The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -7

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -7

The
change which three years have brought about is too remarkable
to be passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson
not to be laid to heart. Never did a President enter upon
office with less means at his command, outside his own
strength of heart and steadiness of understanding, for
inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning it for
himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was
that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his
*availability,*--that is, because he had no history,--and
chosen by a party with whose more extreme opinions he was not
in sympathy. It might well be feared that a man past fifty,
against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could rake up
no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who
was at best only the representative of a party, and who yet
did not fairly represent even that, would fail of political,
much more of popular, support. And certainly no one ever
entered upon office with so few resources of power in the
past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as
Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which
acknowledged him as President, there was a large, and at that
time dangerous, minority, that hardly admitted his claim to
the office, and even in the party that elected him there was
also a large minority that suspected him of being secretly a
communicant with the church of Laodicea.(1) All he did was
sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side; all that
he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness
and backsliding by the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a
truly colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the
country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril
undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to
win from the crowning dangers of his administration, in the
confidence of the people, the means of his safety and their
own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our
Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in the
confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration. (1) See *Revelation,* chapter 3,
verse 15.