The Lincoln Story Book Part 7

HE DID NOT KNOW HIS OWN HOUSE.

In 1842 Abraham Lincoln married Miss Mary Todd, a Kentucky lady, at Springfield, where he took a house for the wedded life. Previously, while qualifying for the bar, he had dwelt for study over a furniture-store.

On account of his attending the traveling court, which compelled a horse, since he could not afford the gig a.s.sociated with the chief lawyers' degree of respectability, he was frequently and for long spells away from home. In one of these absences his wife deemed it fit for his coming dignity of pleader to have a second story and roof of a fas.h.i.+onable type set upon the old foundations. Under a fresh coat of paint, too, this renovation perplexed the home-comer when he drew up his horse before it. At the sound of the horse's steps he knew that some one was flying to the parlor window, but, affecting amazement, he challenged a pa.s.ser-by:

"Neighbor, I feel like a stranger here. Can you tell me where Abraham Lincoln lives? He used to live here!"

THE ONLY ONE WHO DARED "PULL WOOL OVER LINCOLN'S EYES."

While Mr. Lincoln was living in Springfield, a judge of the city, who was one of the leading and most influential citizens of the place, had occasion to call upon him. Mr. Lincoln was not overparticular in his matter of dress, and was also careless in his manners. The judge was ushered into the parlor, where he found Mr. Lincoln sprawled out across a couple of chairs, reclining at his ease. The judge was asked to be seated, and, without changing his position in the least, Mr. Lincoln entered into conversation with his visitor.

While the two men were talking, Mrs. Lincoln entered the room. She was, of course, greatly embarra.s.sed at Mr. Lincoln's offhand manner of entertaining his caller, and, stepping up behind her husband, she grasped him by the hair and twitched his head about, at the same time looking at him reprovingly.

Mr. Lincoln apparently did not notice the rebuke. He simply looked up at his wife, then across to the judge, and, without rising, said:

"Little Mary, allow me to introduce you to my friend, Judge So-and-so."

It will be remembered that Mrs. Lincoln's maiden name was Mary Todd, and that she was very short in stature.--_Leslie's Monthly._

THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT.

The contrast between the statures of the Lincolns, man and wife, was palpable, but this hardly substantiates the story of the President appearing with his wife on the White House porch in response to a serenade, and his saying:

"Here I am, and here is Mrs. Lincoln. That's the long and short of it!"

"ALL A MAN WANTS--TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS!"

In one of his messages to Congress, the President foretold and denounced the tendency of wealth acquired in ma.s.ses and rapidly by the war contractors and the like as "approaching despotism." He saw liberty attacked in "the effort to place capital on an equal footing with--if not above--labor in the structure of government." It is never to be forgotten that neither he nor his Cabinet officers were ever upbraided for corruption; [Footnote: It is true that Lincoln's first war minister, Simon Cameron, was accused of smoothing the way to certain fat war contracts, a wit suggesting Simony as the term, but no charges were really brought. Lincoln said that if one proof were forthcoming, he would have the Cameronian head--but Mr. Cameron died intact.] some, like Secretary Stanton, though handling enormous sums, died poor men comparatively. It is in accordance with this honesty of the "Honest Old Abe" rule that he said to an old friend whom he met in New York in 1859:

"How have you fared since you left us?"

The merchant gleefully replied that he had made a hundred thousand dollars in business. "And--lost it all!" with a reflection of Lincoln's and the Western cool humor. "How is it on your part?"

"Oh, very well; I have the cottage at Springfield, and about eight hundred dollars. If they make me vice-president with Seward, as some say they will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to twenty thousand. That is as much as any man ought to want!"

"I'LL HIT THE THING HARD!"

In Coffin's "Lincoln," it is stated that when Lincoln and Offutt, boating to New Orleans, attended a slave auction for the first time, the former said to his companion:

"By the Eternal, if ever I get a chance to hit this thing, I'll hit it hard!"

The oath was General-President Jackson's, and familiar as a household word at the day. The promise is premature in a youth of twenty.

Herndon, twenty-five years a.s.sociated with Lincoln, doubts, but says that Lincoln did allude to some such utterance. But it is Dennis Hanks, cousin of Lincoln, who affirms that they two saw such a sight, and that he knew by his companion's emotion that "the iron had entered into his soul."

In 1841 Lincoln and Speed had a tedious low-water trip from Louisville to St. Louis. Lincoln says: "There were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me ... a _thing_ which has and continually exercises the power of making me miserable."

But his acts show that he "hit the thing hard." It could not recover from the telling stroke which rent the black oak--the Emanc.i.p.ation Act.

THE "LEX TALIONIS" CHRISTIANIZED.

Frederick Dougla.s.s, the colored men's representative, called on the President to procure a pledge that the unfair treatment of negro soldiers in the Union uniform should cease by retaliatory measures on the captured Confederates. But his hearer shrank, from the bare thought of hanging men in cold blood, even though the rebels should slay the negroes taken.

"Oh, Dougla.s.s, I cannot do that! If I could get hold of the actual murderers of colored prisoners, I would retaliate; but to hang those who have no hand in the atrocities, I cannot do _that_!"--(By F. Dougla.s.s, in _Northwestern Advocate_.)

THE SLAVE-DEALER.

"You have among you the cla.s.s of native tyrants known as the slave-dealer. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but, if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him for a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rolick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to go through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony-- instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse with him and his family."

"Those who deny the poor negro's natural right to himself and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death."--(Speech; Reply to Douglas, Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854.)

THE NEGRO HOME, OR AGITATION!

Lincoln was admitted to the law practise in 1837; he went into partners.h.i.+p with John F. Stuart. The latter elected to Congress, he united his legal talents with S. T. Logan's, a union severed in 1843, as both the a.s.sociates were aiming to be congressmen also. Not being nominated, the consolation was in the courts, with Judge Herndon as partner. It was from this daily frequentation that the latter was enabled to write a "Life of Lincoln."

An old colored woman came to them for legal aid. Her case was a sad one. Brought from Kentucky, Lincoln's natal State, by a planter, Hinkle, he had set her and children free in Indiana, not fostering the waning oppression. Her son, growing up, had the rashness to venture on the steamboat down to New Orleans. His position was as bad as that of an Americanized foreigner returning into a despotic land. He was arrested and held for sale, having crossed a Louisiana law framed for such intrusions: a free negro could be sold here as if never out of bond. There was little time to redeem him, and Lincoln--whose view of the inst.i.tution had not been enchanting--seized the opportunity to hit "and hit hard!" as he said in the same city on beholding a slave sale.