Abraham Lincoln Read Online Free Page A

happened in his shell-torn land, Sandburg is trying to demonstrate that “the hopes and apprehensions of millions, their loves and hates, their exultation and despair, were reflected truthfully in the deep waters of Lincoln’s being,” as Robert Sherwood said.
    In the “tornado years” of civil war, Sandburg’s Lincoln is both the hero and the instrument of the people. He is the umpire of an embattled Union, patiently sticking to the cherished middle way. When it comes to emancipation, he always follows the pulse of the people: with a genius for timing, he issues his proclamation only when that is what they want. Now “a piece of historic drama” has been played, and across the world, among the masses of people who create folk gods out of slender fact, there runs the story of “the Strong Man who arose in his might and delivered an edict, spoke a few words fitly chosen, and thereupon the shackles and chains fell from the arms and ankles of men, women, and children born to be chattels for toil and bondage.”
    As the war rages on, Lincoln’s “skilled referee hand” guides the ship of state through cross winds of passion and cross plays of hate. Throughout he has the folk masses behind him. He is still their Friendly Stranger in a storm of death and destruction. Even during his lowest ebb in 1864, he remains the people’s President: he retains their love and loyalty even as Republican leaders raise a howl against his renomination and reelection. And he wins in 1864 because the wisdom of the people prevails.
    Moreover, in the last long year of the war, Sandburg’s Lincoln does battle with the so-called radicals of the party—vindictive cynics like Charles Sumner and old Thad Stevens, who in Sandburg’s view want to exterminate the South’s ruling class and convert Dixie into “a vast graveyard of slaughtered whites, with Negro State governments established and upheld by Northern white bayonets.” But a mild and moderate Lincoln refuses to go along with them. He is now in his grandest hour, this Lincoln of The War Years , as he plans to reconstruct the South with tender magnanimity. He is the only man in the entire country who can peaceably reunite the sections. But, as in a Greek tragedy, Lincoln is murdered before he can bind up the nation’s wounds and heal the antagonisms of his divided countrymen. In North and South, common people weep aloud, realizing the painful truth of the old folk adage that a tree is measured best when it is down.
    â€œTo a deep river,” writes Sandburg, “to a far country, to a by-and-by whence no man returns, had gone the child of Nancy Hanks and Tom Lincoln, the wilderness boy who found far lights and tall rainbows to live by, whose name even before he died had become a legend inwoven with men’s struggle for freedom the world over.” There was the story of how Count Leo Tolstoy, traveling into the Caucasus of czarist Russia, encountered tribesmen demanding to know about Lincoln, the “greatest general and greatest ruler of the world.” Says Sandburg: “To Tolstoy the incident proved that in far places over the earth the name of Lincoln was worshipped and the personality of Lincoln had become a world folk legend.”
    Sandburg ended his narrative with Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield. But others have added an epilogue implied by Sandburg’s story. Without Father Abraham, the epilogue goes, the nation foundered in the harsh years of reconstruction, as an all-too-mortal President succumbed to “vengeful radicals” on Capitol Hill. Alas, how much better reconstruction would have been had Father Abraham only lived. How much more easily a divided nation would have set aside the war years and come together again in a spirit of mutual respect and harmony. There would never have been an impeachment trial, never a radical reconstruction, never an army of occupation, never a Ku