place in Springfield, Ill., the patriot President's former home. The Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, we need hardly relate, succeeded to the office of the chief magistracy of the Republic; while the great war reached its close with the fall of Richmond, the flight and subsequent capture of Jefferson Davis, and the clement issue of a proclamation of amnesty, with the happy return of the Union soldiers and sailors to private life. The work of Reconstruction, to which Lincoln had begun to address himself before his sadly-mourned death, now passed to other hands, while the nation lost in this important task what doubtless would have been of rich and priceless service to it. Though passed from earth, the memory of the great Emancipator is enshrined in the hearts of his admiring countrymen; while he has a no less abidingplace in history and on the proud roll of a nation's benefactors. "Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly, earnest, brave, foreseeing man, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. BY TOM TAYLOR, IN LONDON Punch, APRIL, 1865. "How humble, yet how hopeful, he could be; How, in good fortune and in ill, the same; He went about his work-such work as few As one who knows, where there's a task to do, Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command; Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow, If but that will we can arrive to know, Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill. So he went forth to battle, on the side That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's, As in his peasant boyhood he had plied His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights; The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil, The iron-bark that turns the lumberer's axe, The rapid that o'erbears the boatman's toil, The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks. So he grew up, a destined work to do, And lived to do it; four long-suffering years, Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through, And then he heard the hisses, changed to cheers, The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood; Till, as he came on light, from darkling days, And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood, A felon hand, between the goal and him, Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest, And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim, Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest! The words of mercy were upon his lips, Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen, When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse SPEECHES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE PERPETUATION OF OUR POLTICAL [An Address, delivered Jan. 27, 1837, to a Young Men's Lyceum organization in Springfield, Ill., which Mr. Lincoln had taken part in founding for the mutual improvement of its members. In it, it will be seen, how thoughtfully Lincoln refers to the prevalent evils of mob rule, and points out the danger that menaces political institutions in a lack of reverence for law and the displacement of reason by passion and wild appeals to passion]. IN the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 't is ours only to transmit thesethe former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform. How then shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide. I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country-the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country. It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of them. Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are perhaps the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers-a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or very honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the legis lature passed but a single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest. Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the world. Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land. |