I suppose all the children who were born about the time of the
Civil War have recollections quite unlike those of the children
who are living now. Although I was but four and a half years old
when Lincoln died, I distinctly remember the day when I found on
our two white gateposts American flags companioned with black. I
tumbled down on the harsh gravel walk in my eager rush into the
house to inquire what they were "there for." To my amazement I
found my father in tears, something that I had never seen before,
having assumed, as all children do, that grown-up people never
cried. The two flags, my father's tears, and his impressive
statement that the greatest man in the world had died, constituted
my initiation, my baptism, as it were, into the thrilling and
solemn interests of a world lying quite outside the two white
gateposts. The great war touched children in many ways: I
remember an engraved roster of names, headed by the words "Addams'
Guard," and the whole surmounted by the insignia of the American
eagle clutching many flags, which always hung in the family
living-room. As children we used to read this list of names again
and again. We could reach it only by dint of putting the family
Bible on a chair and piling the dictionary on top of it; using the
Bible to stand on was always accompanied by a little thrill of
superstitious awe, although we carefully put the dictionary above
that our profane feet might touch it alone. Having brought the
roster within reach of our eager fingers,--fortunately it was
glazed,--we would pick out the names of those who "had fallen on
the field" from those who "had come back from the war," and from
among the latter those whose children were our schoolmates. When
drives were planned, we would say, "Let us take this road," that
we might pass the farm where a soldier had once lived; if flowers
from the garden were to be given away, we would want them to go to
the mother of one of those heroes whose names we knew from the
"Addams' Guard." If a guest should become interested in the roster
on the wall, he was at once led by the eager children to a small
picture of Colonel Davis which hung next the opposite window, that
he might see the brave Colonel of the Regiment. The introduction
to the picture of the one-armed man seemed to us a very solemn
ceremony, and long after the guest was tired of listening, we
would tell each other all about the local hero, who at the head of
his troops had suffered wounds unto death. We liked very much to
talk to a gentle old lady who lived in a white farmhouse a mile
north of the village. She was the mother of the village hero,
Tommy, and used to tell us of her long anxiety during the spring
of '62; how she waited day after day for the hospital to surrender
up her son, each morning airing the white homespun sheets and
holding the little bedroom in immaculate readiness. It was after
the battle of Fort Donelson that Tommy was wounded and had been
taken to the hospital at Springfield; his father went down to him
and saw him getting worse each week, until it was clear that he
was going to die; but there was so much red tape about the
department, and affairs were so confused, that his discharge could
not be procured. At last the hospital surgeon intimated to his
father that he should quietly take him away; a man as sick as
that, it would be all right; but when they told Tommy, weak as he
was, his eyes flashed, and he said, "No, sir; I will go out of the
front door or I'll die here." Of course after that every man in
the hospital worked for it, and in two weeks he was honorably
discharged. When he came home at last, his mother's heart was
broken to see him so wan and changed. She would tell us of the
long quiet days that followed his return, with the windows open so
that the dying eyes might look over the orchard slope to the
meadow beyond where the younger brothers were mowing the early
hay. She told us of those days when his school friends from the
Academy flocked in to see him, their old acknowledged leader, and
of the burning words of earnest patriotism spoken in the crowded
little room, so that in three months the Academy was almost
deserted and the new Company who marched away in the autumn took
as drummer boy Tommy's third brother, who was only seventeen and
too young for a regular. She remembered the still darker days
that followed, when the bright drummer boy was in Andersonville
prison, and little by little she learned to be reconciled that
Tommy was safe in the peaceful home graveyard.
However much we were given to talk of war heroes, we always fell
silent as we approached an isolated farmhouse in which two old
people lived alone. Five of their sons had enlisted in the Civil
War, and only the youngest had returned alive in the spring of
1865. In the autumn of the same year, when he was hunting for
wild ducks in a swamp on the rough little farm itself, he was
accidently shot and killed, and the old people were left alone to
struggle with the half-cleared land as best they might. When we
were driven past this forlorn little farm our childish voices
always dropped into speculative whisperings as to how the
accident could have happened to this remaining son out of all the
men in the world, to him who had escaped so many chances of
death! Our young hearts swelled in first rebellion against that
which Walter Pater calls "the inexplicable shortcoming or
misadventure on the part of life itself"; we were overwhelmingly
oppressed by that grief of things as they are, so much more
mysterious and intolerable than those griefs which we think dimly
to trace to man's own wrongdoing.
It was well perhaps that life thus early gave me a hint of one of
her most obstinate and insoluble riddles, for I have sorely
needed the sense of universality thus imparted to that mysterious
injustice, the burden of which we are all forced to bear and with
which I have become only too familiar.
My childish admiration for Lincoln is closely associated with a
visit made to the war eagle, Old Abe, who, as we children well
knew, lived in the state capital of Wisconsin, only sixty-five
miles north of our house, really no farther than an eagle could
easily fly! He had been carried by the Eighth Wisconsin Regiment
through the entire war, and now dwelt an honored pensioner in the
state building itself.
Many times, standing in the north end of our orchard, which was
only twelve miles from that mysterious line which divided
Illinois from Wisconsin, we anxiously scanned the deep sky,
hoping to see Old Abe fly southward right over our apple trees,
for it was clearly possible that he might at any moment escape
from his keeper, who, although he had been a soldier and a
sentinel, would have to sleep sometimes. We gazed with thrilled
interest at one speck after another in the flawless sky, but
although Old Abe never came to see us, a much more incredible
thing happened, for we were at last taken to see him.
We started one golden summer's day, two happy children in the
family carriage, with my father and mother and an older sister to
whom, because she was just home from boarding school, we
confidently appealed whenever we needed information. We were
driven northward hour after hour, past harvest fields in which
the stubble glinted from bronze to gold and the heavy-headed
grain rested luxuriously in rounded shocks, until we reached that
beautiful region of hills and lakes which surrounds the capital
city of Wisconsin.
But although Old Abe, sitting sedately upon his high perch, was
sufficiently like an uplifted ensign to remind us of a Roman
eagle, and although his veteran keeper, clad in an old army coat,
was ready to answer all our questions and to tell us of the
thirty-six battles and skirmishes which Old Abe had passed
unscathed, the crowning moment of the impressive journey came to
me later, illustrating once more that children are as quick to
catch the meaning of a symbol as they are unaccountably slow to
understand the real world about them.
The entire journey to the veteran war eagle had itself symbolized
that search for the heroic and perfect which so persistently
haunts the young; and as I stood under the great white dome of
Old Abe's stately home, for one brief moment the search was
rewarded. I dimly caught a hint of what men have tried to say in
their world-old effort to imprison a space in so divine a line
that it shall hold only yearning devotion and high-hearted hopes.
Certainly the utmost rim of my first dome was filled with the
tumultuous impression of soldiers marching to death for freedom's
sake, of pioneers streaming westward to establish self-government
in yet another sovereign state. Only the great dome of St.
Peter's itself has ever clutched my heart as did that modest
curve which had sequestered from infinitude in a place small
enough for my child's mind, the courage and endurance which I
could not comprehend so long as it was lost in "the void of
unresponsible space" under the vaulting sky itself. But through
all my vivid sensations there persisted the image of the eagle in
the corridor below and Lincoln himself as an epitome of all that
was great and good. I dimly caught the notion of the martyred
President as the standard bearer to the conscience of his
countrymen, as the eagle had been the ensign of courage to the
soldiers of the Wisconsin regiment.
Thirty-five years later, as I stood on the hill campus of the
University of Wisconsin with a commanding view of the capitol
building a mile directly across the city, I saw again the dome
which had so uplifted my childish spirit. The University, which
was celebrating it's fiftieth anniversary, had honored me with a
doctor's degree, and in the midst of the academic pomp and the
rejoicing, the dome again appeared to me as a fitting symbol of the
state's aspiration even in its high mission of universal education.
Thousands of children in the sixties and seventies, in the
simplicity which is given to the understanding of a child, caught a
notion of imperishable heroism when they were told that brave men
had lost their lives that the slaves might be free. At any moment
the conversation of our elders might turn upon these heroic events;
there were red-letter days, when a certain general came to see my
father, and again when Governor Oglesby, whom all Illinois children
called "Uncle Dick," spent a Sunday under the pine trees in our
front yard. We felt on those days a connection with the great
world so much more heroic than the village world which surrounded
us through all the other days. My father was a member of the state
senate for the sixteen years between 1854 and 1870, and even as a
little child I was dimly conscious of the grave march of public
affairs in his comings and goings at the state capital.
He was much too occupied to allow time for reminiscence, but I
remember overhearing a conversation between a visitor and himself
concerning the stirring days before the war, when it was by no
means certain that the Union men in the legislature would always
have enough votes to keep Illinois from seceding. I heard with
breathless interest my father's account of the trip a majority of
the legislators had made one dark day to St. Louis, that there
might not be enough men for a quorum, and so no vote could be
taken on the momentous question until the Union men could rally
their forces.
My father always spoke of the martyred President as Mr. Lincoln,
and I never heard the great name without a thrill. I remember
the day--it must have been one of comparative leisure, perhaps a
Sunday--when at my request my father took out of his desk a thin
packet marked "Mr. Lincoln's Letters," the shortest one of which
bore unmistakable traces of that remarkable personality. These
letters began, "My dear Double-D'ed Addams," and to the inquiry
as to how the person thus addressed was about to vote on a
certain measure then before the legislature, was added the
assurance that he knew that this Addams "would vote according to
his conscience," but he begged to know in which direction the
same conscience "was pointing." As my father folded up the bits
of paper I fairly held my breath in my desire that he should go
on with the reminiscence of this wonderful man, whom he had known
in his comparative obscurity, or better still, that he should be
moved to tell some of the exciting incidents of the
Lincoln-Douglas debates. There were at least two pictures of
Lincoln that always hung in my father's room, and one in our
old-fashioned upstairs parlor, of Lincoln with little Tad. For
one or all of these reasons I always tend to associate Lincoln
with the tenderest thoughts of my father.
I recall a time of great perplexity in the summer of 1894, when
Chicago was filled with federal troops sent there by the
President of the United States, and their presence was resented
by the governor of the state, that I walked the wearisome way
from Hull-House to Lincoln Park--for no cars were running
regularly at that moment of sympathetic strikes--in order to look
at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous
St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently been placed at the
entrance of the park. Some of Lincoln's immortal words were cut
into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more
sorely need the healing of "with charity towards all" than did
Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had won
charity for those on both sides of "an irrepressible conflict."
Of the many things written of my father in that sad August in
1881, when he died, the one I cared for most was written by an old
political friend of his who was then editor of a great Chicago
daily. He wrote that while there were doubtless many members of
the Illinois legislature who during the great contracts of the war
time and the demoralizing reconstruction days that followed, had
never accepted a bribe, he wished to bear testimony that he
personally had known but this one man who had never been offered a
bribe because bad men were instinctively afraid of him.
I feel now the hot chagrin with which I recalled this statement
during those early efforts of Illinois in which Hull- House
joined, to secure the passage of the first factory legislation. I
was told by the representatives of an informal association of
manufacturers that if the residents of Hull-House would drop this
nonsense about a sweatshop bill, of which they knew nothing,
certain business men would agree to give fifty thousand dollars
within two years to be used for any of the philanthropic
activities of the Settlement. As the fact broke upon me that I
was being offered a bribe, the shame was enormously increased by
the memory of this statement. What had befallen the daughter of
my father that such a thing could happen to her? The salutary
reflection that it could not have occurred unless a weakness in
myself had permitted it, withheld me at least from an historic
display of indignation before the two men making the offer, and I
explained as gently as I could that we had no ambition to make
Hull-House "the largest institution on the West Side," but that we
were much concerned that our neighbors should be protected from
untoward conditions of work, and--so much heroics, youth must
permit itself--if to accomplish this the destruction of Hull-House
was necessary, that we would cheerfully sing a Te Deum on its
ruins. The good friend who had invited me to lunch at the Union
League Club to meet two of his friends who wanted to talk over the
sweat shop bill here kindly intervened, and we all hastened to
cover the awkward situation by that scurrying away from ugly
morality which seems to be an obligation of social intercourse.
Of the many old friends of my father who kindly came to look up
his daughter in the first days of Hull-House, I recall none with
more pleasure than Lyman Trumbull, whom we used to point out to
members of the Young Citizen's Club as the man who had for days
held in his keeping the Proclamation of Emancipation until his
friend President Lincoln was ready to issue it. I remember the
talk he gave at Hull-House on one of our early celebrations of
Lincoln's birthday, his assertion that Lincoln was no cheap
popular hero, that the "common people" would have to make an
effort if they would understand his greatness, as Lincoln
painstakingly made a long effort to understand the greatness of
the people. There was something in the admiration of Lincoln's
contemporaries, or at least of those men who had known him
personally, which was quite unlike even the best of the devotion
and reverent understanding which has developed since. In the
first place, they had so large a fund of common experience; they
too had pioneered in a western country, and had urged the
development of canals and railroads in order that the raw prairie
crops might be transported to market; they too had realized that
if this last tremendous experiment in self-government failed here,
it would be the disappointment of the centuries and that upon
their ability to organize self-government in state, county, and
town depended the verdict of history. These men also knew, as
Lincoln himself did, that if this tremendous experiment was to
come to fruition, it must be brought about by the people
themselves; that there was no other capital fund upon which to
draw. I remember an incident occurring when I was about fifteen
years old, in which the conviction was driven into my mind that
the people themselves were the great resource of the country. My
father had made a little address of reminiscence at a meeting of
"the old settlers of Stephenson County," which was held every
summer in the grove beside the mill, relating his experiences in
inducing the farmers of the county to subscribe for stock in the
Northwestern Railroad, which was the first to penetrate the county
and make a connection with the Great Lakes at Chicago. Many of the
Pennsylvania German farmers doubted the value of "the whole
new-fangled business," and had no use for any railroad, much less
for one in which they were asked to risk their hard-earned
savings. My father told of his despair in one farmers' community
dominated by such prejudice which did not in the least give way
under his argument, but finally melted under the enthusiasm of a
high-spirited German matron who took a share to be paid for "out
of butter and egg money." As he related his admiration of her, an
old woman's piping voice in the audience called out: "I'm here
to-day, Mr. Addams, and I'd do it again if you asked me." The old
woman, bent and broken by her seventy years of toilsome life, was
brought to the platform and I was much impressed by my father's
grave presentation of her as "one of the public-spirited pioneers
to whose heroic fortitude we are indebted for the development of
this country." I remember that I was at that time reading with
great enthusiasm Carlyle's "Heroes and Hero Worship," but on the
evening of "Old Settlers' Day," to my surprise, I found it
difficult to go on. Its sonorous sentences and exaltation of the
man who "can" suddenly ceased to be convincing. I had already
written down in my commonplace book a resolution to give at least
twenty-five copies of this book each year to noble young people of
my acquaintance. It is perhaps fitting in this chapter that the
very first Christmas we spent at Hull-House, in spite of exigent
demands upon my slender purse for candy and shoes, I gave to a
club of boys twenty-five copies of the then new Carl Schurz's
"Appreciation of Abraham Lincoln."
In our early effort at Hull-House to hand on to our neighbors
whatever of help we had found for ourselves, we made much of
Lincoln. We were often distressed by the children of immigrant
parents who were ashamed of the pit whence they were digged, who
repudiated the language and customs of their elders, and counted
themselves successful as they were able to ignore the past.
Whenever I held up Lincoln for their admiration as the greatest
American, I invariably pointed out his marvelous power to retain
and utilize past experiences; that he never forgot how the plain
people in Sangamon County thought and felt when he himself had
moved to town; that this habit was the foundation for his
marvelous capacity for growth; that during those distracting
years in Washington it enabled him to make clear beyond denial to
the American people themselves, the goal towards which they were
moving. I was sometimes bold enough to add that proficiency in
the art of recognition and comprehension did not come without
effort, and that certainly its attainment was necessary for any
successful career in our conglomerate America.
An instance of the invigorating and clarifying power of Lincoln's
influence came to me many years ago in England. I had spent two
days in Oxford under the guidance of Arnold Toynbee's old friend
Sidney Ball of St. John's College, who was closely associated
with the group of scholars we all identify with the beginnings of
the Settlement movement. It was easy to claim the philosophy of
Thomas Hill Green, the road-building episode of Ruskin, the
experimental living in the east end by Frederick Maurice, the
London Workingman's College of Edward Dennison, as foundations
laid by university men for the establishment of Toynbee Hall. I
was naturally much interested in the beginnings of the movement
whose slogan was "Back to the People," and which could doubtless
claim the Settlement as one of its manifestations. Nevertheless
the processes by which so simple a conclusion as residence among
the poor in East London was reached, seemed to me very involved
and roundabout. However inevitable these processes might be for
class-conscious Englishmen, they could not but seem artificial to
a western American who had been born in a rural community where
the early pioneer life had made social distinctions impossible.
Always on the alert lest American Settlements should become mere
echoes and imitations of the English movement, I found myself
assenting to what was shown me only with that part of my
consciousness which had been formed by reading of English social
movements, while at the same time the rustic American looked on
in detached comment.
Why should an American be lost in admiration of a group of Oxford
students because they went out to mend a disused road, inspired
thereto by Ruskin's teaching for the bettering of the common
life, when all the country roads in America were mended each
spring by self-respecting citizens, who were thus carrying out
the simple method devised by a democratic government for
providing highways. No humor penetrated my high mood even as I
somewhat uneasily recalled certain spring thaws when I had been
mired in roads provided by the American citizen. I continued to
fumble for a synthesis which I was unable to make until I
developed that uncomfortable sense of playing two roles at once.
It was therefore almost with a dual consciousness that I was
ushered, during the last afternoon of my Oxford stay, into the
drawingroom of the Master of Balliol. Edward Caird's "Evolution
of Religion," which I had read but a year or two before, had been
of unspeakable comfort to me in the labyrinth of differing
ethical teachings and religious creeds which the many immigrant
colonies of our neighborhood presented. I remember that I wanted
very much to ask the author himself how far it was reasonable to
expect the same quality of virtue and a similar standard of
conduct from these divers people. I was timidly trying to apply
his method of study to those groups of homesick immigrants
huddled together in strange tenement houses, among whom I seemed
to detect the beginnings of a secular religion or at least of a
wide humanitarianism evolved out of the various exigencies of the
situation; somewhat as a household of children, whose mother is
dead, out of their sudden necessity perform unaccustomed offices
for each other and awkwardly exchange consolations, as children
in happier households never dream of doing. Perhaps Mr. Caird
could tell me whether there was any religious content in this
Faith to each other; this fidelity
Of fellow wanderers in a desert place.
But when tea was over and my opportunity came for a talk with my
host, I suddenly remembered, to the exclusion of all other
associations, only Mr. Caird's fine analysis of Abraham Lincoln,
delivered in a lecture two years before.
The memory of Lincoln, the mention of his name, came like a
refreshing breeze from off the prairie, blowing aside all the
scholarly implications in which I had become so reluctantly
involved, and as the philosopher spoke of the great American "who
was content merely to dig the channels through which the moral life
of his countrymen might flow," I was gradually able to make a
natural connection between this intellectual penetration at Oxford
and the moral perception which is always necessary for the
discovery of new methods by which to minister to human needs. In
the unceasing ebb and flow of justice and oppression we must all
dig channels as best we may, that at the propitious moment somewhat
of the swelling tide may be conducted to the barren places of life.
Gradually a healing sense of well-being enveloped me and a quick
remorse for my blindness, as I realized that no one among his own
countrymen had been able to interpret Lincoln's greatness more
nobly than this Oxford scholar had done, and that vision and
wisdom as well as high motives must lie behind every effective
stroke in the continuous labor for human equality; I remembered
that another Master of Balliol, Jowett himself, had said that it
was fortunate for society that every age possessed at least a few
minds, which, like Arnold Toynbee's, were "perpetually disturbed
over the apparent inequalities of mankind." Certainly both the
English and American settlements could unite in confessing to
that disturbance of mind.
Traces of this Oxford visit are curiously reflected in a paper I
wrote soon after my return at the request of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science. It begins as follows:--
The word "settlement," which we have borrowed from London,
is apt to grate a little upon American ears. It is not,
after all, so long ago that Americans who settled were
those who had adventured into a new country, where they
were pioneers in the midst of difficult surroundings. The
word still implies migrating from one condition of life to
another totally unlike it, and against this implication
the resident of an American settlement takes alarm.
We do not like to acknowledge that Americans are divided
into two nations, as her prime minister once admitted of
England. We are not willing, openly and professedly, to
assume that American citizens are broken up into classes,
even if we make that assumption the preface to a plea that
the superior class has duties to the inferior. Our
democracy is still our most precious possession, and we do
well to resent any inroads upon it, even though they may
be made in the name of philanthropy.
Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our
democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic
government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and
shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable
contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.