August 19, 2025 • 20 mins
In Story of Abraham Lincoln, Mary A. Hamilton offers a unique British perspective on the life of the 16th President of the United States, presenting a heartfelt tribute to “Honest Abe.” She explores Lincoln’s ancestral roots, his humble beginnings in Kentucky, his formative years in Indiana, and his impactful adult life in Illinois, culminating in his presidency and the trials of the White House. The biography also delves into the American Civil War, providing valuable context on its causes and developments. While Hamilton’s narrative is engaging, it does contain some historical inaccuracies, such as misidentifying Jefferson Davis as the Southern Democratic candidate in the 1860 election instead of John C. Breckinridge. Nevertheless, The Story of Abraham Lincoln remains an intriguing and accessible account of Lincolns life, principles, and political legacy. Please note Chapter 7 includes a single use of an epithet for African-Americans from a British magazine quote, and Chapter 8 features an example of a stereotypical Southern black dialect that may be considered offensive. (Summary by John Lieder.)
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter five of the Story of Abraham Lincoln. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Recording by John Leader. The Story of Abraham Lincoln by
Mary A. Hamilton, Chapter five, Defeat of the Little Giant.
(00:24):
Lincoln had worked very hard in Illinois all this year.
He was making speeches, educating the people of the state,
helping them to understand the big questions before them, making
things clear in his own mind by putting them into
the clear and simple words that would carry their importance
to the minds of others. A great meeting was held,
(00:45):
summoned by the editors of the newspapers that were against
the Kansas Bill. They invited prominent men from different parts
of the country to come and address them. Lincoln was
among those who went, and his speech was by far
the most important of all that were delivered there. He
had not indeed intended to say anything, but he was
roused by the weakness of those who did address the meeting.
(01:09):
Springing to his feet, he poured out what was in
his mind and could not be kept back. In such
burning and eloquent words that the reporters dropped their pencils
and listened spell bound. The whole audience was carried away
by excitement. It was one of the greatest speeches that
Lincoln ever made, we are told by all who heard it,
(01:29):
but there is no record of it. Lincoln himself spoke
in a transport of enthusiasm. The words came how he
hardly knew. He could not afterwards write down what he
had said. The reporters were so deeply moved that they
only took down a sentence here and there. The speech
was a warning to the growing Republican party. Sentences were
(01:50):
quoted and remembered. The North was indeed beginning to awaken
to the need of uniting against slavery, but it took
four years before it fully awoke, and as long as
the North was divided, the South was irresistible. When the
presidential election came in eighteen fifty six, the votes of
(02:10):
the South carried the day had a strong man with
definite and wise views been elected. Had Lincoln been elected,
the war between North and South it came four years later,
might have been prevented. But Lincoln's fame had not yet
traveled far beyond Illinois, he was not even nominated. Mister Buchanan,
(02:31):
the new president, called himself a Democrat. He believed in
Douglas's policy of state rights, but he was a tool
in the hands of the South. Weak and undecided. His
stupid administration made war inevitable. He did not satisfy the South,
and he showed the North how great a danger they
were in, so that when the next election came, they
(02:52):
were ready to act. The Republican Party gradually grew strong.
More and more Northern voters came to see that its
policy no extension of slavery, was the only right one.
The pro slavery party in Kansas continued to behave in
the most violent way. Civil war continued. In Congress. Charles
(03:13):
Sumner made a number of eloquent speeches on what he
called the crime against Kansas, and in them he openly
attacked slavery. One day, as he was sitting in the
member's reading room, a Southern member called Brooks came in.
Although there were several other people in the room. Brooks
fell upon Sumner and with his heavy walking stick, which
(03:34):
was weighted with lead at the end, beat him within
an inch of his life. For the next four years,
Sumner was an invalid and unable to take part in politics.
This incident caused great indignation in the North. Their indignation
was heightened by the attempt to force slavery on Kansas,
till it grew in very many cases to a real
(03:54):
hatred of slavery itself. But there was still a large
party in the North which did not disapprove of slavery.
This party was led, of course, by Douglas. Douglas had
been successful up till now because he represented the ordinary
man of the North, whose conscience was not yet awake,
who did not see that slavery in itself was wrong.
(04:18):
Lincoln had never really succeeded until now because his conscience
had always been awake and the ordinary Northerner was not
ready to follow him. The whole question of slavery was
brought under discussion in the next year, eighteen fifty seven,
by the famous case of a negro called dread Scott.
(04:38):
Dred Scott claimed his freedom before the United States courts
because his master, a doctor, had taken him to live
in the free state of Illinois. The Chief Justice Tainey
was an extreme pro slavery man. He was not satisfied
with deciding the case against dread Scott, he went much
further and declared that since a negro was proper and
(05:00):
not a person in the legal sense, he could not
bring a case before an American court. A negro, he declared,
has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.
The South, of course, was delighted with this verdict. What
it meant was this, When the Declaration of Independence declared
(05:20):
that all men are equal and possess right to life
and liberty, what was intended was not all men, but
all white men, since black men are not legally men.
To the North, such reasoning was hateful. People like mister
Seward of New York began to say, if slavery is
part of the constitution of America, there is a law
(05:42):
that is higher than the constitution, the moral law. Abraham Lincoln,
in a noble speech, declared, in some respects the black
women is certainly not my equal, but in her natural
right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands,
she is my equal, and the equal of all others.
The point was, could a negro have rights? The dread
(06:05):
Scott decision declared no. The South shouted no. The Republican
party said yes. In this same year, a free election
at last took place in Kansas, and a huge majority
decided that the state should not hold slaves. All these
events showed that troubled times were coming. In the next year,
(06:28):
a set of speeches was made which showed people how
things stood. In eighteen fifty eight, Lincoln stood against Douglas
as candidate for the state of Illinois. Douglas was one
of the most famous and popular men then living in America.
He was far the cleverest man and the best speaker
of his party. He stood for all those who, though
(06:48):
they might not want to have slaves themselves, thought that
slavery was not wrong, that black men were intended by
a kind providence to be useful to white men. If
any state wanted slaves, let them have them. Why not,
as Lincoln said, Douglas is so put up by nature
that a lash upon his back would hurt him, But
(07:11):
a lash upon anybody else's back does not hurt him.
Those who did not know Lincoln thought it absurd that he,
an unknown man from the country, should dare to stand
against Douglas, the little Giant. But Lincoln was not afraid.
He did not think of himself. He wanted people to
hear what he had to say. He arranged with Douglas
(07:34):
that they should hold a number of meetings together in Illinois.
They arranged it in this way. At half the meetings,
Douglas spoke first for an hour. Then Lincoln replied, speaking
for an hour and a half, and Douglas answered him
in half an hour's speech. At the other half, Lincoln
began and Douglas followed Lincoln ending. You can imagine one
(07:57):
of these meetings a large hall, rough built for the
most part, the seats often made of planks laid on
top of unhewn logs, packed with two or three thousand people,
intensely eager to hear and learn. Some of them were
already followers of Douglas, the most popular man in America.
All of them had heard of the little Giant, the
(08:18):
cleverest speaker in the States. Immense cheering as Douglas rose
to his feet. A small man with a big head,
a handsome face, with quickly moving, keen, dark eyes, faultlessly dressed,
a well bred gentleman, secure of himself, a lawyer with
all his art at the end of his tongue, able
(08:39):
to persuade anyone that black was white, to wrap up
anything in so many charming words that only the cleverest
could see when one statement did not follow from another,
when an argument was not a proof, quick to see
and stab the weak points in any one else. A voice,
rich and mellow, various and well trained, pleased all who
(09:00):
heard it. For an hour he spoke amid complete silence,
only broken by outbursts of applause. When he ended, there
were deafening cheers, then a pause, and Lincoln Lincoln. From
all parts of the hall. Lincoln seemed an awkward countryman
(09:21):
beside the Senator. His tall body seemed too big for
the platform, and his ill fitting black clothes hung loosely
upon it, as if they had been made for someone else.
When he began to speak, his voice was harsh and shrill.
His huge hands, the hands of a laborer with the
big knuckles and red ugly wrists, got knotted together, as
(09:44):
if nothing could unfix them. Soon, however, he became absorbed
in what he was saying. He ceased to be nervous.
Everything seemed to change as he forgot himself. His body
seemed to expand and straighten itself that everyone else looked
small and mean. Beside him, his voice became deep and clear,
(10:06):
reaching to the farthest end of the hall, and his
face that had appeared ugly, was lit up with an
inner light that made it more than beautiful. The deep
gray eyes seemed to each man in the hall to
be looking at him and piercing his soul. The language
was so simple that the most ignorant man in the
hall could follow it and understand. Everything was clear, There
(10:30):
was no hiding under fine words, nothing was left out,
nothing unnecessary was said. No one could doubt what Lincoln meant,
and he was not going to let anyone doubt what
Douglas meant. The greatest debate of all was that at
the meeting at Freeport. At Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas a question,
against the advice of all his friends. He asked whether
(10:54):
if a state wanted not to have slavery, it could
so decide. Lincoln knew that if Douglas said no, a
state which had slavery must keep it, the people of
Illinois would not vote for him, and he would lose
this election. If he said yes, he would be elected
and not Lincoln. Lincoln knew this. He knew that if
(11:15):
Douglas said yes, he was safe, and he would say yes,
where do you come in? Then? His friends asked him,
why do you ask him this. If you do, Douglas
is sure to get in. You are ruining your own chances.
I do not come in anywhere, said Lincoln. But that
does not matter. What does matter is this. If Douglas
(11:40):
says yes, as he will, he will get into the
Senate now, But two years after this he will stand
for election as president. If he says yes now, the
South will vote against him then and he will not
be elected. He must not be elected. No one who
believes in spreading slavery must be elected. It does not
(12:01):
matter about me. Lincoln was quite right. He saw further
than any one else. Douglas said yes, and he was
elected for Illinois. But the Democratic Party in the South,
whose support had made him strong, began to distrust him.
Douglas said, Lincoln is followed by a crowd of blind men,
(12:23):
and went to make some of these blind men see.
Lincoln was defeated, but he did not think of himself.
His speeches against Douglas were printed and read all over America.
He was invited to speak in Ohio, and in the
next year, in the beginning of eighteen sixty, a society
in New York asked him to come and give them
(12:44):
an address on politics. A huge audience in which were
all the best known and most brilliant men of the day,
gathered to hear him, an audience very much unlike any
that he had addressed before. They were all anxious to
see what he was like, this backwoodsman and farm laborer
who had met the great Stephen Arnold Douglas and proved
(13:06):
a match for him in argument, whose speeches had been
printed to express the views of a whole party. His
appearance was strange and impressive. When he stood up, his
height was astonishing, because his legs were very long, and
when sitting he did not appear tall. His face, thin
and marked by deep lines, was very sad. A massive
(13:30):
black hair was pushed back from his high forehead. His
eyebrows were black too, and stood out in his pale face.
His dark gray eyes were set deep in his head.
The mouth could smile, but now it was stern and sad.
The face was unlike other faces. When he spoke, it
was beautiful, for he felt everything he had. Abraham Lincoln
(13:54):
was a common man. He had had no advantages of birth,
of training. He had known it extreme poverty for years.
He had struggled without success and mean and small occupations.
He had no knowledge but what he had taught himself.
But no one who heard him speak could think him common.
(14:15):
Speaking now to an audience in which were the cleverest
people in New York, people who had read everything, and
seen everything, and been everywhere, who had had every opportunity
that he had not, he impressed them as much as
he had impressed the people of Illinois. He was one
of the greatest orators that ever lived. His words went
straight to the people to whom they were spoken. What
(14:38):
he said was as straightforward and as certain as a
sum in arithmetic, as easy to follow, and behind it
all you felt that the man believed every word of
what he said and spoke, because he must. The truth
was in him. Lincoln's address in New York convinced the
Republican Party that here was the man they wanted. In
(15:02):
eighteen sixty there came the presidential election, always the most
important event in American politics, this year more important than
ever before. For the last half century, almost the Democratic
Party had been in power they had been strong because
they were united. They united the people of the South
and those people in the North who thought that it
(15:24):
was a waste of time to discuss slavery, since slavery
was part of the constitution. Their policy on slavery had
been to leave it alone. As long as they did this,
there was nothing to create another party in the North
strong enough to oppose them. But when Douglas, in order
to make his own position strong in the South, made
(15:46):
slavery practical politics by bringing in a bill to allow
Kansas to have slaves, and when the judges in the
dread Scott case roused sympathy with the Negroes by declaring
that slaves were not men but property, then the question
united the divided North into a strong Republican party in
which all were agreed there was to be no slavery
(16:08):
north of Mason and Dixon's line. The attempt to force
slavery on Kansas split the Democratic Party. One section was
led by Douglas, who had gone as far as he could.
He was not ready to force Kansas to have slaves
if she did not want them, because people from Missouri
wanted her to have them. He saw that to force
(16:29):
slavery on the North in this way would mean division
and war, and therefore he refused to go any further.
By this refusal, Douglas lost his supporters in the South.
They joined the section led by Jefferson Davis, the Southern
candidate for the presidentship. Jefferson Davis was the true leader
of the South. Douglas, as well as Lincoln, had begun
(16:51):
life as the child of a poor pioneer. Each had
risen by his own abilities and by constant hard work.
Jefferson Davis was a true aristocrat. He was the son
of rich and educated parents. All his life he had
been waited on by slaves and surrounded by every comfort
while Lincoln was plowing or hewing wood, while Douglas was
(17:14):
working hard at the bar. Davis went first to the
University at Kentucky and then to the military academy at
West Point, from which he passed to the army. He
served as a lieutenant at the time of the Black
Hawk War, and it is very likely that he came
across Lincoln, who was serving as a volunteer. After serving
seven years in the army, he married and settled down
(17:37):
as a cotton planter in Mississippi. His estates were worked
by slaves. Of course, to him, the negro was an
animal quite different from the white man, meant by nature
to be under him and to serve him. Black men,
unlike white did not exist for themselves with the equal
right to live possessed by a man and in sect
(18:00):
or a tree, but had been created solely to be
useful to white men. No two men could be more
unlike than Lincoln and Davis. The groundwork of Davis's nature
was an intense pride. A friend described him as as
ambitious as lucifer and as cold as a lizard. He
(18:21):
was cold in manner and seldom laughed. Lincoln was entirely humble, minded,
full of passionate, longing to help the weak. To Lincoln,
what was common was therefore precious. Jefferson Davis said, the minority,
and not the majority, ought to rule, and their looks
were as unlike as their minds. Jefferson Davis, with his beautiful,
(18:43):
proud face, as cold and as handsome as a statue,
expressed the utter contempt and scorn of the aristocrat for
everything and everyone beneath him. When the Democratic Party met
at Charleston to nominate their candidate for president. They were
hopelessly divided. Douglas his Freeport speech had set the South
against him. For the last four years, there had been
(19:04):
a growing section which said that as long as the
South was fastened to the North, slavery was not safe. Now,
seven states, led by South Carolina, left the Democratic meeting
and nominated Davis as their candidate. The Republican Party met
at Chicago. There was only one man, strong, reasonable, and
(19:26):
sane enough for every section of the party to accept.
This was Abraham Lincoln. At the time of his nomination,
Lincoln was playing barn ball with his children in the
field behind his house. When told that he had been chosen,
he said, you must be able to find some better
man than me. But he was ready to take up
the difficult task. He knew that he could serve his country,
(19:49):
and he was not afraid. He had a clear ideal
before him to preserve America as one united whole. He
saw that war might come. As he had said five
years before, America could not endure forever half slave and
half free. It must be all free, and the South
would not let slavery go without war. The election came
(20:13):
in November. The result was that Lincoln was elected president
for four years, the destiny of his country was in
his hands. End of Chapter five, Recording by John Leader, Bloomington, Illinois,
Chapter five of the Story of Abraham Lincoln. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
Recording by John Leader. The Story of Abraham Lincoln by
Mary A. Hamilton, Chapter five, Defeat of the Little Giant.
(00:24):
Lincoln had worked very hard in Illinois all this year.
He was making speeches, educating the people of the state,
helping them to understand the big questions before them, making
things clear in his own mind by putting them into
the clear and simple words that would carry their importance
to the minds of others. A great meeting was held,
(00:45):
summoned by the editors of the newspapers that were against
the Kansas Bill. They invited prominent men from different parts
of the country to come and address them. Lincoln was
among those who went, and his speech was by far
the most important of all that were delivered there. He
had not indeed intended to say anything, but he was
roused by the weakness of those who did address the meeting.
(01:09):
Springing to his feet, he poured out what was in
his mind and could not be kept back. In such
burning and eloquent words that the reporters dropped their pencils
and listened spell bound. The whole audience was carried away
by excitement. It was one of the greatest speeches that
Lincoln ever made, we are told by all who heard it,
(01:29):
but there is no record of it. Lincoln himself spoke
in a transport of enthusiasm. The words came how he
hardly knew. He could not afterwards write down what he
had said. The reporters were so deeply moved that they
only took down a sentence here and there. The speech
was a warning to the growing Republican party. Sentences were
(01:50):
quoted and remembered. The North was indeed beginning to awaken
to the need of uniting against slavery, but it took
four years before it fully awoke, and as long as
the North was divided, the South was irresistible. When the
presidential election came in eighteen fifty six, the votes of
(02:10):
the South carried the day had a strong man with
definite and wise views been elected. Had Lincoln been elected,
the war between North and South it came four years later,
might have been prevented. But Lincoln's fame had not yet
traveled far beyond Illinois, he was not even nominated. Mister Buchanan,
(02:31):
the new president, called himself a Democrat. He believed in
Douglas's policy of state rights, but he was a tool
in the hands of the South. Weak and undecided. His
stupid administration made war inevitable. He did not satisfy the South,
and he showed the North how great a danger they
were in, so that when the next election came, they
(02:52):
were ready to act. The Republican Party gradually grew strong.
More and more Northern voters came to see that its
policy no extension of slavery, was the only right one.
The pro slavery party in Kansas continued to behave in
the most violent way. Civil war continued. In Congress. Charles
(03:13):
Sumner made a number of eloquent speeches on what he
called the crime against Kansas, and in them he openly
attacked slavery. One day, as he was sitting in the
member's reading room, a Southern member called Brooks came in.
Although there were several other people in the room. Brooks
fell upon Sumner and with his heavy walking stick, which
(03:34):
was weighted with lead at the end, beat him within
an inch of his life. For the next four years,
Sumner was an invalid and unable to take part in politics.
This incident caused great indignation in the North. Their indignation
was heightened by the attempt to force slavery on Kansas,
till it grew in very many cases to a real
(03:54):
hatred of slavery itself. But there was still a large
party in the North which did not disapprove of slavery.
This party was led, of course, by Douglas. Douglas had
been successful up till now because he represented the ordinary
man of the North, whose conscience was not yet awake,
who did not see that slavery in itself was wrong.
(04:18):
Lincoln had never really succeeded until now because his conscience
had always been awake and the ordinary Northerner was not
ready to follow him. The whole question of slavery was
brought under discussion in the next year, eighteen fifty seven,
by the famous case of a negro called dread Scott.
(04:38):
Dred Scott claimed his freedom before the United States courts
because his master, a doctor, had taken him to live
in the free state of Illinois. The Chief Justice Tainey
was an extreme pro slavery man. He was not satisfied
with deciding the case against dread Scott, he went much
further and declared that since a negro was proper and
(05:00):
not a person in the legal sense, he could not
bring a case before an American court. A negro, he declared,
has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.
The South, of course, was delighted with this verdict. What
it meant was this, When the Declaration of Independence declared
(05:20):
that all men are equal and possess right to life
and liberty, what was intended was not all men, but
all white men, since black men are not legally men.
To the North, such reasoning was hateful. People like mister
Seward of New York began to say, if slavery is
part of the constitution of America, there is a law
(05:42):
that is higher than the constitution, the moral law. Abraham Lincoln,
in a noble speech, declared, in some respects the black
women is certainly not my equal, but in her natural
right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands,
she is my equal, and the equal of all others.
The point was, could a negro have rights? The dread
(06:05):
Scott decision declared no. The South shouted no. The Republican
party said yes. In this same year, a free election
at last took place in Kansas, and a huge majority
decided that the state should not hold slaves. All these
events showed that troubled times were coming. In the next year,
(06:28):
a set of speeches was made which showed people how
things stood. In eighteen fifty eight, Lincoln stood against Douglas
as candidate for the state of Illinois. Douglas was one
of the most famous and popular men then living in America.
He was far the cleverest man and the best speaker
of his party. He stood for all those who, though
(06:48):
they might not want to have slaves themselves, thought that
slavery was not wrong, that black men were intended by
a kind providence to be useful to white men. If
any state wanted slaves, let them have them. Why not,
as Lincoln said, Douglas is so put up by nature
that a lash upon his back would hurt him, But
(07:11):
a lash upon anybody else's back does not hurt him.
Those who did not know Lincoln thought it absurd that he,
an unknown man from the country, should dare to stand
against Douglas, the little Giant. But Lincoln was not afraid.
He did not think of himself. He wanted people to
hear what he had to say. He arranged with Douglas
(07:34):
that they should hold a number of meetings together in Illinois.
They arranged it in this way. At half the meetings,
Douglas spoke first for an hour. Then Lincoln replied, speaking
for an hour and a half, and Douglas answered him
in half an hour's speech. At the other half, Lincoln
began and Douglas followed Lincoln ending. You can imagine one
(07:57):
of these meetings a large hall, rough built for the
most part, the seats often made of planks laid on
top of unhewn logs, packed with two or three thousand people,
intensely eager to hear and learn. Some of them were
already followers of Douglas, the most popular man in America.
All of them had heard of the little Giant, the
(08:18):
cleverest speaker in the States. Immense cheering as Douglas rose
to his feet. A small man with a big head,
a handsome face, with quickly moving, keen, dark eyes, faultlessly dressed,
a well bred gentleman, secure of himself, a lawyer with
all his art at the end of his tongue, able
(08:39):
to persuade anyone that black was white, to wrap up
anything in so many charming words that only the cleverest
could see when one statement did not follow from another,
when an argument was not a proof, quick to see
and stab the weak points in any one else. A voice,
rich and mellow, various and well trained, pleased all who
(09:00):
heard it. For an hour he spoke amid complete silence,
only broken by outbursts of applause. When he ended, there
were deafening cheers, then a pause, and Lincoln Lincoln. From
all parts of the hall. Lincoln seemed an awkward countryman
(09:21):
beside the Senator. His tall body seemed too big for
the platform, and his ill fitting black clothes hung loosely
upon it, as if they had been made for someone else.
When he began to speak, his voice was harsh and shrill.
His huge hands, the hands of a laborer with the
big knuckles and red ugly wrists, got knotted together, as
(09:44):
if nothing could unfix them. Soon, however, he became absorbed
in what he was saying. He ceased to be nervous.
Everything seemed to change as he forgot himself. His body
seemed to expand and straighten itself that everyone else looked
small and mean. Beside him, his voice became deep and clear,
(10:06):
reaching to the farthest end of the hall, and his
face that had appeared ugly, was lit up with an
inner light that made it more than beautiful. The deep
gray eyes seemed to each man in the hall to
be looking at him and piercing his soul. The language
was so simple that the most ignorant man in the
hall could follow it and understand. Everything was clear, There
(10:30):
was no hiding under fine words, nothing was left out,
nothing unnecessary was said. No one could doubt what Lincoln meant,
and he was not going to let anyone doubt what
Douglas meant. The greatest debate of all was that at
the meeting at Freeport. At Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas a question,
against the advice of all his friends. He asked whether
(10:54):
if a state wanted not to have slavery, it could
so decide. Lincoln knew that if Douglas said no, a
state which had slavery must keep it, the people of
Illinois would not vote for him, and he would lose
this election. If he said yes, he would be elected
and not Lincoln. Lincoln knew this. He knew that if
(11:15):
Douglas said yes, he was safe, and he would say yes,
where do you come in? Then? His friends asked him,
why do you ask him this. If you do, Douglas
is sure to get in. You are ruining your own chances.
I do not come in anywhere, said Lincoln. But that
does not matter. What does matter is this. If Douglas
(11:40):
says yes, as he will, he will get into the
Senate now, But two years after this he will stand
for election as president. If he says yes now, the
South will vote against him then and he will not
be elected. He must not be elected. No one who
believes in spreading slavery must be elected. It does not
(12:01):
matter about me. Lincoln was quite right. He saw further
than any one else. Douglas said yes, and he was
elected for Illinois. But the Democratic Party in the South,
whose support had made him strong, began to distrust him.
Douglas said, Lincoln is followed by a crowd of blind men,
(12:23):
and went to make some of these blind men see.
Lincoln was defeated, but he did not think of himself.
His speeches against Douglas were printed and read all over America.
He was invited to speak in Ohio, and in the
next year, in the beginning of eighteen sixty, a society
in New York asked him to come and give them
(12:44):
an address on politics. A huge audience in which were
all the best known and most brilliant men of the day,
gathered to hear him, an audience very much unlike any
that he had addressed before. They were all anxious to
see what he was like, this backwoodsman and farm laborer
who had met the great Stephen Arnold Douglas and proved
(13:06):
a match for him in argument, whose speeches had been
printed to express the views of a whole party. His
appearance was strange and impressive. When he stood up, his
height was astonishing, because his legs were very long, and
when sitting he did not appear tall. His face, thin
and marked by deep lines, was very sad. A massive
(13:30):
black hair was pushed back from his high forehead. His
eyebrows were black too, and stood out in his pale face.
His dark gray eyes were set deep in his head.
The mouth could smile, but now it was stern and sad.
The face was unlike other faces. When he spoke, it
was beautiful, for he felt everything he had. Abraham Lincoln
(13:54):
was a common man. He had had no advantages of birth,
of training. He had known it extreme poverty for years.
He had struggled without success and mean and small occupations.
He had no knowledge but what he had taught himself.
But no one who heard him speak could think him common.
(14:15):
Speaking now to an audience in which were the cleverest
people in New York, people who had read everything, and
seen everything, and been everywhere, who had had every opportunity
that he had not, he impressed them as much as
he had impressed the people of Illinois. He was one
of the greatest orators that ever lived. His words went
straight to the people to whom they were spoken. What
(14:38):
he said was as straightforward and as certain as a
sum in arithmetic, as easy to follow, and behind it
all you felt that the man believed every word of
what he said and spoke, because he must. The truth
was in him. Lincoln's address in New York convinced the
Republican Party that here was the man they wanted. In
(15:02):
eighteen sixty there came the presidential election, always the most
important event in American politics, this year more important than
ever before. For the last half century, almost the Democratic
Party had been in power they had been strong because
they were united. They united the people of the South
and those people in the North who thought that it
(15:24):
was a waste of time to discuss slavery, since slavery
was part of the constitution. Their policy on slavery had
been to leave it alone. As long as they did this,
there was nothing to create another party in the North
strong enough to oppose them. But when Douglas, in order
to make his own position strong in the South, made
(15:46):
slavery practical politics by bringing in a bill to allow
Kansas to have slaves, and when the judges in the
dread Scott case roused sympathy with the Negroes by declaring
that slaves were not men but property, then the question
united the divided North into a strong Republican party in
which all were agreed there was to be no slavery
(16:08):
north of Mason and Dixon's line. The attempt to force
slavery on Kansas split the Democratic Party. One section was
led by Douglas, who had gone as far as he could.
He was not ready to force Kansas to have slaves
if she did not want them, because people from Missouri
wanted her to have them. He saw that to force
(16:29):
slavery on the North in this way would mean division
and war, and therefore he refused to go any further.
By this refusal, Douglas lost his supporters in the South.
They joined the section led by Jefferson Davis, the Southern
candidate for the presidentship. Jefferson Davis was the true leader
of the South. Douglas, as well as Lincoln, had begun
(16:51):
life as the child of a poor pioneer. Each had
risen by his own abilities and by constant hard work.
Jefferson Davis was a true aristocrat. He was the son
of rich and educated parents. All his life he had
been waited on by slaves and surrounded by every comfort
while Lincoln was plowing or hewing wood, while Douglas was
(17:14):
working hard at the bar. Davis went first to the
University at Kentucky and then to the military academy at
West Point, from which he passed to the army. He
served as a lieutenant at the time of the Black
Hawk War, and it is very likely that he came
across Lincoln, who was serving as a volunteer. After serving
seven years in the army, he married and settled down
(17:37):
as a cotton planter in Mississippi. His estates were worked
by slaves. Of course, to him, the negro was an
animal quite different from the white man, meant by nature
to be under him and to serve him. Black men,
unlike white did not exist for themselves with the equal
right to live possessed by a man and in sect
(18:00):
or a tree, but had been created solely to be
useful to white men. No two men could be more
unlike than Lincoln and Davis. The groundwork of Davis's nature
was an intense pride. A friend described him as as
ambitious as lucifer and as cold as a lizard. He
(18:21):
was cold in manner and seldom laughed. Lincoln was entirely humble, minded,
full of passionate, longing to help the weak. To Lincoln,
what was common was therefore precious. Jefferson Davis said, the minority,
and not the majority, ought to rule, and their looks
were as unlike as their minds. Jefferson Davis, with his beautiful,
(18:43):
proud face, as cold and as handsome as a statue,
expressed the utter contempt and scorn of the aristocrat for
everything and everyone beneath him. When the Democratic Party met
at Charleston to nominate their candidate for president. They were
hopelessly divided. Douglas his Freeport speech had set the South
against him. For the last four years, there had been
(19:04):
a growing section which said that as long as the
South was fastened to the North, slavery was not safe. Now,
seven states, led by South Carolina, left the Democratic meeting
and nominated Davis as their candidate. The Republican Party met
at Chicago. There was only one man, strong, reasonable, and
(19:26):
sane enough for every section of the party to accept.
This was Abraham Lincoln. At the time of his nomination,
Lincoln was playing barn ball with his children in the
field behind his house. When told that he had been chosen,
he said, you must be able to find some better
man than me. But he was ready to take up
the difficult task. He knew that he could serve his country,
(19:49):
and he was not afraid. He had a clear ideal
before him to preserve America as one united whole. He
saw that war might come. As he had said five
years before, America could not endure forever half slave and
half free. It must be all free, and the South
would not let slavery go without war. The election came
(20:13):
in November. The result was that Lincoln was elected president
for four years, the destiny of his country was in
his hands. End of Chapter five, Recording by John Leader, Bloomington, Illinois,
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