How many soldiers feel yet
the pressure of a strong hand that clasped theirs once as they lay sick
and weak in the dreary hospital! How many ears will never lose the
thrill of some kind word he spoke--he who could speak so kindly to
promise a kindness that always matched his word! How often he surprised
the land with a clemency which made even those who questioned his policy
love him the more for what they called his weakness,--seeing how the man
in whom God had most embodied the discipline of Freedom not only could
not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant! In the heartiness of his
mirth and his enjoyment of simple joys; in the directness and shrewdness
of perception which constituted his wit; in the untired, undiscouraged
faith in human nature which he always kept; and perhaps above all in the
plainness and quiet, unostentatious earnestness and independence of his
religious life, in his humble love and trust of God--in all, it was a
character such as only Freedom knows how to make.
Now it was in this character, rather than in any mere political
position, that the fitness of Mr. Lincoln to stand forth in the struggle
of the two American natures really lay. We are told that he did not come
to the Presidential chair pledged to the abolition of Slavery. When will
we learn that with all true men it is not what they intend to do, but it
is what the qualities of their natures bind them to do, that determines
their career! The President came to his power full of the blood, strong
in the strength of Freedom.
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