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Bruce Cotton began as a reporter for the Cleoeland News, and after working on other papers, became the Washington correspondent for the N.E.A. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1954, and he is at present occupied in further study of the Civil War and as Editor of American Heritage. Lincoln's Difficult Decisions * BRUCE CATTON t? stand in new Salem and talk about the great decisions which Abraham Lincoln made, which have affected the life of the entire country ever since, is to run into one of the strange and dramatic chapters of the American story. One hundred and twenty-five years ago Lincoln came to this town as a young man of twenty-two. He was long, lanky, uneducated, uncultivated and uninspired. There was nothing whatever to show that this uncouth frontiersman had the American future in his keeping. To all outward appearances he was simply one more back woodsman coming to a little town to make his way in the world. But American life works in strange ways, and one of the inspiring things about the Lincoln story is the simple fact that it was to be given to this untaught countryman to grow and develop and finally to lead a great nation down the path to the future. What Lincoln did, when he got into the White House, grew directly out of what he was here in New Salem. Through him, middle America spoke, with all the vision and the overpowering strength which had been developed on the frontier in the formative days of the republic. As President, Lincoln had some tremendous decisions to make. He had nothing to guide him as he made them except his own sense of what America was all about and his own willingness to meet a crisis according to the best light which his own conscience could give him. The first decision was thrust upon him within six weeks of the day when he took the oath of office. In the shadowy marshland around Fort * This address was delivered at a special convocation of Lincoln College, celebrating the 125th anniversary of Lincoln's arrival at New Salem. This special Lincoln College 125th anniversary convocation was held in Petersburg, Illinois, April 22, 1956. 6 BRUCE CATTON Sumter southern guns opened fire, and it was up to Lincoln to determine what this challenge meant and how it should be coped with. In his reaction to this sudden stroke of violence Lincoln went far to determine the scope and the meaning of the war which the bombardment brought on. Without hesitation, Lincoln accepted the war as a revolutionary situation . None of the guide lines laid down by the founding fathers were of any use to him here. He had to decide for himself what the war meant and how it should be fought. Accepting it as a revolution, he unhesitatingly adopted revolutionary means to fight it—and by so doing, he set the key for everything that was to happen in the next four years. He concluded , above everything else, that he would not be bound by legalistic considerations. Secession as he saw it was nothing less than an attempt at revolution, and in a revolution any means that lie to one's hands must be used and used quickly. On April 19, the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry undertook to march across Baltimore on its way to Washington and got into a street fight with a secessionist mob. Lincoln's reaction was swift and ruthless. The Mayor of Baltimore and nineteen members of the state legislature were promptly thrown in jail. When the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court issued a writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln blandly ignored it. He marched troops into Baltimore, entrusting their command to the hard-boiled General Ben Butler; he put Federal troops in eastern Maryland to curb secessionist sentiment there. He made it, as a matter of fact, quite impossible for southern sympathizers in Maryland to exert any influence on the way Maryland would react to the crisis of civil war. Doing all this, Lincoln stretched the Constitution past the breaking point and without question acted in an extremely highhanded manner. What Maryland...

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