A

MERICAN fiction has never succeeded in portraying satisfactorily a typical American iron-master of the early period. The type has passed away and is now about forgotten. The early iron furnaces and forges in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey were distant from the seats of the civic authorities. Preliminary to pay day the iron-master drove his horses maybe thirty miles to the nearest bank, and on the following day rode back with the men's wages. He maintained the original company store, a necessity in those remote regions. If the workmen, often turbulent, engaged in riot it fell to him to walk into the battle and by force of character and personal authority restore the peace. If a wife appealed to him when her husband beat her, as wives often did, the culprit was brought to different behavior by means which were perhaps as good for the family and the community as the modern divorce mill. As the community about the forge or furnace grew to a town, it was the iron-master who took the first steps to supply its increasing needs—a burying ground, a bank, a bridge in place of the uncertain ford, a shady playground for the children near the unsheltered school-house. Such an iron-master in such a community, swept by a yellow fever epidemic from which the unstricken fled in a panic of fear, went from house to house, nursed the sick

and with his own hands coffined and buried the dead. Good human fibre, thus strengthened and disciplined by responsibility, by calls to meet sudden and unlooked for difficulties and personal danger, did not deteriorate. In a family with such a head or a succession of such heads, precept and example set up standards that the offspring learned must be emulated if they were to be men like their fathers.

Contrary to the prevailing belief, it was from such a family that Abraham Lincoln sprang. As his rail-splitting appealed to the proletariat of his own day more than his Cooper Institute speech could do, so the legend of an origin so lowly that it does violence to the elemental laws of heredity has always been popular with the American people. At least once a year in many thousands of school-houses and from innumerable platforms and pulpits that legend is repeated and the accepted miracle is recounted anew. All of us are taught, year in and year out, that the Lincoln in whom was combined one of the shrewdest of politicians, a philosophical statesman, a master of English and an intellectual aristocrat came out of utter darkness into an effulgence of fame attained by but one other American since the beginning of the nation.

The truth is that the obscurity of Lincoln's father was but an accident in the

family history caused by the Indian's rifle which left him fatherless at six years-a Ichild in a wilderness. Wherever the Lincoln family lived, in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, its members were people of substance and local prominence. Mordecai Lincoln, the greatgreat-great-grandfather of the President, established the first furnace and forge for making wrought iron in New England. His sons Mordecai and Abraham went to Pennsylvania by way of New Jersey in or about 1720. The second Mordecai had a one-third interest in a forge and other iron works on French Creek in Chester County, by 1723, and he was the owner of more land than was owned by most of the early "cavaliers" of tidewater Virginia. His son Thomas became Sheriff of Berks County in 1758, owned many acres, wrote a copperplate hand and spelled with conspicuous correctness. Another son, Abraham, was County Commissioner from 1772 to 1779, a sublieutenant in Berks County in 1777, and was elected to the Assembly in 1782, 1783, 1784 and 1785. He was chosen to make the address to Washington in Philadelphia after the Revolution and was a member of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1789-90. His family record book contains the entry of his marriage with Anna Boone, one of many evidences of close association between the Lincolns and the family of Daniel Boone, and is noticeable for its grammatical and other accuracy; he recorded with great precision that he was 5 months, 15 days and 22 hours "older than she." In the modern American language the entry of a fact so meticulously arrived at would certainly be written "older than her" by the average rural American. Besides his other public duties. this early Abraham Lincoln was Road Supervisor and School Commissioner. His administrators, who were his two sons (like their father, skilled penmen), accounted for the considerable sum of £2627, 4s., 6ds., exclusive of his real estate.

Another son of Mordecai the elder was John-"Virginia John", his Pennsylvania

relatives called him-the great-grandfather of the President. By his father's will, John was given 300 acres of land in New Jersey, which he sold in 1748 for £200. In the two years 1763 and 1765 he sold 331 acres, 49 perches of land in Pennsylvania for £794 and bought 161 acres for £260, and shortly afterward went to Virginia, where in 1768 he bought for £250 600 acres on Linville Creek in Augusta, now Rockingham, County. His son Abraham, the President's grandfather, in 1779 bought for £500, 52 acres on Linville Creek and in 1780 sold for £5000 250 acres, and with his family, including his son Thomas, the President's father, went to Kentucky, where he purchased 2600 acres. Four years after he had gone to Kentucky and while at work with his boys in a clearing, he was shot by an Indian. Thomas, the President's father, was then six years old. The death of the father and the then existing law of primogeniture, which gave all his real estate to Mordecai, the oldest son, was the cause of the humble condition of Thomas Lincoln. For 39 years

surely a brief period compared with the more than two centuries of family activity and prominence-this obscurity was unbroken. Then, at the age broken. Then, at the age of 23, Abraham Lincoln began his public life, resuming as certainly as the fountain water seeks its former height the earlier family plane.

II

The sponsors of an early Lincoln legend would have avoided their initial error if they had attributed to the conditions of his youth and to his rounds of a rural Illinois circuit his limitations as a war leader instead of seeking in those conditions the matrix which moulded him into greatness. They were estopped from this by the assumption held by nearly all the people of the North that the preservation of the Union was chiefly due to Lincoln. After the war certain enthusiasts even asserted that he was the best general of the Northern armies.

De Amicis wrote that the Dutch ab

horred that form of apotheosis which attributes to the individual the merits or vices of the many. General Henry J. Hunt wrote that God Almighty hated unequal weights and balances, but that the American people seemed to love them. It is possible, if one gives consideration to what Lincoln himself said and did in war time, to be left with admiration for his unerring sagacity in gauging mass momentum and at the same time to doubt with Herndon whether he judged the individual as shrewdly as he judged the mass, and further to doubt without Herndon whether as a war leader he was the equal of Jefferson Davis.

Lincoln was a far shrewder politician than Davis. Secretary Chase, after an interview with him, returned to his office and raising his hands above his head exclaimed before his private secretary, "That man is the most cunning person I ever saw in my life!" Lincoln's reasoning processes were far more sure-footed than those of Davis. It is impossible to conceive of Davis delighting in the rustic wit of the stories which Lincoln so often told to Stanton's displeasure, shown by his stalking out of the room and slamming the door. Also, it would have been impossible for Davis, had he been in Lincoln's place, to do as Lincoln did-listen patiently to the demand of a formidable group of New York bankers that he make peace, and then reply with such overwhelming power that they departed from the War Office in the manner of cowed school boys. Davis might have been as determined, but he would have been apt to show more signs of irritation. His reply would probably have been more personal and caustic. The bankers very likely would have gone away defeated, but not convinced. It is difficult to picture Jefferson Davis, punctilious, honorable, high-minded, able as he was, rising so far above the plane of his visitors as to convince them of his mastery and hold them as followers.

As commander in chief of an army and navy in active service Davis had the ad

vantage over Lincoln of being a West Point graduate, of having been Secretary of War, of knowing the character and capacity of army officers. Training and experience gave him the effective method, so necessary to war time leadership, of disregarding to a large extent political and other civil influences. Davis lost, not for lack of men or food, but because the inferior industrial civilization of the Southa civilization which in the industrial sense was primitive-collapsed. With abundance of mere man power, the South could not replace its always inferior railroad lines. and motive power; it could not transport the food supplies on which Sherman's army lived in Georgia to the army of Lee in Virginia. Davis knew Lee's ability and character and advanced him when Lee was under a cloud, and press and public were condemning him for his West Virginia failure. Davis declined Lee's offer to resign after Gettysburg; Lincoln, after every failure in the field, selected a new general, one after another, and for a long time a worse one. His selection of corps commanders for McClellan was poor; all of them had to be weeded out. McClellan was right in wanting to give some practical test to generals before selecting corps commanders. Beside Burnside, Hooker and Pope, Lincoln was responsible for other soldiers incompetent for the work assigned them-Halleck, Banks, Sickles, the last lacking in both military ability and character. Lincoln made Burnside commander of the Army of the Potomac just after Burnside's weak failure at Antietam, where he had spoiled McClellan's excellent plan. Burnside continued to fail weakly throughout his military career. Stonewall Jackson's opportunity, which he embraced by defeating one after another of Lincoln's generals, was based on Lincoln's inadequacy to the military problem. McClellan's critics find much fault with him, but the Northern cause was in far better shape after McClellan's Peninsular campaign, and again after Antietam, than it was under the Lincoln generals I have named.