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Ode

SUNG AT THE OCCASION OF DECORATING THE GRAVES OF THE CONFEDERATE DEAD, AT MAGNOLIA CEMETERY, CHARLESTON, S. C., JUNE 16, 1866.3

Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause;
Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.

In seeds of laurel in the earth,

The garlands of your fame are sown;
And somewhere, waiting for its birth,
The shaft is in the stone!

Meanwhile, your sisters for the years
Which hold in trust your storied tombs,
Bring all they now can give you-tears,
And these memorial blooms.

Small tributes! but your shades will smile
As proudly on those wreaths today,
As when some cannon-molded pile

Shall overlook this Bay.

Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned!

3. The poem was published in the Charleston Courier, June 18, 1866, and in a revised version, July 23, 1866, not. noted until 1933 (G. P. Voigt, "New Light on Timrod's Memorial Ode," American Literature, IV, January, 1933,

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1866, 1873

395-396). Collected in Hayne's edition (1873) and in Emerson's Parnassus (1874), it became Timrod's most familiar poem, in its earlier form, which is given here.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

(1809-1865)

In the affections of his countrymen, Lincoln has become a legend, and the actual events of his life are also common knowledge. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, were virtually il

literate pioneers, and their child of destiny was born, on February 12, 1809, in a backwoods log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. Two years later, the Lincolns were tilling thirty acres of

cleared land in the forest at Knob Creek, below Louisville. When the boy was only seven, the family trekked north across the Ohio into southern Indiana, taking squatter-rights on woodland again. There young Lincoln grew to manhood. His mother, a mystical and sensitive woman who influenced him deeply, died when he was nine. Her place was soon taken by Sarah Bush, practical and courageous, who encouraged his innate genius and ambition. Educational opportunities were limited-the boy spent no more than a year altogether in several schoolhouses but he read and reread the few good books that he could obtain, such as the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Aesop's Fables, Weems's Washington, and Grimshaw's History of the United States. At nineteen he worked his way to New Orleans on a Mississippi flatboat.

When Lincoln was twentyone, he accompanied the stillimpoverished family westward, to Decatur, Illinois; but when, the next spring, Tom Lincoln decided upon a further move, to Coles County, the young frontiersman decided that he must strike out for himself. He agreed to take a flatboat loaded with merchandise to New Orleans. Returning, Abe Lincoln brought history to the Sangamon country by settling at New Salem, near Springfield, Illinois. There the force of his homespun integrity gradually brought him into local prominence. From hired hand and rail splitter he rose to be storekeeper and postmaster of New Salem. He read whatever

he could find, and studied law. An unsuccessful candidate in 1832 for election to the legislature, he went off to the fiveweeks' Black Hawk War with a company of volunteers who elected him as captain.

In 1834, running as a Whig, he won the election and went to Vandalia, then the capital, on borrowed money, wearing a pair of new blue jeans. There his political moderation began to take form. He supported the opposition of his party to Jackson's financial policies, and he agreed with free-soilers that the federal authority legally extended to the control of slavery in the territories; however, on constitutional grounds, he had to oppose abolition in the states. But abolition was not yet a genuine political issue, and he held office for

four consecutive terms (1834-1842). In In 1837 he opened a law office in Springfield, the new capital. There, in 1842, he returned to private practice, and married Mary

Todd.

During the next few years, as a circuit-riding lawyer, he won a modest prosperity and a considerable reputation. In 1847 the Illinois Whigs sent him to Congress, just as the brief Mexican War drew to its close. The question of slavery in the newly won territories divided the Whigs in such border states as Illinois. Lincoln consistently opposed the extension of slavery, and joined those who sought to embarrass Polk, the Democratic president, as instigator of a slavestate war. Lincoln knew at the time that by taking this stand he would alienate voters of all

parties in Illinois, and he was not nominated in 1849.

Again in private practice in Springfield, this time with William H. Herndon as his partner, he enjoyed great success as a lawyer, and continued to participate in politics, though apparently with no high ambitions. In 1854 he was again elected to the state legislature, but his opposition to the principle of squatter sovereignty embodied in Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill sent him stump speaking, and he resigned from the legislature in 1855 to run for the Senate. He was defeated, but threw the votes of his supporters in such a manner as to elect an opponent of Douglas.

In 1856, after the disruption of the southern Whigs by these controversies, Lincoln joined the newly formed Republican party, and in 1858 he was the candidate for the Senate against the Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas. At the party convention he made the famous declaration that "A house divided against itself cannot stand," in a speech which, then and later, was heard through the land. In his seven debates with Douglas during the campaign, he demonstrated his cool logic, his devastating humor, and his firm moderation as an enemy of slavery who opposed both the abolition and the extension of slavery on consistent constitutional principles. Although he lost the election, he was clearly a man who might lead the Republicans to national victory; yet it seems that he then had no such idea himself.

In the speech at Cooper Union in 1860 he repeated more

formally the principles which he had developed in the heat of the debates. Now that secession was openly advocated in the South, the preservation of the Union was the paramount issue; and this, he thought, could best be assured by strict adherence to the provisions of the Constitution, in respect to both the states and the territorial areas. Three months later the Republican party named him as their candidate. He defeated the candidates of the split Democratic party in November and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861.

The remainder of Lincoln's history is that of the Civil War. A few of the events which best reveal him are reflected in the selections in this volume. Unprepared by previous experience, he became, within two years, the master of complex and gigantic events, the principal strategist of the northern cause, and, as it seemed, the tragic embodiment of the nation's suffering, North and South. His second inauguration occurred on March 4, 1865. On April 9, Lee surrendered the remnant of the Army of Virginia to Grant at Appomattox. On the night of Good Friday, April 14, just six weeks after his inauguration, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theatre, Washington. He died early the next morning.

Much might be said of Lincoln's place in literature, but that seems unnecessary. He spoke always from the heart of the people, with speech at once lofty and common; what he had to say seems to embody the best that they have learned of human

compassion and nobility; and his words have been received and treasured around the earth as the language of humanity itself.

Among the collections of Lincoln's writings the most comprehensive is The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols., edited by Roy P. Basler and others, 1953. Standard, though less comprehensive, is The Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols., edited by John G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1894; enlarged, 12 vols., 1905. One-volume selections are Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, edited by Roy P. Basler, 1946, containing an excellent

critical introduction; and Selections from Lincoln, 1927.

John G. Nicolay and John Hay wrote the comprehensive biography, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols., 1890. Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vols., 1926, and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols., 1939, are classics. Satisfactory onevolume biographies are those by Lord Charnwood, 1917; and Albert J. Beveridge, 1928. Paul M. Angle compiled The Lincoln Reader, 1947, comprising selections from various biographies, chronologically arranged. See also James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols., 1945-55; and Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, 1952, the best brief account.

Speech at Cooper Union,1 New York

MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW CITIZENS OF NEW YORK:

The facts with which I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and the inferences and observations following that presentation. In his speech last autumn at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in the New York Times, Senator Douglas said:

"Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now."

thousand listeners braved a heavy snow to hear this remarkable speech. On the platform were the mighty Horace Greeley of the Tribune, and William Cullen Bryant, of the New York Evening Post, who introduced the speaker. Lincoln's initial embarrassment is well known; but his mastery of his facts clarified the concept of constitutionalism as an antislavery policy, and paved the way for his selection as the Republican presidential candidate some months later.

I fully indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse. I so adopt it because it furnishes a precise and an agreed starting-point for a discussion between Republicans and that wing of the Democracy headed by Senator Douglas. It simply leaves the inquiry: What was the understanding those fathers had of the question mentioned? 1. Stephen A. Douglas, the "Little Giant" of the Democratic coalition of Illinois, won the 1858 senatorial election; but Lincoln, candidate of the newborn Republicans, emerged as a figure of national stature in their famous campaign debates. Eastern Republicans wanted to hear this "rail splitter," whose unquestioned opposition to slavery was rendered politically "moderate" by his insistence on remedies within the Constitution, the laws, and the Union. Invited to give a "political lecture" in Henry Ward Beecher's famous Brooklyn church, he decided to destroy Douglas's argument that the authors of the Constitution had made allowances for slavery. His sponsors, New York Republicans opposing Seward's nomination, changed the meeting place to Cooper Institute (later Union), where, on the night of February 27, 1860, fifteen

2. This was not one of the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, but a later Douglas speech, in September, 1859, in support of Democratic candidates in Ohio. 3. An appeal for the support of Douglas Democrats, a coalition of southern moderates who opposed secession and northerners who had made concessions in the cause of unity.

What is the frame of government under which we live? The answer must be, "The Constitution of the United States." That Constitution consists of the original, framed in 1787, and under which the present government first went into operation, and twelve subsequently framed amendments, the first ten of which were framed in 1789.

Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? I suppose the "thirty-nine" who signed the original instrument may be fairly called our fathers who framed that part of the present government. It is almost exactly true to say they framed it, and it is altogether true to say they fairly represented the opinion and sentiment of the whole nation at that time. Their names, being familiar to nearly all, and accessible to quite all, need not now be repeated.

I take these "thirty-nine," for the present, as being "our fathers who framed the government under which we live." What is the question which, according to the text, those fathers understood "just as well, and even better, than we do now"?

It is this: Does the proper division of local from federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our federal government to control as to slavery in our federal territories?4

Upon this Senator Douglas holds the affirmative, and Republicans the negative. This affirmation and denial form an issue; and this issue—this question-is precisely what the text declares our fathers understood "better than we." Let us now inquire whether the "thirty-nine," or any of them, ever acted upon this question; and if they did, how they acted upon it-how they expressed that better understanding. In 1784, three years before the Constitution, the United States then owning the Northwestern Territory, and no other, the Congress of the Confederation had before them the question of prohibiting slavery in that territory, and four of the "thirty-nine" who afterward framed the Constitution were in that Congress, and voted on that question. Of these, Roger Sherman, Thomas Mifflin, and Hugh Williamson voted for the prohibition; thus showing that, in their understanding, no line dividing local from federal authority, nor anything else, properly forbade the federal government to control as to slavery in federal territory. The other of the four, James McHenry, voted against the prohibition, showing that for some cause he thought it improper to vote for it. In 1787, still before the Constitution, but while the convention

4. The principle of state sovereignty had been generally conceded in respect to slavery in the established states; hence proslavery interests persistently denied that the federal authority over new territories included the control of slavery.

5. Bounded by Pennsylvania and by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Northwest Territory comprised Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. It was won from the British during the Revolution and ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris (1783).

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