August 19, 2025 • 15 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 (00:01):
Chapter six 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 six, The New President and Secession.
(00:27):
Lincoln's election was a thunderbolt to the South. It meant
that the great question of slavery would have to be
decided one way or the other. Lincoln was a man
who had opinions, and opinions in which he believed for
which he would fight. He would not let things drift
as Buchanan did. Buchanan's policy would have ended in allowing
(00:48):
the South to separate itself from the North. The Southern
politicians knew this, and they wanted Buchanan's policy carried on
so as to make that separation possible in the North.
Although many in the South understood as clearly as Lincoln
did the position of affairs, he saw that the time
(01:08):
had come when active measures must be taken. A strong
and decided policy maintained if the Union was to be
held together. He was a true patriot. He believed in
the union. He thought it a great and glorious thing.
That North and South should be separated was to him
like separating husband and wife. Their strength and happiness lay
(01:30):
in each other. They had grown together for eighty four years.
If they parted now, each must lose something it could
never regain. He loved his country. He loved the South
as well as the North. He believed that if the
South tried to separate, the North would be justified in
the true interests of the American nation in compelling her
(01:52):
to remain. The great problem was now, as he saw,
could America hold together as one nation, half slave and
half free? Could the union be a real union while
there was this deep division, a division which it was
now clear, could not be got rid of as the
Northerners had hoped for so long by the slow passage
(02:15):
of time. Time alone would not induce the South to
give up slavery. Slavery was a barbarous institution, degrading to
the slaves and to those who owned them. The North
could not accept it. If North and South were to
hold together, slavery must go. The great thing was to
keep North and South united. This, and this only was
(02:39):
Lincoln's great purpose. He hated slavery, but he would not
have compelled the South to give up slavery if he
had believed that the union could have been maintained without
that North and South must hold together whatever it cost,
only so could each part of the nation and the
nation as a whole, attain the best that was possible
(03:00):
for it. Lincoln's great difficulty was this. The South saw
that the nation could not hold together forever half slave
and half free. Two years before Lincoln's election, one of
the members for South Carolina had written what was afterwards
known as the Scarlet Letter. In it, he declared, we
(03:22):
can make a revolution in the Cotton States, and there
were many even at that time who shared his views.
The South saw that if they were to remain united
to the North, slavery must go, and they were ready
to separate from the North in order to keep slavery.
But while the South understood the position, the North did not.
(03:45):
It did not understand it fully at the time of
Lincoln's election, or indeed until the end of the second
year of the war. And because they did not understand,
they could not appreciate Lincoln's policy or support it as
they are ought to have done. All the time, they criticized, blamed,
and abused him, making his hard task harder. Not until
(04:09):
after his death did all the Northerners see how great
and how right he had been. Not until his death
did Americans realize that, had it not been for Lincoln,
the United States might have ceased to be. Lincoln's speeches
had been plain and outspoken enough, the South was terrified
by his election. They resolved on separation. Lincoln, though elected
(04:34):
in November eighteen sixty, did not actually become president until
February eighteen sixty one. During these three months, he remained
in the plain yellow House at Springfield. His little office
crowded every day with visitors who came to consult him,
to advise him, or often merely to shake his hand.
(04:54):
Honest Old Abe, as they called him, had a joke
or a kindly word for all of them. He was
presented with many quaint gifts. An old woman came one day, and,
after shaking hands with Lincoln, produced from under her huge
cloak a vast pair of knitted stockings for the President
to wear in winter. Lincoln thanked her graciously and let
(05:16):
her out, Then, returning, he lifted up the stockings and
showing the enormous feat, said to his secretary, the old
lady seems to have guessed the latitude and longitude about right.
Lincoln spent the time reading and writing, drawing up memoranda,
choosing his cabinet, learning the difficult ins and outs of
(05:38):
the new work before him. All these months he was
thinking hard. His purpose was already clear. But the presidentship,
always a heavy burden, had never been so heavy as
it was to be for Lincoln. Things grew more serious
every day. The weakness of Buchanan, who had no plan
(05:59):
or purpose, allowed the South to do as it chose.
The only chance of avoiding war lay in firm action now,
but it was not in Buchanan's nature to be firm.
He had been made president by the votes of the
South because he was not firm, because he would allow
them to do as they chose. They dreaded Lincoln because
(06:20):
he was firm and therefore acted while there was yet time.
On December twenty, eighteen sixty, the chief men of South
Carolina met together and declared the Union to be dissolved.
Posters appeared all over the state. The South was in
a state of feverish excitement. Within the month, the states
(06:41):
of Missouri, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, the chief
cotton growing slave owning states, also declared themselves to be
separated from the Union, and these six states joined with
South Carolina to form what they called the Southern Confederation,
independent of the North. They chose for their first president,
(07:05):
Jefferson Davis. Buchanan did not know what to do. The
question was has a state any right to leave the Union? America,
of course, is a federation. At the time of the
declaration of independence, the thirteen states that then existed joined
themselves together forever and created a common federal government for
(07:29):
common purposes, with a president at its head. Lincoln would
have said, one state has no more right to leave
the others than an English county has to declare that
it is a separate kingdom not bound by the common law.
Buchanan said no too. But he also said if a
(07:49):
state does leave, the federal government has no right to
force it to stay, which meant to stand still. You
ought not want to go, but if you do, we
have I have no right to prevent you. Buchanan's one idea, indeed,
was to let things drift. There was one great and
(08:09):
immediate difficulty. In each of the coast states of the Union,
the Federal government had armed forts. In South Carolina, there
were two important ones, Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter, with
a small garrison in each commanded by Major Anderson. South
Carolina demanded that the garrisons should be withdrawn now. To
(08:32):
withdraw the garrisons and abandon the forts was to admit
that South Carolina had a right to leave the Union
and to recognize the Southern Confederation as independent of the
federal government. To maintain the forts, more forces must be sent.
Anderson wrote to say that he was not strong enough
to hold out against an attack. Buchanan did nothing. Anderson,
(08:57):
believing that an attack was going to be made on
Fort Moultrie, which he was too weak to defend, removed
all his men to Fort Sumter. The militia of South
Carolina at once occupied Fort Moultrie. In the second week
of the new year eighteen sixty one, a government vessel,
the Star of the West, sailed into the harbor of
(09:20):
Charleston to bring provisions for Anderson. The South Carolina, having
attacked the Star of the West, fired on the United
States flag which it carried and drove it out of
the harbor. The Confederate government, led by Jefferson Davis, then
demanded that Fort Sumter should be given up to them.
(09:41):
When Andersen refused, it was blockaded by much superior forces,
and by the twelfth of April it was taken by
General Beauregard. Under these circumstances, when war was at hand,
when half the nation was ready to take up arms
against the other half, Lincoln took up the burden of office.
(10:03):
It was a burden, indeed, which no ordinary man could
have borne. Buchanan had simply looked on while rebellion was
preparing itself. For Lincoln was the task of quelling it.
But the fact of rebellion was not his greatest difficulty.
This was the disunion of the North. One section the
(10:25):
abolitionists rejoiced at the cessation of the South, we shall
no more be chained to the slave owners. Another section
thought that if the South wanted to go, why not
let them. There was as yet only a very small
section able to agree with Lincoln. Lincoln hated slavery, but
(10:45):
not slave owners. He loved the South as much as
the North. It was agony to him to know his
country divided against itself. Well, might he say, in the
speech he made on leaving his old home at Springfield, forever,
there is a task before me greater than that which
rested upon Washington. It was very natural that men who
(11:08):
had not known Lincoln should fear to have the fate
of their country at so critical a time entrusted to
a man of so small experience. But any one who
knew Lincoln felt absolute confidence in him. Years of difficulty
and disappointment, of constant struggle against every kind of obstacle
had made him what he was clear eyed to see,
(11:32):
where the right was, steadfast and unflinching to pursue it,
tender hearted, and generous to sympathize with all those who
stumbled on the way. Few people indeed understood him in
the years to come. Nearly all, at one time or another,
abused him, and distrusted him, and blamed him when things
(11:52):
went wrong. For four years he bore the whole burden
of a great responsibility. Patiently and silently. He endured disappointment
and reproach. In the end, he could say that if
Washington had made America one, he had remade it so
that it could never again be unmade. The speech he
(12:13):
made when he entered on his duties as president showed
how little bitterness there was in his heart towards the South.
He said, we are not enemies, but friends. We must
not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must
not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory,
(12:34):
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every heart
and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell
the course of the Union, when touched, as surely they
will be by the better angels of our nature. The
attack on Sumpter and its fall made war inevitable. Lincoln
(12:54):
was no Buchanan. War was horrible, civil war, war between
men of the same country, between friends, often between relations,
most horrible of all. But he could not, at whatever
cost allow the Union for which his countrymen had fought
so heroically eighty four years ago, which had stood so
(13:16):
long for such a high ideal of freedom all over
the world. He could not allow the Union to be
destroyed without fighting to preserve it. To him, the secession
of the Southern States meant something as unnatural as a
separate kingdom in Scotland would be to us, and a
kingdom based on something which we thought wholly wrong. The
(13:38):
question is, he said, whether in a free government the
minority have a right to break it up whenever they choose.
He declared that they had no such right. The whole
population of the slaveholding states was much smaller than that
of the free states, and among those states, while seven
had seceded, eight remained at least nominally in the Union.
(14:01):
And even in the seceding states themselves, there was a
party at each that was ready to remain faithful to
the Union and not prepared to take up arms against it.
They wanted war. Their attack on Fort Sumter was a
call to arms. They wanted war, They should have it.
In the long run, the North was bound to win.
(14:24):
Its population was half as great again, and its resources
as much superior. Almost the first act of Lincoln's government
was to call for seventy five thousand volunteers. The attack
upon Sumter and Lincoln's call to arms roused the North
from its apathy. Excitement grew when the seventh Massachusetts Regiment,
(14:46):
passing through Baltimore on its way to headquarters, was violently
attacked by the mob. When the Southern army, already in
the Field, captured Harper's ferry, and seized the Union arsenal
at Gosport, end of Chapter six. Recording by John Leader, Bloomington, Illinois,
Chapter six 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 six, The New President and Secession.
(00:27):
Lincoln's election was a thunderbolt to the South. It meant
that the great question of slavery would have to be
decided one way or the other. Lincoln was a man
who had opinions, and opinions in which he believed for
which he would fight. He would not let things drift
as Buchanan did. Buchanan's policy would have ended in allowing
(00:48):
the South to separate itself from the North. The Southern
politicians knew this, and they wanted Buchanan's policy carried on
so as to make that separation possible in the North.
Although many in the South understood as clearly as Lincoln
did the position of affairs, he saw that the time
(01:08):
had come when active measures must be taken. A strong
and decided policy maintained if the Union was to be
held together. He was a true patriot. He believed in
the union. He thought it a great and glorious thing.
That North and South should be separated was to him
like separating husband and wife. Their strength and happiness lay
(01:30):
in each other. They had grown together for eighty four years.
If they parted now, each must lose something it could
never regain. He loved his country. He loved the South
as well as the North. He believed that if the
South tried to separate, the North would be justified in
the true interests of the American nation in compelling her
(01:52):
to remain. The great problem was now, as he saw,
could America hold together as one nation, half slave and
half free? Could the union be a real union while
there was this deep division, a division which it was
now clear, could not be got rid of as the
Northerners had hoped for so long by the slow passage
(02:15):
of time. Time alone would not induce the South to
give up slavery. Slavery was a barbarous institution, degrading to
the slaves and to those who owned them. The North
could not accept it. If North and South were to
hold together, slavery must go. The great thing was to
keep North and South united. This, and this only was
(02:39):
Lincoln's great purpose. He hated slavery, but he would not
have compelled the South to give up slavery if he
had believed that the union could have been maintained without
that North and South must hold together whatever it cost,
only so could each part of the nation and the
nation as a whole, attain the best that was possible
(03:00):
for it. Lincoln's great difficulty was this. The South saw
that the nation could not hold together forever half slave
and half free. Two years before Lincoln's election, one of
the members for South Carolina had written what was afterwards
known as the Scarlet Letter. In it, he declared, we
(03:22):
can make a revolution in the Cotton States, and there
were many even at that time who shared his views.
The South saw that if they were to remain united
to the North, slavery must go, and they were ready
to separate from the North in order to keep slavery.
But while the South understood the position, the North did not.
(03:45):
It did not understand it fully at the time of
Lincoln's election, or indeed until the end of the second
year of the war. And because they did not understand,
they could not appreciate Lincoln's policy or support it as
they are ought to have done. All the time, they criticized, blamed,
and abused him, making his hard task harder. Not until
(04:09):
after his death did all the Northerners see how great
and how right he had been. Not until his death
did Americans realize that, had it not been for Lincoln,
the United States might have ceased to be. Lincoln's speeches
had been plain and outspoken enough, the South was terrified
by his election. They resolved on separation. Lincoln, though elected
(04:34):
in November eighteen sixty, did not actually become president until
February eighteen sixty one. During these three months, he remained
in the plain yellow House at Springfield. His little office
crowded every day with visitors who came to consult him,
to advise him, or often merely to shake his hand.
(04:54):
Honest Old Abe, as they called him, had a joke
or a kindly word for all of them. He was
presented with many quaint gifts. An old woman came one day, and,
after shaking hands with Lincoln, produced from under her huge
cloak a vast pair of knitted stockings for the President
to wear in winter. Lincoln thanked her graciously and let
(05:16):
her out, Then, returning, he lifted up the stockings and
showing the enormous feat, said to his secretary, the old
lady seems to have guessed the latitude and longitude about right.
Lincoln spent the time reading and writing, drawing up memoranda,
choosing his cabinet, learning the difficult ins and outs of
(05:38):
the new work before him. All these months he was
thinking hard. His purpose was already clear. But the presidentship,
always a heavy burden, had never been so heavy as
it was to be for Lincoln. Things grew more serious
every day. The weakness of Buchanan, who had no plan
(05:59):
or purpose, allowed the South to do as it chose.
The only chance of avoiding war lay in firm action now,
but it was not in Buchanan's nature to be firm.
He had been made president by the votes of the
South because he was not firm, because he would allow
them to do as they chose. They dreaded Lincoln because
(06:20):
he was firm and therefore acted while there was yet time.
On December twenty, eighteen sixty, the chief men of South
Carolina met together and declared the Union to be dissolved.
Posters appeared all over the state. The South was in
a state of feverish excitement. Within the month, the states
(06:41):
of Missouri, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, the chief
cotton growing slave owning states, also declared themselves to be
separated from the Union, and these six states joined with
South Carolina to form what they called the Southern Confederation,
independent of the North. They chose for their first president,
(07:05):
Jefferson Davis. Buchanan did not know what to do. The
question was has a state any right to leave the Union? America,
of course, is a federation. At the time of the
declaration of independence, the thirteen states that then existed joined
themselves together forever and created a common federal government for
(07:29):
common purposes, with a president at its head. Lincoln would
have said, one state has no more right to leave
the others than an English county has to declare that
it is a separate kingdom not bound by the common law.
Buchanan said no too. But he also said if a
(07:49):
state does leave, the federal government has no right to
force it to stay, which meant to stand still. You
ought not want to go, but if you do, we
have I have no right to prevent you. Buchanan's one idea, indeed,
was to let things drift. There was one great and
(08:09):
immediate difficulty. In each of the coast states of the Union,
the Federal government had armed forts. In South Carolina, there
were two important ones, Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter, with
a small garrison in each commanded by Major Anderson. South
Carolina demanded that the garrisons should be withdrawn now. To
(08:32):
withdraw the garrisons and abandon the forts was to admit
that South Carolina had a right to leave the Union
and to recognize the Southern Confederation as independent of the
federal government. To maintain the forts, more forces must be sent.
Anderson wrote to say that he was not strong enough
to hold out against an attack. Buchanan did nothing. Anderson,
(08:57):
believing that an attack was going to be made on
Fort Moultrie, which he was too weak to defend, removed
all his men to Fort Sumter. The militia of South
Carolina at once occupied Fort Moultrie. In the second week
of the new year eighteen sixty one, a government vessel,
the Star of the West, sailed into the harbor of
(09:20):
Charleston to bring provisions for Anderson. The South Carolina, having
attacked the Star of the West, fired on the United
States flag which it carried and drove it out of
the harbor. The Confederate government, led by Jefferson Davis, then
demanded that Fort Sumter should be given up to them.
(09:41):
When Andersen refused, it was blockaded by much superior forces,
and by the twelfth of April it was taken by
General Beauregard. Under these circumstances, when war was at hand,
when half the nation was ready to take up arms
against the other half, Lincoln took up the burden of office.
(10:03):
It was a burden, indeed, which no ordinary man could
have borne. Buchanan had simply looked on while rebellion was
preparing itself. For Lincoln was the task of quelling it.
But the fact of rebellion was not his greatest difficulty.
This was the disunion of the North. One section the
(10:25):
abolitionists rejoiced at the cessation of the South, we shall
no more be chained to the slave owners. Another section
thought that if the South wanted to go, why not
let them. There was as yet only a very small
section able to agree with Lincoln. Lincoln hated slavery, but
(10:45):
not slave owners. He loved the South as much as
the North. It was agony to him to know his
country divided against itself. Well, might he say, in the
speech he made on leaving his old home at Springfield, forever,
there is a task before me greater than that which
rested upon Washington. It was very natural that men who
(11:08):
had not known Lincoln should fear to have the fate
of their country at so critical a time entrusted to
a man of so small experience. But any one who
knew Lincoln felt absolute confidence in him. Years of difficulty
and disappointment, of constant struggle against every kind of obstacle
had made him what he was clear eyed to see,
(11:32):
where the right was, steadfast and unflinching to pursue it,
tender hearted, and generous to sympathize with all those who
stumbled on the way. Few people indeed understood him in
the years to come. Nearly all, at one time or another,
abused him, and distrusted him, and blamed him when things
(11:52):
went wrong. For four years he bore the whole burden
of a great responsibility. Patiently and silently. He endured disappointment
and reproach. In the end, he could say that if
Washington had made America one, he had remade it so
that it could never again be unmade. The speech he
(12:13):
made when he entered on his duties as president showed
how little bitterness there was in his heart towards the South.
He said, we are not enemies, but friends. We must
not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must
not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory,
(12:34):
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every heart
and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell
the course of the Union, when touched, as surely they
will be by the better angels of our nature. The
attack on Sumpter and its fall made war inevitable. Lincoln
(12:54):
was no Buchanan. War was horrible, civil war, war between
men of the same country, between friends, often between relations,
most horrible of all. But he could not, at whatever
cost allow the Union for which his countrymen had fought
so heroically eighty four years ago, which had stood so
(13:16):
long for such a high ideal of freedom all over
the world. He could not allow the Union to be
destroyed without fighting to preserve it. To him, the secession
of the Southern States meant something as unnatural as a
separate kingdom in Scotland would be to us, and a
kingdom based on something which we thought wholly wrong. The
(13:38):
question is, he said, whether in a free government the
minority have a right to break it up whenever they choose.
He declared that they had no such right. The whole
population of the slaveholding states was much smaller than that
of the free states, and among those states, while seven
had seceded, eight remained at least nominally in the Union.
(14:01):
And even in the seceding states themselves, there was a
party at each that was ready to remain faithful to
the Union and not prepared to take up arms against it.
They wanted war. Their attack on Fort Sumter was a
call to arms. They wanted war, They should have it.
In the long run, the North was bound to win.
(14:24):
Its population was half as great again, and its resources
as much superior. Almost the first act of Lincoln's government
was to call for seventy five thousand volunteers. The attack
upon Sumter and Lincoln's call to arms roused the North
from its apathy. Excitement grew when the seventh Massachusetts Regiment,
(14:46):
passing through Baltimore on its way to headquarters, was violently
attacked by the mob. When the Southern army, already in
the Field, captured Harper's ferry, and seized the Union arsenal
at Gosport, end of Chapter six. Recording by John Leader, Bloomington, Illinois,
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