Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life, Especially of its Springs of Action as Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War , livre ebook

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. Authority for all important statements of facts in the following pages may be found in the notes; the condensed references are expanded in the bibliography. A few controversial matters are discussed in the notes.

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Publié par	Pub One Info
Date de parution	06 novembre 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9782819934264
Langue	English

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LINCOLN
Abraham Lincoln,
An Account of His Personal Life,
Especially of Its Springs of Action as
Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War
By Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
Authority for all important statements of facts inthe following pages may be found in the notes; the condensedreferences are expanded in the bibliography. A few controversialmatters are discussed in the notes.
I am very grateful to Mr. William Roscoe Thayer forenabling me to use the manuscript diary of John Hay. Miss HelenNicolay has graciously confirmed some of the implications of theofficial biography. Lincoln's only surviving secretary, Colonel W.O. Stoddard, has given considerate aid. The curious incident ofLincoln as counsel in an action to recover slaves was mentioned tome by Professor Henry Johnson, through whose good offices it wasconfirmed and amplified by Judge John H. Marshall. Mr. Henry W.Raymond has been very tolerant of a stranger's inquiries withregard to his distinguished father. A futile attempt to discoverdocumentary remains of the Republican National Committee of 1864has made it possible, through the courtesy of Mr. Clarence B.Miller, at least to assert that there is nothing of importance inpossession of the present Committee. A search for new light onChandler drew forth generous assistance from Professor Ulrich B.Phillips, Mr. Floyd B. Streeter and Mr. G. B. Krum. The lattercaused to be examined, for this particular purpose, the Blairmanuscripts in the Burton Historical Collection. Much illuminationarose out of a systematic resurvey of the Congressional Globe, forthe war period, in which I had the stimulating companionship ofProfessor John L. Hill, reinforced by many conversations withProfessor Dixon Ryan Fox and Professor David Saville Muzzey. At theheart of the matter is the resolute criticism of Mrs. Stephensonand of a long enduring friend, President Harrison Randolph. Thetemper of the historical fraternity is such that any worker in anyfield is always under a host of incidental obligations. There isespecial propriety in my acknowledging the kindness of ProfessorAlbert Bushnell Hart, Professor James A. Woodburn, Professor HermanV. Ames, Professor St. George L. Sioussat and Professor AllenJohnson.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author and publisher make gratefulacknowledgement to Ginn and Company, Boston, for the photograph ofSt. Gaudens' Statue; to The Century Company of New York for theEarliest Portrait of Lincoln, which is from an engraving by Johnsonafter a daguerreotype in the possession of the Honorable Robert T.Lincoln; and for Lincoln and Tad, which is from the famousphotograph by Brady; to The Macmillan Company of New York for theportrait of Mrs. Lincoln and also for The Review of the Army of thePotomac, both of which were originally reproduced in Ida M.Tarbell's Life of Abraham Lincoln. For the rare and interestingportrait entitled The Last Phase of Lincoln acknowledgment is madeto Robert Bruce, Esquire, Clinton, Oneida County, New York. Thisphotograph was taken by Alexander Gardner, April 9, 1865, the glassplate of which is now in Mr. Bruce's collection.
I. THE CHILD OF THE FOREST
Of first importance in the making of the Americanpeople is that great forest which once extended its mysteriouslabyrinth from tide-water to the prairies when the earliestcolonists entered warily its sea-worn edges a portion of theEuropean race came again under a spell it had forgotten centuriesbefore, the spell of that untamed nature which created primitiveman. All the dim memories that lay deep in subconsciousness; allthe vague shadows hovering at the back of the civilized mind; thesense of encompassing natural power, the need to strugglesingle-handed against it; the danger lurking in the darkness of theforest; the brilliant treachery of the forest sunshine glintedthrough leafy secrecies; the Strange voices in its illimitablemurmur; the ghostly shimmer of its glades at night; the lovelybeauty of the great gold moon; all the thousand wondering dreamsthat evolved the elder gods, Pan, Cybele, Thor; all this wakedagain in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon penetrating the great forest.And it was intensified by the way he came, — singly, or with butwife and child, or at best in very small company, a mere handful.And the surrounding presences were not only of the spiritual world.Human enemies who were soon as well armed as he, quicker of footand eye, more perfectly noiseless in their tread even than the wildbeasts of the shadowy coverts, the ruthless Indians whom he came toexpel, these invisible presences were watching him, in a fiercesilence he knew not whence. Like as not the first signs of thatmenace which was everywhere would be the hiss of the Indian arrow,or the crack of the Indian rifle, and sharp and sudden death.
Under these conditions he learned much and forgotmuch. His deadly need made him both more and less individual thanhe had been, released him from the dictation of his fellows indaily life while it enforced relentlessly a uniform method ofself-preservation. Though the unseen world became more and morereal, the understanding of it faded. It became chiefly a matter ofemotional perception, scarcely at all a matter of philosophy. Themorals of the forest Americans were those of audacious, visionarybeings loosely hound together by a comradeship in peril. Courage,cautiousness, swiftness, endurance, faithfulness, secrecy, — thesewere the forest virtues. Dreaming, companionship, humor, — thesewere the forest luxuries.
From the first, all sorts and conditions wereensnared by that silent land, where the trails they followed, theirrifles in their hands, had been trodden hard generation aftergeneration by the feet of the Indian warriors. The best and theworst of England went into that illimitable resolvent, lostthemselves, found themselves, and issued from its shadows, or theirchildren did, changed both for good and ill, Americans. Meanwhilethe great forest, during two hundred years, was slowly vanishing.This parent of a new people gave its life to its offspring andpassed away. In the early nineteenth century it had witheredbackward far from the coast; had lost its identity all along thenorth end of the eastern mountains; had frayed out toward thesunset into lingering tentacles, into broken minor forests, intoshreds and patches.
Curiously, by a queer sort of natural selection, itspeople had congregated into life communities not all of onepattern. There were places as early as the beginning of the centurywhere distinction had appeared. At other places life was as rudeand rough as could be imagined. There were innumerable farms thatwere still mere “clearings, ” walled by the forest. But there wereother regions where for many a mile the timber had been hewn away,had given place to a ragged continuity of farmland. In such regionsespecially if the poorer elements of the forest, spirituallyspeaking, had drifted thither— the straggling villages which hadappeared were but groups of log cabins huddled along a fewneglected lanes. In central Kentucky, a poor new village wasElizabethtown, unkempt, chokingly dusty in the dry weather, withmuddy streams instead of streets during the rains, a stench ofpig-sties at the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking outwardglimpses of a lovely meadow land.
At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, acarpenter, also his niece Nancy Hanks. Poor people they were, ofthe sort that had been sucked into the forest in their weakness, orhad been pushed into it by a social pressure they could not resist;not the sort that had grimly adventured its perils or gaily courtedits lure. Their source was Virginia. They were of a thriftless,unstable class; that vagrant peasantry which had drifted westwardto avoid competition with slave labor. The niece, Nancy, has beenreputed illegitimate. And though tradition derives her from thepredatory amour of an aristocrat, there is nothing to sustain thetale except her own appearance. She had a bearing, a cast offeature, a tone, that seemed to hint at higher social origins thanthose of her Hanks relatives. She had a little schooling; was of apious and emotional turn of mind; enjoyed those amazing “revivals”which now and then gave an outlet to the pent-up religiosity of thevillage; and she was almost handsome. (1)
History has preserved no clue why this girl who wasrather the best of her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprenticeof her uncle's, Thomas Lincoln, whose name in the forest wasspelled “Linkhorn. ” He was a shiftless fellow, never succeeding atanything, who could neither read nor write. At the time of hisbirth, twenty-eight years before, his parents— drifting, roamingpeople, struggling with poverty— were dwellers in the Virginiamountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an Indian— one of the fewpositive acts attributed to him— and his father had been killed byIndians. There was a “vague tradition” that his grandfather hadbeen a Pennsylvania Quaker who had wandered southward through theforest mountains. The tradition angered him. Though he appears tohave had little enough— at least in later years— of the fierceindependence of the forest, he resented a Quaker ancestry as aninsult. He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal ofgenealogists would track his descent until they had linked him witha lost member of a distinguished Puritan family, a certain MordecaiLincoln who removed to New Jersey, whose descendants becamewanderers of the forest and sank speedily to the bottom of thesocial scale, retaining not the slightest memory of their NewEngland origin. (2) Even in the worst of the forest villages, fewcouples started married life in less auspicious circumstances thandid Nancy and Thomas. Their home in one of the alleys ofElizabethtown was a shanty fourteen feet square. (3) Very soonafter marriage, shiftless Thomas gave up carpentering and took tofarming. Land could be had almost anywhere for almost nothing thosedays, and Thomas got a farm on credit near where now standsHodg