Confusion and discord were everywhere. To use Mr. Lincoln's
forcible figure of speech, sinners were calling the righteous to
repentance. Finally the flag, insulted and fired upon, trailed in
surrender at Sumter; and then came the humiliation of the riot at
Baltimore, and the President for a few days practically a
prisoner in the capital of the nation.
But his apprenticeship had been served, and there was to be no
more failure. With faith and justice and generosity he conducted
for four long years a war whose frontiers stretched from the
Potomac to the Rio Grande; whose soldiers numbered a million men
on each side. The labor, the thought, the responsibility, the
strain of mind and anguish of soul that he gave to this great
task, who can measure? "Here was place for no holiday magistrate,
no fair weather sailor," as Emerson justly said of him. "The new
pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four years-- four
years of battle days--his endurance, his fertility of resources,
his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting." "By
his courage, his justice, his even temper, his humanity, he stood
a heroic figure in the centre of a heroic epoch."
What but a lifetime's schooling in disappointment, what but the
pioneer's self-reliance and freedom from prejudice, what but the
clear mind, quick to see natural right and unswerving in its
purpose to follow it; what but the steady self-control, the
unwarped sympathy, the unbounded charity of this man with spirit
so humble and soul so great, could have carried him through the
labors he wrought to the victory he attained?
With truth it could be written, "His heart was as great as the
world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a
wrong.
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