''Abe'' Lincoln's Yarns and Stories - Alexander Kelly McClure (best android ereader TXT) 📗

an infuriated ruffian, edged his way through the crowd, and, seizing the bully by the neck and the seat of his trousers, threw him, by means of his strength and long arms, as one witness stoutly insists, “twelve feet away.” Returning to the stand, and throwing aside his hat, he inaugurated his campaign with the following brief but pertinent declaration:

“Fellow-citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of the national bank; I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments; if elected, I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.”

 

THREE INFERNAL BORES.

One day, when President Lincoln was alone and busily engaged on an important subject, involving vexation and anxiety, he was disturbed by the unwarranted intrusion of three men, who, without apology, proceeded to lay their claim before him.

The spokesman of the three reminded the President that they were the owners of some torpedo or other warlike invention which, if the government would only adopt it, would soon crush the rebellion.

“Now,” said the spokesman, “we have been here to see you time and again; you have referred us to the Secretary of War, the Chief of Ordnance, and the General of the Army, and they give us no satisfaction. We have been kept here waiting, till money and patience are exhausted, and we now come to demand of you a final reply to our application.”

Mr. Lincoln listened to this insolent tirade, and at its close the old twinkle came into his eye.

“You three gentlemen remind me of a story I once heard,” said he, “of a poor little boy out West who had lost his mother. His father wanted to give him a religious education, and so placed him in the family of a clergyman, whom he directed to instruct the little fellow carefully in the Scriptures. Every day the boy had to commit to memory and recite one chapter of the Bible. Things proceeded smoothly until they reached that chapter which details the story of the trial of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. When asked to repeat these three names the boy said he had forgotten them.

“His teacher told him that he must learn them, and gave him another day to do so. The next day the boy again forgot them.

“‘Now,’ said the teacher, ‘you have again failed to remember those names and you can go no farther until you have learned them. I will give you another day on this lesson, and if you don’t repeat the names I will punish you.’

“A third time the boy came to recite, and got down to the stumbling block, when the clergyman said: ‘Now tell me the names of the men in the fiery furnace.’

“‘Oh,’ said the boy, ‘here come those three infernal bores! I wish the devil had them!’”

Having received their “final answer,” the three patriots retired, and at the Cabinet meeting which followed, the President, in high good humor, related how he had dismissed his unwelcome visitors.

 

LINCOLN’S MEN WERE “HUSTLERS.”

In the Chicago Convention of 1860 the fight for Seward was maintained with desperate resolve until the final ballot was taken. Thurlow Weed was the Seward leader, and he was simply incomparable as a master in handling a convention. With him were Governor Morgan, Henry J. Raymond, of the New York Times, with William M. Evarts as chairman of the New York delegation, whose speech nominating Seward was the most impressive utterance of his life. The Bates men (Bates was afterwards Lincoln’s Attorney-General) were led by Frank Blair, the only Republican Congressman from a slave State, who was nothing if not heroic, aided by his brother Montgomery (afterwards Lincoln’s Postmaster General), who was a politician of uncommon cunning. With them was Horace Greeley, who was chairman of the delegation from the then almost inaccessible State of Oregon.

It was Lincoln’s friends, however, who were the “hustlers” of that battle. They had men for sober counsel like David Davis; men of supreme sagacity like Leonard Swett; men of tireless effort like Norman B. Judd; and they had what was more important than all—a seething multitude wild with enthusiasm for “Old Abe.”

 

A SLOW HORSE.

On one occasion when Mr. Lincoln was going to attend a political convention one of his rivals, a liveryman, provided him with a slow horse, hoping that he would not reach his destination in time. Mr. Lincoln got there, however, and when he returned with the horse he said: “You keep this horse for funerals, don’t you?” “Oh, no,” replied the liveryman. “Well, I’m glad of that, for if you did you’d never get a corpse to the grave in time for the resurrection.”

 

DODGING “BROWSING PRESIDENTS.”

General McClellan, after being put in command of the Army, resented any “interference” by the President. Lincoln, in his anxiety to know the details of the work in the army, went frequently to McClellan’s headquarters. That the President had a serious purpose in these visits McClellan did not see.

“I enclose a card just received from ‘A. Lincoln,’” he wrote to his wife one day; “it shows too much deference to be seen outside.”

In another letter to Mrs. McClellan he spoke of being “interrupted” by the President and Secretary Seward, “who had nothing in particular to say,” and again of concealing himself “to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presidents,” etc.

“I am becoming daily more disgusted with this Administration—perfectly sick of it,” he wrote early in October; and a few days later, “I was obliged to attend a meeting of the Cabinet at 8 P. M., and was bored and annoyed. There are some of the greatest geese in the Cabinet I have ever seen—enough to tax the patience of Job.”

 

A GREENBACK LEGEND.

At a Cabinet meeting once, the advisability of putting a legend on greenbacks similar to the In God We Trust legend on the silver coins was discussed, and the President was asked what his view was. He replied: “If you are going to put a legend on the greenback, I would suggest that of Peter and Paul: ‘Silver and gold we have not, but what we have we’ll give you.’”

 

GOD’S BEST GIFT TO MAN.

One of Mr. Lincoln’s notable religious utterances was his reply to a deputation of colored people at Baltimore who presented him a Bible. He said:

“In regard to the great book, I have only to say it is the best gift which God has ever given man. All the good from the Savior of the world is communicated to us through this book. But for this book we could not know right from wrong. All those things desirable to man are contained in it.”

 

SCALPING IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR.

When Lincoln was President he told this story of the Black Hawk War:

The only time he ever saw blood in this campaign, was one morning when, marching up a little valley that makes into the Rock River bottom, to reinforce a squad of outposts that were thought to be in danger, they came upon the tent occupied by the other party just at sunrise. The men had neglected to place any guard at night, and had been slaughtered in their sleep.

As the reinforcing party came up the slope on which the camp had been made, Lincoln saw them all lying with their heads towards the rising sun, and the round red spot that marked where they had been scalped gleamed more redly yet in the ruddy light of the sun. This scene years afterwards he recalled with a shudder.

 

MATRIMONIAL ADVICE.

For a while during the Civil War, General Fremont was without a command. One day in discussing Fremont’s case with George W. Julian, President Lincoln said he did not know where to place him, and that it reminds him of the old man who advised his son to take a wife, to which the young man responded: “All right; whose wife shall I take?”

 

OWED LOTS OF MONEY.

On April 14, 1865, a few hours previous to his assassination, President Lincoln sent a message by Congressman Schuyler Colfax, Vice-President during General Grant’s first term, to the miners in the Rocky Mountains and the regions bounded by the Pacific ocean, in which he said:

“Now that the Rebellion is overthrown, and we know pretty nearly the amount of our National debt, the more gold and silver we mine, we make the payment of that debt so much easier.

“Now I am going to encourage that in every possible way. We shall have hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers, and many have feared that their return home in such great numbers might paralyze industry by furnishing, suddenly, a greater supply of labor than there will be demand for. I am going to try to attract them to the hidden wealth of our mountain ranges, where there is room enough for all. Immigration, which even the War has not stopped, will land upon our shores hundreds of thousands more per year from overcrowded Europe. I intend to point them to the gold and silver that wait for them in the West.

“Tell the miners for me that I shall promote their interests to the utmost of my ability; because their prosperity as the prosperity of the nation; and,” said he, his eye kindling with enthusiasm, “we shall prove, in a very few years, that we are indeed the treasury of the world.”

 

“ON THE LORD’S SIDE.”

President Lincoln made a significant remark to a clergyman in the early days of the War.

“Let us have faith, Mr. President,” said the minister, “that the Lord is on our side in this great struggle.”

Mr. Lincoln quietly answered: “I am not at all concerned about that, for I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right; but it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation may be on the Lord’s side.”

 

WANTED TO BE NEAR “ABE.”

It was Lincoln’s custom to hold an informal reception once a week, each caller taking his turn.

Upon one of these eventful days an old friend from Illinois stood in line for almost an hour. At last he was so near the President his voice could reach him, and, calling out to his old associate, he startled every one by exclaiming, “Hallo, ‘Abe’; how are ye? I’m in line and hev come for an orfice, too.”

Lincoln singled out the man with the stentorian voice, and recognizing a particularly old friend, one whose wife had befriended him at a peculiarly trying time, the President responded to his greeting in a cordial manner, and told him “to hang onto himself and not kick the traces. Keep in line and you’ll soon get here.”

They met and shook hands with the old fervor and renewed their friendship.

The informal reception over, Lincoln sent for his old friend, and the latter began to urge his claims.

After having given him some good advice, Lincoln kindly told him he was incapable of holding any such position as he asked for. The disappointment of the Illinois friend was plainly shown, and with a perceptible tremor in his voice he said, “Martha’s dead, the gal is married, and I’ve guv Jim the forty.”

Then looking at Lincoln he came a little nearer and almost whispered, “I knowed I wasn’t eddicated enough to git the place, but I kinder want to stay where I ken see ‘Abe’ Lincoln.”

He was given employment in the White House grounds.

Afterwards the President said, “These brief interviews, stripped of