Abraham LincolnCharnwood, Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Baron
History
Abraham Lincoln
Charnwood, Godfrey Rathbone Benson, Baron
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more
powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina. He enjoyed
beyond all his contemporaries the fame of an intellectual person.
Lincoln conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating phrases.
An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who knew him, has described him as
"embodied intellect." He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative
tides to respect which have gone far in America to ensure praise from the
public and the historians; for he was correct and austere, and, which is
more, kindly among his family and his slaves. He is credited, too, with
an observance of high principle in public life, which it might be
difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions. But the
warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as "heartless, selfish, and a
physical coward," and Jackson could speak generously of an opponent whom
he really knew. His intellect must have been powerful enough, but it was
that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights in elaborate
deductions from principles which he is too proud to revise; a man, too,
who is fearless in accepting conclusions which startle or repel the
vulgar mind; who is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense,
healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth. Such men have
disciples who reap the disgrace which their masters are apt somehow to
avoid; they give the prestige of wisdom and high thought to causes which
could not otherwise earn them. A Northern soldier came back wounded in
1865 and described to the next soldier in the hospital Calhoun's monument
at Charleston. The other said: "What you saw is not the real monument,
but I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South. . . . That is
Calhoun's real monument."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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