Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809. That year, 1809, the earth brought forth a litter of veritable lion whelps. It is the birth-year of two masters in music, Chopin and Mendelssohn; and four poets of the first rank, Edgar Allan Poe, Edward FitzGerald, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Alfred Tennyson. The same year comes Charles Darwin, whose influence upon every department of modern thought is perhaps greater than that of any other modern man, and William Ewart Gladstone, “the Grand Old Man” of England.
And also in this year of 1809, on the twelfth day of February, amid the tangled forests of Kentucky, then a haunt of savage Indians and wild beasts, was born, of common stock, the man-child who was destined to take his place in history as the most consummate and complete American. There is only one genuinely great strain in human blood, the Common Strain. The Preferred Stock of the race is the Common Stock. Real rulers of men appear as the wild flowers, growing in the untilled land, blossoming in the hedgerows. The plants in the royal hot-houses, the Caesars, Romanoffs, Hohenzollerns, and Wettins, by and by get pretty spindling. The future Garibaldi or Milton is, as probably as not, drawing pictures in his arithmetic in your sitting-room, or reaching for cookies in your pantry, at this moment. He who makes men out of the dust of the ground creates a superior soul when He gets ready and where He will. The true priests and prophets of humanity are all “after the order of Melchizedek, King of Salem, without father, without mother, without descent.”
Thomas Lincoln, Abraham’s father, was a carpenter. He could just about write his own name when he tried, but he did not write it often, because it hurt his tongue. That was as far as his book-learning extended. In 1806 he married a wild rose named Nancy Hanks. It was a good, solid name. They were not naming babies Evelyth Jasmyn Tryphosa Vere de Vere in that region. The young couple lived awhile in Elizabethtown, Kentucky; but it was too crowded, with its eleven or twelve houses all packed in close within a mile and a half of each other. Thomas needed breathing-room. So he moved fourteen miles out into the jungle and cleared a farm. Here they had two children. The first died. The second was tough and vigorous. They named him Abraham, after his grandfather.
The Creator, when He made the boy, wrote ‘“Common” all over his face and form. He was not a handsome child, and as he grew older he became homelier.
He grew up “as a root out of dry ground. He had no form nor comeliness; and when we saw him, we found no beauty in him that we should desire him.”
He was the common-looking son of common Tom Lincoln and Nancy Hanks. And it is because of this commonness that he was great.
He knew the common people as a child knows his mother. He knew their courage, their profound convictions, and the careless humor with which they concealed them. He had borne their sorrows and carried all their griefs. As a barefoot boy he had paddled alongside the “mover’s’’ wagon. He had slept on a bed of leaves in a cabin corner. He had run errands through the snow, carrying a hot potato to keep his hands warm. He had done his examples upon the back of a wooden fire-shovel, shaving it off with a jack-knife to get a clean surface. He had clerked in a store, dragged a surveyor’s chain, guided a flatboat down the Mississippi, peddled notions from door to door, studied law in a back office in a row of wooden buildings in Springfield, campaigned in politics, been elected and defeated; and when he came to the White House to take his seat among the rulers of the earth he refused to put on manners foreign to his bringing up, but remained the same unaffected, genuine, hard-headed, clear-eyed, and fearless son of the West, meeting slander with whimsical humor, wearing success with simple modesty, enduring reverses, disaster, threats, and misunderstanding with a manly faith in himself, in the people, in God; himself he could not save, but died as he had lived, smiling when the bullet found him; as for God, He has rewarded him; and as for the people, we, their sons, after fifty years have ripened our judgment and sifted all the evidence, we say, “If you ask what kind of people Americans are, there stands our truest representative, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.”
Just a common man! Just a homely, plain piece of ordinary humanity. None of the marvellous gifts of those others born that year. No musical genius like Mendelssohn and Chopin, no literary talent like that of Poe or FitzGerald, Oliver Wendell Holmes or Alfred Tennyson, no erudition like Gladstone’s, nor scientific ability like Darwin’s—no, just a man, a common man, but common as air is common, whose sweetness we never guess until it is polluted; common as water is common, without which shipwrecked men go mad; common as God’s sky is common, lit by day with ineffable light and starred at night with whirling worlds of beauty; common as mothers are common, who make and unmake men; common as the Son of God was common, who ate with publicans and sinners, whom the common people heard gladly, and who never entered the court of a prince until He entered there to receive a robe of purple mockery and a crown of thorns! Just a plain, common man; but this nation was made for such, the first triumphant effort to erect “a government for the people,” and when the hell-fires of war and rebellion broke loose the people turned to him, a man, bone of their bone, their own kind, and they chose him and confided their life and destiny to him; they loved him, they took him, into his strong hands they put their lives, in his kindly face they saw that divine shining of a lofty soul that men look for in a leader’s face when they are asked to die; upon his sensitive heart they rolled the burden of their doom; they gave themselves to him as a maid gives her soul and body into the keeping of the man she chooses be-cause he is loving and honest and true.
And they made no mistake. For he was great, not with a starlike greatness that dwelt apart from and above us, not with some peculiar talent that separated him from ordinary men, but great with all our greatness, great with the greatness of the New World. Upon his shoulders he wore no ermine robe, upon his head no jewelled crown. His robe of power was the confidence of the men who work and do and vote, the farmers of Illinois and the mechanics of New England; his crown the praise of the slaves he had made men. Thank God, he had no illustrious parentage, and put on no imperial manner! He was ours, friends, ours—our own; the realization of the worth of common humanity, of how proud, how glorious, how divine a thing it is to be a HUMAN BEING.
