LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BUST OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

By GUTZEN BORGLUM, Washington

MAP OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 1861

ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 1860

By permission of THE MACMILLAN Co., New York.

LIFE MASK OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1861

ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN 1864

From a Portrait by M. B. BRady.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND HIS SON, TAD

By permission of THE MACMILLAN Co., New York.

D

INTRODUCTION

EMOCRACY has brought with it its own hero.
He is as new to the world as democracy is new,

and we have not yet learned what to say about him. The older hero type was simple. Moreover, we had been trained to know what to expect. Trumpets blew when he entered, he strode across the stage, wilful, marshalling men and forces at the beckon of his finger and turning all into puppets before his masterful desire. He destroyed or built as he went his way, and we said So-and-So, Great Man that he was, passed along our road and was able to accomplish all this. We told his life step by step, and showed the monuments he created -simple things after all, built in wood and stone. He was clear to the eye, this hero of our past sagas.

But how are we to speak of the new hero? There is no flourish of trumpets at his entrance, he is no Man on Horseback, marshalling legions behind him, he has not built in wood and stone; in fact, he is no general and no builder, but good helmsman, great administrator. His deeds are wrought in social institutions and his works are part of civilization. They make the story of the slow coming of age of the people.

So we say we have had no life written of Abraham Lincoln worthy of that great man. Here is a people's hero, dead now fifty years, and the generations stand mystified before his gentle figure.

The truth is we have not been taught how to tell of his life. We say over and over again he was a good man; he was a great man; he died a martyr. What of it? Not knowing what he did we have crowned him with epithets which, fit or not, bespeak only our emotions. We called him the Emancipator, the Great Liberator, the Saviour of his Country. We were looking for our old-time hero of the sagas, and here came along one who made the people hero. We cannot tell his life by speaking of his life alone. We say he was born a poor boy, of Western pioneer stock, taught himself law, entered politics, and attained to the Presidency of the United States.

But all this does not tell his story.

While he was President, a four years' civil war broke out, and the nation was on the verge of ruin. He weathered the war, came forth victorious, and wiped out forever the cause of disunion, the institution of slavery which had existed from the country's beginning. Thus Thus he became the Great Liberator and the Saviour. At the first flush of victory he was assassinated, and he became the Great Martyr.

Still, that does not tell the story of his life.

For once, the plain facts become meaningless. There was a reason for his election to the Presidency which lay apart from himself. He did not ride into the Capitol with fire and sword and capture it. He did not create the war. The liberation of the slaves, the overthrow of chattel slavery and the preservation of the Union of the United States on republican principles cannot be told as his deeds. They are greater than