Part 7 (2/2)

”I'LL HIT THE THING HARD!”

In Coffin's ”Lincoln,” it is stated that when Lincoln and Offutt, boating to New Orleans, attended a slave auction for the first time, the former said to his companion:

”By the Eternal, if ever I get a chance to hit this thing, I'll hit it hard!”

The oath was General-President Jackson's, and familiar as a household word at the day. The promise is premature in a youth of twenty.

Herndon, twenty-five years a.s.sociated with Lincoln, doubts, but says that Lincoln did allude to some such utterance. But it is Dennis Hanks, cousin of Lincoln, who affirms that they two saw such a sight, and that he knew by his companion's emotion that ”the iron had entered into his soul.”

In 1841 Lincoln and Speed had a tedious low-water trip from Louisville to St. Louis. Lincoln says: ”There were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me ... a _thing_ which has and continually exercises the power of making me miserable.”

But his acts show that he ”hit the thing hard.” It could not recover from the telling stroke which rent the black oak--the Emanc.i.p.ation Act.

THE ”LEX TALIONIS” CHRISTIANIZED.

Frederick Dougla.s.s, the colored men's representative, called on the President to procure a pledge that the unfair treatment of negro soldiers in the Union uniform should cease by retaliatory measures on the captured Confederates. But his hearer shrank, from the bare thought of hanging men in cold blood, even though the rebels should slay the negroes taken.

”Oh, Dougla.s.s, I cannot do that! If I could get hold of the actual murderers of colored prisoners, I would retaliate; but to hang those who have no hand in the atrocities, I cannot do _that_!”--(By F. Dougla.s.s, in _Northwestern Advocate_.)

THE SLAVE-DEALER.

”You have among you the cla.s.s of native tyrants known as the slave-dealer. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculating price. If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but, if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly; you do not recognize him for a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rolick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to go through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet; but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony-- instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the ban of non-intercourse with him and his family.”

”Those who deny the poor negro's natural right to himself and make mere merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt, and death.”--(Speech; Reply to Douglas, Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854.)

THE NEGRO HOME, OR AGITATION!

Lincoln was admitted to the law practise in 1837; he went into partners.h.i.+p with John F. Stuart. The latter elected to Congress, he united his legal talents with S. T. Logan's, a union severed in 1843, as both the a.s.sociates were aiming to be congressmen also. Not being nominated, the consolation was in the courts, with Judge Herndon as partner. It was from this daily frequentation that the latter was enabled to write a ”Life of Lincoln.”

An old colored woman came to them for legal aid. Her case was a sad one. Brought from Kentucky, Lincoln's natal State, by a planter, Hinkle, he had set her and children free in Indiana, not fostering the waning oppression. Her son, growing up, had the rashness to venture on the steamboat down to New Orleans. His position was as bad as that of an Americanized foreigner returning into a despotic land. He was arrested and held for sale, having crossed a Louisiana law framed for such intrusions: a free negro could be sold here as if never out of bond. There was little time to redeem him, and Lincoln--whose view of the inst.i.tution had not been enchanting--seized the opportunity to hit ”and hit hard!” as he said in the same city on beholding a slave sale.

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