in the writing of opposing counsel requesting the court to instruct the jury that the passage from Exodus read by Lincoln to the jury was not the law in the case on trial. The instruction was given. "Lincoln's speeches are filled with biblical references; hardly one of his public utterances or great state papers from the time he was elected president until his death but has a quotation from the Bible or a reference to the fact that God rules in the affairs of nations." "Men who could meet and cope on equal terms with the great lawyers of Illinois of their time as did Lincoln and Douglas," says Carter, "must have been more than ordinary lawyers. Among the members of that bar were six future United States Senators, eight future members of Congress, a future Cabinet minister, and not less than six who were to be judges of the Supreme Court of the State, to say nothing of many others distinguished in other walks of life." MRS. DOUGLAS' DEVOTION TO THE UNION In the Louisville Journal of December 20th, 1861, as quoted in Putnam's "Rebellion Record," the following anecdote of Mrs. Douglas is related. "Very few people indeed," runs the account, "have been placed in a more trying position and sacrificed more for the sake of the Union than has Mrs. Douglas. She has persistently refused to entertain the proposition forwarded to her by a special messenger under a flag of truce from the Governor of North Carolina, asking that the two sons of the late Senator Douglas be sent South to save their extensive estates in Mississippi from confiscation. If she refused, a large property would be taken from the children, and, in her present reduced circumstances, they may thereby eventually be placed in straitened circumstances. Here, then, was an appeal made directly to her tender regard for them, which, if she should refuse, would work disastrously against them in after years. "But her answer was worthy of herself and of her late distinguished husband. If the rebels wish to make war upon defenseless children, and take away the all of little orphan boys, it must be so; but she could not for an instant think of surrendering them to the enemies of their country and of their father. His last words were, "Tell them to obey the Constitution and the laws of the country,' and Mrs. Douglas will not make herself the instrument of disobeying his dying injunction. The children, she says, belong to Illinois, and must remain in the North. Illinois and the North, we take it, will see to it that they are not sufferers by the devotedness and patriotism of their mother.” FINAL RESTING PLACE OF DOUGLAS The remains of Senator Douglas are in Chicago, and rest in a marble sarcophagus placed within a crypt under a lofty monument of granite. Surmounting the shaft is a bronze statue of the statesman, the total height to the top of the statue being ninety-six feet. Upon the sarcophagus is an inscription giving the dates of his birth and death, and the words of his last message. The monument is situated on rising ground, overlooking the lake, and is surrounded by an ample lawn space adjoining the right-of-way of the Illinois Central railroad, at Thirty-fifth street. It was completed in 1878 at a cost of about one hundred thousand dollars, the principal share of which having been borne by the state of Illinois. CHAPTER XXV EVENTS PRIOR TO LINCOLN'S NOMINATION OF THE COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH-QUOTATIONS FROM THE SPEECH-COMMENTS THE COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH HE address by Mr. Lincoln at the Cooper Institute in New York was delivered on the evening of February 27th, 1860. Mr. Lincoln had been invited by certain of the Republican leaders in New York, through Mr. Charles C. Nott, a representative of the Committee of the Young Men's Republican Union, "to deliver one of a series of addresses which had been planned to make clear to the voters the purposes and the foundations of the new party. His name had become known to the Republicans of the East through the debates with Douglas. It was recognized that Lincoln had taken the highest ground in regard to the principles of the new party, and that his counsels should prove of practical service in the shaping of the policy of the Presidential campaign." The meeting was presided over by William Cullen Bryant, and a number of the most prominent citizens of New York were present, among them Horace Greeley. In the Tribune the next morning Greeley said, "No man ever made such an impression in his first appeal to a New York audience." Greeley was emphatic in his appreciation of the address, "it was the ablest, the greatest, the wisest speech that had yet been made; it would reassure the conservative Northerner, it was conclusive in its argument, and would assure the overthrow of Douglas." The peroration of the speech is often quoted, and is given here as an example of Lincoln's oratory. "Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man— -such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care-such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance-such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. "Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Perhaps no appeal, uttered from the political platform in those stirring times, breathed a loftier tone or carried convictions so strong as this memorable speech. "As I read the concluding pages of that speech," says Horace White, "the conflict of opinion that preceded the conflict of arms, then sweeping upon the country like an approaching solar eclipse, seemed prefigured like a chapter of the Book of Fate." RHETORICAL FEATURES OF THE ADDRESS On the morning following the delivery of the Cooper Institute speech Mr. Lincoln met Rev. John P. Gulliver of Norwich, Connecticut, on a train leaving the city. Mr. Gulliver had listened to the speech the evening before, and the two men presently became engaged in conversation. Mr. Gulliver afterwards became a resident of Chicago and was pastor of the New England Congregational church on the North Side, from 1865 to 1868,—and president of Knox College at Galesburg for four years following. Mr. Gulliver remarked to Mr. Lincoln that he thought the speech was the most remarkable one he had ever heard. "I learned more of the art of public speaking last evening," said he, "than I could from a whole course of lectures on rhetoric." "I should like very much to know," replied Mr. Lincoln, "what it was in my speech which you thought so remarkable." Mr. Gulliver's answer was, "The clearness of your statements, the unanswerable style of your reasoning, and, especially, your illustrations, which were romance and pathos and fun and logic all welded together." He followed this with a further exposition of the peculiar power of the address. Mr. Lincoln replied, "I am much obliged to you for this. I have been wishing for a long time to find some one who would make this analysis for me. It throws light on a subject which has been dark to me. I can understand very readily how such a power as you have ascribed to me will account for the effect which seems to be produced by my speeches. I hope you have not been too flattering in your estimate. Certainly I have had a most wonderful success for a man of my limited education." When they were about to separate Mr. Gulliver said to him, "You have become, by the controversy with Mr. Douglas, one of our leaders in this great struggle with slavery, which is undoubtedly the struggle of the nation and the age. What I would like to say is this, and I say it with a full heart: Be true to your principles, and we will be true to you, and God will be true to us all." Mr. Lincoln was touched by the minister's earnestness, and taking his hand in both his own, he exclaimed, "I say amen to that! amen to that!" From New York he went to New England in order to visit his son Robert, then a student in the Phillips Academy, at Exeter, New Hampshire. He made speeches at various points. Putnam quotes from a letter written by him to his wife, dated March 4th, 1860. "I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had foreseen it, I think I would not have come East at all. The speech at New York, being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already seen all my ideas in print." COMMENTS ON THE SPEECH In the Century Magazine for July, 1891, an address by Horace Greeley was printed, which had not, for some reason, previously been published. In this address Mr. Greeley gives his estimate of Lincoln, and, in regard to the great speech at the Cooper Institute, he said: "I do not hesitate to pronounce Mr. Lincoln's speech at Cooper Institute, New York, in the spring of 1860, the very best political address to which I ever listened—and I have heard some of Webster's grandest. As a literary effort, it would not, of course, bear comparison with many of Webster's speeches; but regarded simply as an effort to convince the largest possible number that they ought to be on the speaker's side, not on the other, I do not hesitate to pronounce it unsurpassed." Mr. Lincoln, he said, was "the foremost convincer of his day-the one who could do his cause more good and less harm by a speech than any other living man." In a reprint of the speech, the full text of which is given in George Haven Putnam's "Abraham Lincoln," the following extract from the preface, prepared by the Young Men's Republican Union, appears: "The address is characterized by wisdom, truthfulness and learning. From the first line to the last, from his premises to his conclusion, the speaker travels with a swift, unerring directness that no logician has ever excelled. His argument is complete and is presented without the affectation of learning, and without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A single simple sentence contains . a chapter of history that has taken days of labor to verify, and that must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire. The reader may take up this pamphlet, but he will leave it as a historical treatise-brief, complete, perfect, sound, impartial truth-which will serve the time and the occasion that called it forth, and which will be esteemed hereafter no less for its unpretending modesty than for its intrinsic worth." Mr. Lincoln's speech had indeed cost him much labor in its preparation. No former effort had required so much time and thought as this one had done. "The historical study which it involved," says Holland, "study that led into unexplored fields, and fields very difficult of exploration, must have been very great; but it was intimate and complete. Gentlemen who afterwards engaged in preparing the speech for circulation as a campaign document were much surprised by the amount of research that it required to be able to make the speech, and were very much wearied with the work of verifying its historical statements in detail. They were weeks in finding the works consulted by him." Herndon says that Mr. Lincoln obtained most of the facts of his Cooper Institute speech from Elliott's "Debates on the Federal Constitution." When he went to Washington, early in 1861, he gave Herndon a set of six volumes of this work. While in New York, Mr. Lincoln was photographed by Brady, whose portraits of the distinguished men of that time have become famous. It was a frequent remark of Lincoln's that this portrait and the Cooper Institute speech made him president. LAST APPEARANCE IN COURT One of the last cases in which Mr. Lincoln was engaged as a lawyer was that known as the "Sand Bar" case. The title of the case was "W. S. Johnston vs. William Jones and S. Marsh, Ejectment." Mr. Lincoln was engaged as one of the counsel for the defendants. In the Chicago Press and Tribune of April 5th, 1860, the case is referred to as "one of the most notable trials in the annals of our courts." The contest was 'as to title to the valuable accretions on the lake shore, north of the pier," the property directly and indirectly at issue being valued at over half a million of dollars. This case was tried before Judge Thomas Drummond in the United States District Court, and was the fourth time it had been before the courts, this time ending, after a two weeks' trial, in a verdict for the defendants. The question submitted to the jury was "whether the plaintiff had a water line on the lake on October 22d, 1835, the date of the deed." The court held its sessions in the "Larmon Block," on the northeast corner of Clark and Washington streets. It was during the progress of this case that the opposing counsel asked Colonel John H. Kinzie (son of Chicago's original settler, John Kinzie), "How long he had resided in Chicago?" when Mr. Lincoln interposed saying, "I believe he is 'common law' here, as one who dates back to the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." MR. LINCOLN'S VISIT TO WAUKEGAN While Mr. Lincoln was in Chicago he received invitations to speak on frequent occasions. The citizens of Waukegan had requested his presence there and we find an announcement in the Chicago Press and Tribune for Monday, April 2, 1860, as follows: "At the earnest solicitation of citizens of Lake County, Mr. Lincoln, who is at present engaged here in the United States District Court, will speak on political topics at Waukegan this evening. The announcement will of course bring together one of the largest crowds that Waukegan can furnish.” The Waukegan Weekly Gazette, in its issue of April 7, 1860, gives this account of what happened on the occasion of Mr. Lincoln's visit to that place. |