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Patterson, James W.
Life and character of Abraham Lincoln.
Concord ,N.H., 1865

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Gift of
STUART W. JACKSON
Yale 1898

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MEMORIAL ADDRESS

LIFE A.]Srr> OH^RA-OTER

ABEAHAM LINCOLN,

DELIVERED AT

CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE, JUNE 1, 1865,

AT THE BEQUEST OF THE STATE AUTHORITIES,

BY HON. JAMES ¥. PATTERSON.

CONCORD:
PRINTED BY COGSWELL & STUKTEVANT.
1865.

Cc. £;2,,

?

P 2.7 '^

STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE,
ExECDTiTE Department, Concord.
At a meeting of the Governor and Council, held at the
Council Chamber, June 7, 1865, the following resolution was
unanimously passed :
Resolved, That in behalf of the State, we tender to Hon.
James W. Patterson our most sincere thanks for the eloquent
Memorial Address upon the life and character of Abraham
Lincoln, delivered in this city upon the occasion of the late
National Fast, and that the Secretary of State be requested to
solicit a copy for publication. Attest :
B. Gerrish, Jr., Secretary of State..

MEMORIAL ADDRESS.

In glad compliance with the proclamation of the public
authorities, the people of the commonwealth have rested to-day
from their ordinary vocations and have gathered here at the
Capital of the State, to represent the universal sorrow, and pay
a formal but heartfelt tribute of grief and respect to the memory
of our murdered chief magistrate, who, like Israel's great
leader, fell on the mount of vision, " while yet his eye was not
dim, nor his natural force abated."
The irrepressible sorrow of our hearts prompts to the filial
duty which, as a nation, we could not innocently neglect.
It is the Christian apotheosis which a bereaved people may
give to ^ ruler, the grand results of whose life, and the
masculine beauty of whose character, have entitled him to the
honor of father of the reestablished and regenerated republic.
Treason, the cowardly offspring of slavery, in dalliance with
political ambition, returning with reeking hands from the
slaughter of three hundred thousand of our innocent children,
and burning with the shame of defeat, has assassinated the
foremost, the noblest and the best of our great men, and has
thereby illustrated to the shocked and startled nations of the
world the inherent wrong of oppression and the unutterable
preciousness of liberty.
The time, too, was ominous and suggestive. The horrid
tragedy, as if providentially designed to convict the carping
royalists and the baffled liberals of Europe of the strength and
resources of popular governments, was suffered to occur at one
of those hazardous turns in the tide of public affairs, when,
among a people not possessed of the privileges nor accustomed

to the responsibilities of self-government, nor yet disciplined to
calm self-reliance in the transitions of power, it would have
sounded the tocsin of a fearful struggle for revolution. Doubt
and anxiety had given place to confidence and exultation in
the crushing defeats which loyalty had inflicted upon the forces
of treason. The integrity of the Union, the destruction
of slavery, and the restoration of the authority of government
had been assured in the surrender of the rebel army by its
able commander-in-chief; the carnage and desolations, the
cruelties and sufferings of the fratricidal strife which had
haunted the sensibilities of that heart which throbbed only for
the good of mankind, had begun to be dissipated by the joyous
visions of returning peace and prosperity ; but the attempt to
soothe the wounded pride, to renew the alienated affections,
and to restore the ruptured allegiance of a brave but conquered
people, to gather up the broken threads and weave anew the
tangled web of political organization, had not yet been made.
In that moment of fearful respite, he who had been prepared
for his exalted career by the privations and hardships of a life
of stern realities ; he who had been called from obscurity to his
place of preeminent difficulty and glory, was smitten down
by the hand of an audacious trifler, still playing the role which
his masters had set for him in the tragedy of treason.
When the voice of calumny and detraction had beeh stifled
by the prestige of success; when all hearts turned to him with
hope and love ; while yet the dust was upon his garments which
our victorious legions had raised in the capital of rebellion, and
the thanksgivings of a disenthralled people were ringing in his
ears ; on the very day on which the heroic Anderson unfurled
above the crumbled walls of Sumpter the flag first struck by
the bolts of treason, and which he had pronounced the happiest
of his official hfe, and in the place of public recreation whither
he had reluctantly gone to greet and receive the congratulations
of his countrymen, Abraham Lincoln passed, without warning
and without pain, from the triumph and plenitude of earthly
power to the rewards which eye hath not seen nor ear heard
The frightful message flew from lake to gulf, from' ocean

to ocean, and the nation stood still, mute with horror, and
shuddering with an indefinable dread of undeveloped crimes in
the womb of baffled hate.
But the blindness of organized villainy defeated its purposes
of blood, and with but one, thc most precious victim, set the
black ineffaceable seal of infamy upon this gigantic effort to
establish government upon a national crime.
The vile assassin, summoned to confront his victim at that
bar where " The action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled
Even to the teeth and forehead of our fault
To give in evidence,"
Perished as he by the bullet, and found an unknown grave,
where the footstep of affection shall never press, and while yet
the honored remains of our great chief were slowly moving to
their rest amid the solemn pageantry of universal grief.
God has here vindicated the rights of man as never before in
history, and foreshadowed the doom of all institutions resting
upon a subjugated race, though the humblest in the scale
of intelligent beings. It would be wiser and safer to build
cities upon the shaking roof of a volcano.
The hour of dread passed by, and then came the remem
brance of the unfaltering courage, the steadfast purpose, the
calm wisdom, the saintly charity, and the pious trust of the
martyred statesman in the people and in God ; and with it
came also a sense of irreparable loss, of disappointed hopes and
of crushed affections. The voice of song and merriment ceased,
the thronged city became still at noonday, the farthest hamlet
upon the borders put on the emblems of deep mourning, and
strong men, unaccustomed to tears, wept in the streets like
childhood in its sorrow. The deep currents of national anguish,
5iccumulated and restrained during the perilous years of his
administration, now seemed to pour together and unite all the
bitterness of multiplied bereavement over the lamented repre
sentative of the mighty host of heroic dead, fallen on a thousand
battle-fields and in the rebel charnel-houses of famine.

The moral attributes of Abraham Lincoln had slowly trans
figured to the public imagination his very person, so that when
he died that gaunt and ungainly figure left no peer in manly
beauty ; on no other countenance did the light of intellect and
the charms of many virtues blend so sweetly as on his sad and
wrinkled face. And when they bore him forth from the capitol,
with all the touching insignia of civil and military honors, to his
final rest in the great valley, history gives no record of the
thronging of such multitudes to pay court and homage to king
or conqueror as came voluntarily from city and country to lay
their tribute of respect upon the bier of this peasant ruler,
passing to his grave amid the scenes and friends of his early
home, where, through poverty and toil and honest merit, he had
risen to the proud preeminence of civil power, and to the yet
loftier sphere of confidence and affection in the hearts of his
countrymen. To that tomb, as to Mount Vernon, pilgrims from distant
States, and strangers from other climes, will hereafter come
to drink in the inspiration and the strength that goes forth from
the resting-place of one who sealed a life of unselfish and un
remitting toil in the cause of constitutional liberty and social
enfranchisement with his blood.
Here I would gladly close this discourse, for I am oppressed
with a consciousness of the impotency of speech to utter the
overwhelming sense of bereavement with which the nation has
been smitten. The public mind, relieved of the heavy burdens
of war, and lifted to an ecstasy of joy by the final triumph long
deferred ; the loyal heart, maddened by the fiendish work of
treason, and depressed by doubt and dread to the verge of
despair, can find no adequate expression in the language of
panegyric, of the profound and diverse emotions raised by the
strange events which like battling winds have swept these months
of Spring. The genius of history has crowded years into days
in this tragedy of civil life, and evoked a storm of passion
before which the spirit of ^schylus or Shakspeare would have
stood paralyzed and speechless.
He who would add anything to the wealth of eulogium which

9
has already been lavished upon the departed, should " unsphere
the spirit of Plato," and, divesting himself of the passions and
prejudices of the revolutionary epoch, apply to the analysis of
his character and polity the tests of a sound political philosophy,
reaching to the interests of after generations and the responsi-
bihties of Hfe which lie beyond the plain of technical politics.
But this is the work of history. Time alone has the power to
distinguish between what is essential and what is accidental ; to
remove the scaffolding and bring out simple and salient the
additions which we have made to the temple of our liberties. It
is reserved to our children to cast down our false gods, though
they may be left to set up other divinities less worthy of
adoration. Sufficient for this time are the lessons of that remarkable
career, ascending through slow gradations from obscure penury
to what it is not premature to pronounce the seat of largest
influence and honor among the civil magistracies of Christian
nations. Such a life is a positive and imperishable power added
to the moral forces of the world. That whole circle of civic and
private virtues which crown his memory have received a fresh
beauty from the baptism of his martyr blood. Hereafter, young
men, moved by the impulses of an honorable ambition, and
struggling upward against poverty and the barriers of social
distinctions, will be inspired with new aspirations and more
persistent exertions by the lofty achievements and more than
royal preeminence reached by our fallen chief. They will learn,
too, that the surest path to the attainment of the noblest prizes
among a free and intelligent people is not in the mazy labyrinth
through which low cunning, corrupting as it moves, worms its
way by bribery and dishonest arts into the places of power, but
on the open highway where patriotism, intelligent labor and real
merit perform their daily duty.
Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky in 1809, was the son
of poor parents, who removed from the State in the eighth year
of his age, to Indiana, in order to place their children where the
institution of slavery could not oppose an insuperable obstacle to
their advancement in life. There, in a log hut, on the borders

10
of civilization, and beyond its social and educational privileges,
" the child grew and waxed strong in spirit" till the day of his
majority. No extraordinary event, if we except a voyage to
New Orleans on a flat-boat, at the age of nineteen, with a
companion of his own age, at this period of his life interrupted
his ordinary labors as a backwoodsman. Taught to read by
his pious mother, who was taken from him when but a boy of
ten years, he read and pondered as he toiled, his narrow library
comprising Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, ^sop's Fables, and
the lives of Clay and Washington. And these, more than all
the studies of his subsequent life, moulded his character and
determined his modes of thought and style of expression. They
were reproduced in the pohcy and productions of his public
life. In 1830, at the age of twenty-one, he removed with his father
to lUinois. There, as a hired workman, as a captain in the
Black Hawk war, as a student at law and a member of the
legislature, he passed seven years of splendid preparation in the
hard school which Providence had set for the perfecting of its
chosen instrument.
Poverty brought labor and habits of industry ; privations gave
a broad experience and sympathy with those who eat bread in
the sweat of their brows ; the irrepressible impulses of a mind
conscious of strength induced study and thought. These were
the sources of that intelligence, that tender sensibility to the
misfortunes and sorrows of the humblest citizen, and that large
executive ability which characterized his subsequent career.
In 1837 he commenced the practice of law in Springfield,
and soon won an enviable reputation as a lawyer of large ability
and unquestioned integrity. Nine years later he was elected a
Representative in Congress, where he served but a single term.
There he was not forth-putting, nor a frequent speaker, but
faithful to his convictions and earnest in the discharge of duty.
It was not however until 1858, in his noted struggle with- Judge
Douglas for the Senate, that he achieved a national reputation
as an able and eloquent speaker. That series of debates, and
two or three speeches made subsequently, in as many different

11
States, unquestionably secured his nomination to the Presidency
in 1860. The clearness of his conceptions, the transparent
honesty and homely strength with which he expressed his ideas,
made a deep and favorable impression upon the public mind.
The paramount theme of discussion in the debate between the
two candidates was one or more of the Protean forms of the
question of slavery, which for nearly half a century had vexed
our domestic politics. Mr. Lincoln was a thorough master of
the subject. He had inherited a painful sense of its wrongs and
crushing power ; had watched its aggressions upon free terri
tory, and the platform of principles underlying our republican
instiisitions ; had profoundly studied its history, its nature, and
its insidious purposes.
In Congress, and in the senatorial canvass, as in his first
inaugural, he conceded that slavery in the States was an institu
tion resting upon State rights, with which the general government
in time of peace had no power to interfere without a change of
the constitution. But he held that Freedom was National, and
that it was therefore the duty of Congress to abolish slavery in
the District of Columbia, and to exclude it from all the public
territory. He supported every measure before the House
tending to such a result, and opposed the arrogant claims
introduced upon the assumption that slavery was national.
This, in brief, is the simple story of his life until, escaping
the plot which treason had laid for his assassination, and stand
ing at the Capitol, he took the solemn oath, in the presence of
God and his assembled countrymen, to " preserve, protect and
defend the Constitution of the United States," and made an
earnest and touching appeal to the disaffected to pause " before
entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national
fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes." " We
are not enemies," he says, " but friends. We must not be
enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break
our bonds of affection. The mystic chord of memory, stretch
ing from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living
heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the
chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will
be, by the better angels of our nation."

12
Martyred patriot ! That oath has been redeemed by thine
own precious blood, and the chorus of the Union again swells,
but it is to the mystic chord of memories stretching from fresh
battle-fields and patriot graves to the living hearts and hearth
stones of this broad land, and touched, not by angels in the
bosom of traitors, but by the angels of liberty revisiting their
desolate homes, or marching jubilant, though viewless, in the
thinned but triumphant ranks from which thfiy fell in the great
struggle for a free government.
Of the events in the crowded administration of the late chief
magistrate, from the commencement of the war till the surrender
of Lee, I need not speak. All the thrilling details and mo
mentous issues of the mighty struggle for the success of popular
institutions have passed into history, and are to-day as familiar to
the children of the land as household words. All unaccustomed
as he was to official responsibility and to the conduct of great
public affairs, it would be idle to deny that experienced states
men felt some solicitude, perhaps distrust, as they perceived the
precursors of an impending revolution. Would his hand be
strong and skillful ? Would his mind be calm and clear,
and his voice steady when the tempest should strike and drive
the straining ship amid perils unmarked by chart, unseen by
pilot's eye ? It was a fearful hour ; it was the death-like
stillness which precedes the rock and thunder of the storm, and
the pulse of the nation could be heard to beat. Great principles
of government and the most precious interests of humanity
were at stake. Mr. Lincoln saw it all, felt it all. He did not
court the danger with the rashness of an imbecile, but, with the
clear prophetic vision of a great mind, shrunk from the fearful
hazard. Call to mind his familiar, but touching farewell to his old
neighbors at Springfield, and you will be impressed with the
self-distrust and childlike reliance upon God with which he
went forth to his work. " A duty devolves upon me," he said,
« which is perhaps greater than that which has devolved upon
any other man since the days of Washington. He never could
have succeeded except for the aid of Divine Providence, upon

13
which he at all times relied. I feel that I cannot succeed
without the same divine aid which sustained him, and on the
same almighty being I place my reliance for support, and I hope
you, my friends, will all pray that I may receive that divine
assistance without which I cannot succeed, but with which success
is certain. Again I bid you all an affectionate farewell."
How painful and yet how beautiful are those simple words of
leave-taking. His coming martyrdom seems to have cast its
shadow upon his spirit ; but his appointed work was more than
life, and he gave himself to it without reservation. Time,
thought, labor, and life itself, all were consecrated to the
salvation of his country.
He had not been disciplined by long experience in public life ;
possessed but little knowledge of political philosophy ; was not
familiar with the workings of different governmental systems as
illustrated in history, and yet what Herculean labors he had to
perform ; what questions of jurisdiction and pohtical expediency
to settle.
An army and navy were to be created, maintained and directed
in active service upon a colossal scale and over vast areas. A
depleted treasury was to be made to meet the fabulous expendi
tures of the government through years of destructive war, by
diverting capital from the remunerative channels of productive
industry. The extent and nature of the war powers conferred
by the constitution upon the executive ; how far and in what
respects for the preservation and permanent establishment of
the constitution and personal liberty he might supersede civil
authority by the more summary processes of military law, these,
and other complicated problems, hitherto undetermined in our
national experience, were presented to the cabinet of President
Lincoln for solution at the beginning of his administration. One
by one the tasks were done ; one by one the Gordian knots were
untied or cut.
It would not be just, if it were not beyond human accomplish
ment, to concede to the President the exclusive honor of such
vast achievements. Statesmen of the best abiUty and largest
experience, whose names will hereafter be enrolled with Hamil-

14
ton's and Webster's, were among his advisers. To Seward, and
Chase, and Stanton, should be given largely the glory justly due
to the splendid success of their respective departments. Yet
upon all Mr. Lincoln exercised his right of revision and
. interposed his independent judgment. The policy of a master
mind, distinct and unmistakable, was impressed upon his entire
administration. It was unique and consistent, for he was never subordinated
to his ministers, though inferior to some of them in extent of
reading and an actual knowledge of public affairs. The action
of the government upon the slavery question was all his own.
' There he had no superiors. He did not allow subordinates to
bring the affairs of the country into inextricable confusion by an
arrogant assumption of his appropriate duties and by substituting
emancipation in place of the integrity of the government as the
end of the war, but marked with unerring sagacity the ebb and
flow of public feeling, and so timed his action as to secure the
strength of the current to bear the government safely into the
haven of peace rather than a political aspirant into the place of
power. He knew the history of Slavery, he knew its nature,
and treated it with the calm wisdom of a statesman. So
posterity will decide.
Prescient of the costly penalty of blood and treasure which
the Nemesis of slavery would exact, he entered upon the war
with a reluctance which foreign prejudice, since swift to condemn
his efficiency, stigmatized as incapacity and pusillanimity, and
which even staggered the faith of personal friendship, but when
the Janus gates were opened, he walked " the burning marl "
as proudly as a king, and moved to his object with an energy of
will as inflexible as fate.
Mr. Lincoln's administration, burdened with a multitude and
magnitude of interests without a parallel, was a complete success.
From its beginning to its close, he increased in statesmanship
and in favor with men.
He reached a decision upon great questions with a hesitation
and caution, which to minds committed to special lines of policy
and of more enthusiastic temperament, seemed at first to indicate

15
weakness and vacillation. But it was soon discovered that his
thought swept too wide a field to move rapidly. His sense of
responsibility prompted to original investigation to supply the
defects of experience and observation. He had not been
educated to seek conclusions through logical forms and scholastic
subtleties, and hence his intellect, unfettered by precedents and
the authority of great names, moved to its results by ways
original and peculiar to himself. He reasoned by illustrations
and used anecdotes for syllogisms. Into whatever his wit was
cast it gave a precipitate of wisdom, and when men have done
laughing at his stories they will be used as aphorisms. His
dependent frontier life had given to him mental resources and a
fertility of invention which more liberal privileges and an
affluent fortune might never have developed. He had been
trained for fifty years in the school of Providence for a work
which, if we properly garner the fruits of the revolution, can
never be repeated in our history.
I am not sure that it was not fortunate for Mr. Lincoln's
historic reputation that he was elevated to power at a time when
the great questions of state were as new to men famiUar with
statecraft from boyhood as to himself; when the knottiest
problems for administrative skill lay outside of the sphere of
specific constitutional powers and of previous experience, and
were to be solved by principles drawn from the region of
natural law. Here his masculine good sense, his intuitive
sagacity and reverent love of justice would give him an advan
tage which narrower but more learned minds could not possess.
Precedents, professional technicalities and habits of mind
sometimes mislead where the un trammeled intellect runs naturally
in the way of truth.
We do not claim for Mr. Lincoln the highest order of in
tellectual greatness. He was great as a practical man — the
most perfect embodiment and exponent of the American mind
in our time.
Great thinkers, like Bacon and Montesquieu, ante-date revo
lutions and scatter seeds which may not bear fruit for a century.
They are the prophets of new dispensations and create literature

16
and public opinion. But it is the work of great actors to realize
in laws and institutions the ideas of great thinkers.
They can not be much in advance of their time, because the
enthusiasm and strength of the masses are the forces by which
they accomplish their work. Let them but for once become
infatuated with the conceit of self-power, and alienate popular
confidence, and their mission is at an end. They are hurled
from power and " Drop from the zenith like a falling star
On Lemnos the .aigean isle."
The test of a great actor is his ability to comprehend clearly
the ideas to be put into deeds, and to secure the cordial coopera
tion of those for whom and by whom his life-work is done. He
must have definite and positive views as to how and when things
are to be done ; must make his own the paramount will, and
impress his character in an ever widening circle upon the men
and events that revolve about him as their centre of force.
Brought to this standard, Mr. Lincoln stood in the fore-front of
great actors.
Undoubtedly he borrows something of greatness from his
position. His life was fortunate, and to him, I can but think,
his death, too, was fortunate. Living and dying, he took the
tide in his affairs at its ebb. He was the central figure of an
era destined to correct European views as to the strength of
popular institutions, and to effect great changes in the structure
of society. " Let America succeed," Thomas Carlyle is reported
to have said, and " England goes to Democracy by express-
train." European statesmen, with some noble exceptions, like Bright
and Cobden, to be held in perpetual remembrance in our
Pantheon of great names, have persistently declared the republic
too weak for a permanent or desirable form of government.
European writers, with a sublime assurance, have set forth in
oracular and lachrymose phrase the manner and the horrors of
our downfall. By such teachings, and the excess of liberty, a
reaction towards absolutism had been effected.

17
But here at last, on a fair field, and in its most obstinate
encounter, organized oppression has been baffled and prostrated
by the armies of a free people, and its petted representative,
whom even the liberal minded Gladstone pronounced the founder
of " a nation," a fugitive and a coward, has been dragged from
the crinoline within which he had taken sanctuary, to meet
the doom of a perjured traitor.
A people exercising the right of self-government, have shown
themselves sufficiently wise and steadfast to sustain the govern
ment in prosecuting a wasting and bloody war, and during the
fiery struggle have maintained the rights of persons and property
inviolate. In the hour of triumph, and of unparalleled provocar
tion, smothering the instinctive desire for revenge and humilia
tion, they have returned quietly to the peaceful industries of
life, there to guard with sleepless vigilance against any encroach
ments upon the domain of personal liberty.
The lesson cannot be lost, and Abraham Lincoln will be
honored by a grateful posterity as the directing and repre
sentative mind in the pregnant epoch of history.
But his was not merely the greatness of action or accident.
There are passages not a few in his published speeches and
state papers, as profound and comprehensive in their philosophy,
as terse and strikingly beautiful in their expression, as .any ever
spoken by Burke. There is nothing in the funeral oration
of Pericles which will surpass in sublimity and condensation
of thought, or in the touching pathos of its eloquence, the few
simple periods pronounced by him over our heroic dead at
Gettysburg. I seem to see that care-worn face, and to feel the
power of those loving eyes, which anticipate his utterance
of the. imperishable words :
"But in a larger sense we cannot cledicate, we cannot con
secrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above
our power to add or detract. The world will little note or long
remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they
did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here
to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus
2

18
far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated
to the great task remaining before us ; that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they
gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that this
nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, and for the people,
shall not perish from the earth."
His last inaugural, too, affects you like the benediction of a
sainted father. It is the impressive song of the great lawgiver
ere he goes up upon Nebo to die.
The temperament of the late President singularly fitted him
for the superlative perplexities and hardships of his exalted
station. The pressure of business, the untimely importunities
of friends, and the malignant opposition of enemies, were
incessant, but he was never peevish. Patient and self-poised,
he gave an attentive hearing to all, and then calmly and with
deliberation decided upon measures of moment. He listened
with a tender heart and a helping hand to the story of the
despised black and the child of misfortune ; to the wounded
soldier, and those made widows and orphans by the war.
None could detect by word or manner that he was conscious
of personal or official superiority to the humblest who approached
him, and yet he assumed the responsibihties and discharged
the difficult and often delicate functions of his position as head
of a great government with a natural ease and propriety that
would have become a " prince to the manor born."
He was not a scholar nor a pedant ; he was not a courtier
nor a clown ; he was not a saint nor a hypocrite ; but he
was just what he was, a plain, honest, earnest, intelligent
Christian man, of the largest mould. He desired and had no
need to be anything more.
They called him honest Abe. But is that so rare a virtue,
even amonng pubhc men, as to be made a characteristic
distinction ? He had not been educated in the Machiavelian
school of statecraft, where frauds upon the pubhc treasury and
official bribes are classed as peccadiloes, and where deceit and

19
subterfuge, cunning and detraction are set down as political
necessities, if not essential virtues, in a public functionary.
But in this he did not stand alone. The honesty of Lincoln
was something more. Like the justice of Aristides, it reached
the heart, and gave him the life of a pure and honorable
citizen, who left no stain upon his reputation. It applied the
virtues of the Decalogue to the conduct of national and inter
national affairs as fully as to the intercourse of private life.
It did more than this, it shaped his political poUcy and
made him incorruptible and steadfast in the advocacy and
maintenance of his conscientious convictions of duty.
As in Washington, so in Lincoln, there . was a remarkable
blending of intellectual and spiritual qualities which imparted
to his character something of the attributes of a father and
sage. Deep and tender affections tempered the severity of pure
intellect, and the reason imparted steadiness and consistency to
his emotional nature.
But underlying and permeating all his feelings and all his
views was a profound love of country, transcended only by his
love of universal liberty. This was the first lesson of his boy
hood and the last teaching of his ripened manhood.
" Qui didicit patriae quid debeat, et quid amicis."
That memorable impromptu speech at Independence Hall,
which now seems prophetic, was inspired, by the ruling sentiment
of his life. He preferred death by the hand of violence to
failure in the attempt to rescue the repubhc and the rights of
man from their threatened assassination by traitors.
He fell, but it was in the hour of victory. In his life was
realized the mythical struggle between good and evil. The
poetic justice dimly seen in the old Greek tragedy was here
enacted in the grand drama of actual history. He was
obstructed, defamed, lampooned and caricatured, but amid it
all, his mild temper, his charity, his consciousness of rectitude,
and his abiding conviction of the justice and ultimate triumph
of his cause, seemed to say, " Father forgive them, for they
know not what they do."

20
His time came at last, and he entered the dark valley
beneath the arch of triumph, inscribed with the " Well done"
of a faithful servant. With invisible banners waving over
him, and to music unheard by mortal ears, he passed from our
sight. The remarkable qualities of the distinguished statesman who
has fallen by the hand of an assassin, like the Prince of Orange
and Henry the Fourth, in the beneficent exercise of his great
faculties, will receive the encomiums of his stricken countrymen,
now in the freshness of their grief; but as the tide of events
in successive waves sweeps on, the memory of these will be
obliterated, and the place of our martyr in history will be fixed,
not by personal characteristics, but by the glorious results of the
great struggle in which he was the loyal leader.
Men in this vast assembly may have differed honestly as to
the measures and policy of his administration, yet, when we
remember that traitors had organized an army in the heart
of the republic ; had defied legitimate authority and beleagured
the capital ; had driven the feeble forces of the government
from their strongholds, and wrested from the Union an area
of rich States out of which Empires of European dimensions
might be carved ; that while " Long time in even scale
The battle hung,"
The premeditated cruelty of rebel authorities had murdered,
by the slow torture of hunger, sixty thousand prisoners of war,
and hundreds of thousands of the strong and beautiful of the
land had perished ; when we remember all this, and consider
that the struggle was for union and free government, can we
not agree that he acted from a felt necessity ? Can we not
agree, here at his obsequies, and in the presence of this
universal sorrow, that in the creation of a mighty military
power, in the suspension of the writ of habeas car-pus, in
miUtary arrests, in the confiscation of rebel property, and in
the proclamation of emancipation, in it all, that he followed the
dictates of an honest mind and a patriot's heart ?

21
But whatever private griefs men may have upon these
subjects, in the contemplation of the grand results, thank God,
we stand upon no party platform. We are here to-day as one
people, bowed by a common sorrow, and jubilant over a common
victory. As a nation, we must congratulate ourselves upon a diplomacy
which brought conciliation and forbearance to the management
of dehcate foreign relations, and secured prestige and pre
eminence abroad, without the hazards and commercial inter
ruptions of foreign war.
And is there a man in this assembly, is there a man in the
commonwealth — the proud birth-state of Webster, — who does
not rejoice to-day that the old controversy in respect to the
nature of the general government, waged for a quarter of a
century between North and South, on the hustings and the
floor of Congress, by a partizan press, and at last by an appeal
to arms, has been settled by the war, beyond a peradventure
in the interests of constitutional liberty ? We know at last in
what we believe. We have a government from which no State
can secede, and which has the right and strength to maintain
its own existence.
Is there any man within the sound of my voice ; can any
loyal man be found in any dark nook or corner of the earth,
whose heart does not exult and turn with gratitude to God
when he remembers that a people more numerous than the
whole population of the land at the birth of our nationality,
have been lifted from the prison-house of a crushing and
hopeless bondage to the light and privileges of a Christian
civilization ? Can any man who loves liberty, or the honor and
safety of his country, regret that the Declaration drawn by
Jefferson has been supplemented by the Declaration drawn by
Lincoln, and that " unalienable rights" have been restored to
men who, in their poverty and suffering stood loyal amid the
general wreck of the great defection ? All this has been done
by proclamation and law, by the out-poured treasures of a
noble people, and by the heroic struggles of a thousand battle
fields.

22
A profound conviction of the superiority of republican to
other forms of government, of their inherent capacity to meet
the wants of an expanding people, and to perpetuate themselves
amid the antagonisms and discontents which will hereafter arise
from a crowded population, is the justification which citizen and
soldier must plead for their steady and unwavering support
of the government in the prolonged expenditure of national
treasure, and in the outpouring of tides of blood.
But to you, soldiers, we yield the highest meed of honor, for
you have rescued the Union from disintegration ; you have
unfurled the old flag with no star dropped from its place, over
camp, and court in belligerent States, and have washed the dark
stains from its folds in your own precious blood. Mingling with
your love of country was the inspiration of a loftier thought.
Equally with your fallen chief you comprehended that to you
God had given the grand and fearful responsibility of fighting
battles for all times and all peoples ; that the struggle was
between liberty and absolutism, not in America only, but in all
lands ; that treasure and life were lavished, not for the preserva^
tion of the precious inheritance of our fathers only, but for the
conservation of the principles of civil liberty and social progress
to the children of other nationalities as well. It was for such
precious things, and to prevent the establishment of an oligarchy
more pestilent and dishonorable than a European despotism,
upon soil purchased by revolutionary blood and the revenues of
free labor, that our people have taxed their industry and wealth,
and given up their sons to the hazards of war. It was these-
things, brave men, scarred veterans of a hundred battles, that
steeled your hearts and nerved your arms at Shiloh and Antietam
at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, that sustained you as you trod the
gauntlet of fire from Chatanooga to Atlanta, as you swept from
that citadel of war to the tide waters of the Atlantic, and thence
passed through the swamps of the Carolinas to the surrender of
Johnston. It was the support of such thoughts that upheld your vanish
ing ranks in that bloodiest swath of death through the Wilderness,
and in the perilous siege of Richmond, untU you crushed, as

23
with the hammer of Thor, the iron legions of Lee, and with
"banner high advanced" entered the capital of treason.
Your work is done, and well done. History will give you a
place with the Greeks at Marathon and the Ironsides at Naseby.
Liberty will date her triumphs from your battle-fields. We
welcome you back with pride and exultation to your native hills,
to the homes and firesides which you have rescued from dishonor,
and where you will be cherished by a grateful and generous
people. But you are not all here. Where are the brave boys,
who with flaunting banners and to the tread of martial music
went forth with you to the tented field ? Alas, ours is no solitary
grief. We mourn to-day for a martyred host. They went
down beneath the bullet's stroke and the tread of the war-horse,
by the murmuring rivers and on the hot plains of the South, and
there you have left them with their glory. Each in his place
like a hero fell,
" With his back to the field and his feet to the foe.
And leaving in battle no blot on his name,
Looks proudly to heaven from the death-bed of fame."
The places that have known them will be vacant, and their
familiar faces will greet us pever again; but their deeds will
be told in literature and song; and time, which mocks at
marble and brass, will hold their memory fresh to the latest
generations. To us, fellow-citizens, belongs the hazardous duty of con-
summatmg the great work which the army has advanced to the
glorious assurance of completion.
The bitter animosities and intense excitements of the pro
longed struggle had wearied the public mind, so that with the
approach of peace it was rapidly dropping into a state of moral
debility and lassitude of temper. Familiarity with treason and
the inhuman cruelties of the war had dulled our apprehension
of the superlative guilt of these crimes.
Prudence and magnanimity lie between cruel severity and
childish weakness. In the joy of victory there was dangeri lest
we should swing to weakness, and forget the claims which every

24
legitimate ruler in Christendom could lay upon us to assert the
dignity and authority of righteous government.
The foul attack upon Sumpter broke the trammels of party
and kindled a flame of patriotism which licked up the lust of
gain and brought us as a united people to the defense of the
Union, so the fiendish murder of our magnanimous President
may be the means under God of lifting both people and rulers
to the level of their great duties. Never was vigilance the price
of liberty more emphatically than at this hour.
The unnatural alhance between liberty and slavery must
never be renewed. The seeds of civil discord and treason must
never again be planted in the foundations of the government.
The social and civil institutions, the industry and education of
all the States must henceforth be homogeneous that our national
legislation may not be a patchwork of unappeasable antagonisms,
and our deliberative assemblies the disorderly arenas of sectional
discord and savage violence.
The school of politics which teaches the false theories that
underlie all forms of oppression must cease to exist, and then
the rivalries which restrain productive industry, and retard the
progre ss of popular enhghtenment will never arise, and the red
hand of treason will add no new names to the roll of our
martyred heroes and statesmen.