. Lincoln, after listening patiently, said: “Gentlemen, the credit of the Government is at a very low ebb; greenbacks are not worth more than forty or fifty cents on the dollar; it is impossible for me, in the present condition of things, to furnish you a gunboat, and, in this condition of things, if I was worth half as much as you, gentlemen, are represented to be, and as badly frightened as you seem to be, I would build a gunboat and give it to the Government.”
STANTON’S ABUSE OF LINCOLN.
President Lincoln’s sense of duty to the country, together with his keen judgment of men, often led to the appointment of persons unfriendly to him. Some of these appointees were, as well, not loyal to the National Government, for that matter.
Regarding Secretary of War Stanton’s attitude toward Lincoln, Colonel A. K. McClure, who was very close to President Lincoln, said:
“After Stanton’s retirement from the Buchanan Cabinet when Lincoln was inaugurated, he maintained the closest confidential relations with Buchanan, and wrote him many letters expressing the utmost contempt for Lincoln, the Cabinet, the Republican Congress, and the general policy of the Administration.
“These letters speak freely of the ‘painful imbecility of Lincoln,’ of the ‘venality and corruption’ which ran riot in the government, and expressed the belief that no better condition of things was possible ‘until Jeff Davis turns out the whole concern.’
“He was firmly impressed for some weeks after the battle of Bull Run that the government was utterly overthrown, as he repeatedly refers to the coming of Davis into the National Capital.
“In one letter he says that ‘in less than thirty days Davis will be in possession of Washington;’ and it is an open secret that Stanton advised the revolutionary overthrow of the Lincoln government, to be replaced by General McClellan as military dictator. These letters, bad as they are, are not the worst letters written by Stanton to Buchanan. Some of them were so violent in their expressions against Lincoln and the administration that they have been charitably withheld from the public, but they remain in the possession of the surviving relatives of President Buchanan.
“Of course, Lincoln had no knowledge of the bitterness exhibited by Stanton to himself personally and to his administration, but if he had known the worst that Stanton ever said or wrote about him, I doubt not that he would have called him to the Cabinet in January, 1862. The disasters the army suffered made Lincoln forgetful of everything but the single duty of suppressing the rebellion.
“Lincoln was not long in discovering that in his new Secretary of War he had an invaluable but most troublesome Cabinet officer, but he saw only the great and good offices that Stanton was performing for the imperilled Republic.
“Confidence was restored in financial circles by the appointment of Stanton, and his name as War Minister did more to strengthen the faith of the people in the government credit than would have been probable from the appointment of any other man of that day.
“He was a terror to all the hordes of jobbers and speculators and camp-followers whose appetites had been whetted by a great war, and he enforced the strictest discipline throughout our armies.
“He was seldom capable of being civil to any officer away from the army on leave of absence unless he had been summoned by the government for conference or special duty, and he issued the strictest orders from time to time to drive the throng of military idlers from the capital and keep them at their posts. He was stern to savagery in his enforcement of military law. The wearied sentinel who slept at his post found no mercy in the heart of Stanton, and many times did Lincoln’s humanity overrule his fiery minister.
“Any neglect of military duty was sure of the swiftest punishment, and seldom did he make even just allowance for inevitable military disaster. He had profound, unfaltering faith in the Union cause, and, above all, he had unfaltering faith in himself.
“He believed that he was in all things except in name Commander-in-Chief of the armies and the navy of the nation, and it was with unconcealed reluctance that he at times deferred to the authority of the President.”
THE NEGRO AND THE CROCODILE.
In one of his political speeches, Judge Douglas made use of the following figure of speech: “As between the crocodile and the negro, I take the side of the negro; but as between the negro and the white man—I would go for the white man every time.”
Lincoln, at home, noted that; and afterwards, when he had occasion to refer to the remark, he said: “I believe that this is a sort of proposition in proportion, which may be stated thus: ‘As the negro is to the white man, so is the crocodile to the negro; and as the negro may rightfully treat the crocodile as a beast or reptile, so the white man may rightfully treat the negro as a beast or reptile.’”
LINCOLN WAS READY TO FIGHT.
On one occasion, Colonel Baker was speaking in a court-house, which had been a storehouse, and, on making some remarks that were offensive to certain political rowdies in the crowd, they cried: “Take him off the stand!”
Immediate confusion followed, and there was an attempt to carry the demand into execution. Directly over the speaker’s head was an old skylight, at which it appeared Mr. Lincoln had been listening to the speech. In an instant, Mr. Lincoln’s feet came through the skylight, followed by his tall and sinewy frame, and he was standing by Colonel Baker’s side. He raised his hand and the assembly subsided into silence. “Gentlemen,” said Mr. Lincoln, “let us not disgrace the age and country in which we live. This is a land where freedom of speech is guaranteed. Mr. Baker has a right to speak, and ought to be permitted to do so. I am here to protect him, and no man shall take him from this stand if I can prevent it.” The suddenness of his appearance, his perfect calmness and fairness, and the knowledge that he would do what he had promised to do, quieted all disturbance, and the speaker concluded his remarks without difficulty.
IT WAS UP-HILL WORK.
Two young men called on the President from Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln shook hands with them, and asked about the crops, the weather, etc.
Finally one of the young men said, “Mother is not well, and she sent me up to inquire of you how the suit about the Wells property is getting on.”
Lincoln, in the same even tone with which he had asked the question, said: “Give my best wishes and respects to your mother, and tell her I have so many outside matters to attend to now that I have put that case, and others, in the hands of a lawyer friend of mine, and if you will call on him (giving name and address) he will give you the information you want.”
After they had gone, a friend, who was present, said: “Mr. Lincoln, you did not seem to know the young men?”
He laughed and replied: “No, I had never seen them before, and I had to beat around the bush until I found who they were. It was up-hill work, but I topped it at last.”
LEE’S SLIM ANIMAL.
President Lincoln wrote to General Hooker on June 5, 1863, warning Hooker not to run any risk of being entangled on the Rappahannock “like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to give one way or kick the other.” On the 10th he warned Hooker not to go south of the Rappahannock upon Lee’s moving north of it. “I think Lee’s army and not Richmond is your true objective power. If he comes toward the upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines while he lengthens his. Fight him, too, when opportunity offers. If he stay where he is, fret him, and fret him.”
On the 14th again he says: “So far as we can make out here, the enemy have Milroy surrounded at Winchester, and Tyler at Martinsburg. If they could hold out for a few days, could you help them? If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg, and the tail of it on the flank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere; could you not break him?”
“MRS. NORTH AND HER ATTORNEY.”
In the issue of London “Punch” of September 24th, 1864, President Lincoln is pictured as sitting at a table in his law office, while in a chair to his right is a client, Mrs. North. The latter is a fine client for any attorney to have on his list, being wealthy and liberal, but as the lady is giving her counsel, who has represented her in a legal way for four years, notice that she proposes to put her legal business in the hands of another lawyer, the dejected look upon the face of Attorney Lincoln is easily accounted for. “Punch” puts these words in the lady’s mouth:
MRS. NORTH: “You see, Mr. Lincoln, we have failed utterly in our course of action; I want peace, and so, if you cannot effect an amicable arrangement, I must put the case into other hands.”
In this cartoon, “Punch” merely reflected the idea, or sentiment, current in England in 1864, that the North was much dissatisfied with the War policy of President Lincoln; and would surely elect General McClellan to succeed the Westerner in the White House. At the election McClellan carried but one Northern State—New Jersey, where he was born—President Lincoln sweeping the country like a prairie fire.
“Punch” had evidently been deceived by some bold, bad man, who wanted a little spending money, and sold the prediction to the funny journal with a certificate of character attached, written by—possibly—a member of the Horse Marines. “Punch,” was very much disgusted to find that its credulity and faith in mankind had been so imposed upon, especially when the election returns showed that “the-War-is-a-failure” candidate ran so slowly that Lincoln passed him as easily as though the Democratic nominee was tied to a post.
SATISFACTION TO THE SOUL.
In the far-away days when “Abe” went to school in Indiana, they had exercises, exhibitions and speaking-meetings in the schoolhouse or the church, and “Abe” was the “star.” His father was a Democrat, and at that time “Abe” agreed with his parent. He would frequently make political and other speeches to the boys and explain tangled questions.
Booneville was the county seat of Warrick county, situated about fifteen miles from Gentryville. Thither “Abe” walked to be present at the sittings of the court, and listened attentively to the trials and the speeches of the lawyers.
One of the trials was that of a murderer. He was defended by Mr. John Breckinridge, and at the conclusion of his speech “Abe” was so enthusiastic that he ventured to compliment him. Breckinridge looked at the shabby boy, thanked him, and passed on his way.
Many years afterwards, in 1862, Breckinridge called on the President, and he was told, “It was the best speech that I, up to that time, had ever heard. If I could, as I then thought, make as good a speech as that, my soul would be satisfied.”
WITHDREW THE COLT.
Mr. Alcott, of Elgin, Ill., tells of seeing Mr. Lincoln coming away from church unusually early one Sunday morning. “The sermon could not have been more than half way through,” says Mr. Alcott. “‘Tad’ was slung across his left arm like a pair of saddlebags, and Mr. Lincoln was striding along with long, deliberate steps toward his home. On one of the street corners he encountered a group of his fellow-townsmen. Mr. Lincoln anticipated the question which was about to be put by the group, and, taking his figure of speech from practices with which they were only too familiar, said: ‘Gentlemen, I entered this colt, but he kicked around so I had to withdraw him.”’