With Americans of Past and Present Days - Jusserand Jean Jules (книги онлайн txt) 📗

Tous ces fleaux celestes,

Ces ravageurs d'Etats dont les pieds triomphants

Sur les peres broyes ecrasent les enfants,

Grace a toi, desormais, paliront dans l'histoire....

L'humanite te doit l'esclavage aboli....

L'Amerique sa force et la paix revenue,

L'Europe un ideal de grandeur inconnue,

Et l'avenir mettra ton image et ton nom

Plus haut que les Cesars—aupres de Washington.

When, in a log cabin of Kentucky, over a century ago, that child was born who was named after his grandfather killed by the Indians, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon I swayed Europe, Jefferson was President of the United States, and the second War of Independence had not yet come to pass. It seems all very remote. But the memory of the great man to whom these lines are dedicated is as fresh in everybody's mind as if he had only just left us; more people, indeed, know of him now than was the case in his own day. "It is," says Plutarch, "the fortune of all good men that their virtue rises in glory after their death, and that the envy which any evil man may have conceived against them never survives the envious." Such was the fate of Lincoln.

FOOTNOTES

[227] Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, vol. XIII, col. 33 ff., November 2 and 3, 1803. Senator White had also objected that the price, of fifteen million dollars, was too high; while the French plenipotentiary, Barbe-Marbois, had observed that the lands still unoccupied, to be handed to the American Government "would have a value of several billions before a century had elapsed," in which he was no bad prophet. Marbois added: "Those who knew the importance of a perfect understanding between these two countries attached more value to the twenty million francs set apart for the American claims than to the sixty offered to France." In accordance again with Senator White, the deciding motive had not been that longing for "a perfect understanding" mentioned by Marbois, but a feeling that Louisiana would, at the next war, "inevitably fall into the hands of the British." "Of course, it would," future Marshal Berthier, who was averse to the cession, had observed when the point had been mentioned at the council held at the Tuileries, before the First Consul Bonaparte, on Easter Day, 1803, "but Hanover would just as soon be in our hands, and an exchange would take place at the peace.... Remember this: no navy without colonies; no colonies without a navy." Barbe-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane, Paris, 1829, pp. 295, 315, 330.

[228] May 10, 1786.

[229] September 9, 1786.

[230] July 8, 1783.

[231] "Short Autobiography, written at the request of a friend," Complete Works, ed. Nicolay and Hay, 1905, pp. 26, 27.

[232] Ibid., 28, 29.

[233] Some French settlements were still in existence in the region, and were still French. "The French settlements about Kaskaskia retained much of their national character, and the pioneers from the South who visited them or settled among them never ceased to wonder at their gayety, their peaceable industry, and their domestic affection, which they did not care to dissemble and conceal like their shy and reticent neighbors. It was a daily spectacle which never lost its strangeness for the Tennesseeans and Kentuckians to see the Frenchman returning from his work greeted by his wife and children with embraces of welcome 'at the gate of his dooryard, and in view of all the villagers.' The natural and kindly fraternization of the Frenchmen with the Indians was also a cause of wonder." Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, 1904, I, 58.

[234] February 22, 1861.

[235] L'Amerique devant l'Europe, Paris, 1862; conclusion.

[236] Washington, August, 4, 1862.

[237] "L'esprit Gaulois, toujours moqueur, avait saisi le cote plaisant de cet inutile etalage d'epaulettes et de tambours, et les officiers du 55? New York qui, a l'heure du danger, prodiguerent pour leur nouvelle patrie le sang francais sous la direction d'un chef habile et vaillant, M. de Trobriand, s'etaient donnes a eux-memes, dans l'un des repas de corps qui terminent toujours ces ceremonies, le titre joyeux de 'Gardes La fourchette.'" Comte de Paris, Histoire de la Guerre civile en Amerique, 1874, I, 311.

[238] Quatre ans de campagnes a l'armee du Potomac, par Regis de Trobriand, ex-Major General au service volontaire des Etats Unis d'Amerique, Paris, 1867, 2 vols. As is well known, two French princes took part in the war as staff-officers in the Army of the Potomac, the Comte de Paris and the Duc de Chartres. An American officer who was present told me that, whether on foot or on horseback, the Comte de Paris had the habit of stooping. During a severe engagement he was asked to carry an order across an open field, quite exposed to the enemy's fire. He took the order, straightened on his saddle, crossed the field quite erect, fulfilled his mission, recrossed the field, keeping perfectly straight, and when back in the lines, stooped again.

[239] Quatre ans de campagnes, I, 131.

[240] Abraham Lincoln, by Alphonse Jouault. The work was begun in Washington at the time of Lincoln's assassination, which the author witnessed, but printed only in 1875. The text of the second inaugural address had been read in France with great admiration. The famous bishop of Orleans, Dupanloup, wrote concerning it to Augustin Cochin: "Mr. Lincoln expresses with solemn and touching gravity the feelings which, I am sure, pervade superior souls in the North as in the South.... I thank you for having made me read this beautiful page of the history of great men, and I beg you to tell Mr. Bigelow of my sympathetic sentiments. I would hold it an honor if he were so good as to convey an expression of them to Mr. Lincoln." Orleans, April 2, 1865; an appendix to Montalembert's Victoire du Nord, Paris, 1865.

[241] April 28, 1865. Text as well as that of the documents just quoted in The Assassination of President Lincoln. Appendix to Diplomatic Correspondence of 1865, Government Printing Office, 1866.

[242] "Dedie par la Democratie Francaise a Lincoln, President deux fois elu des Etats Unis—Lincoln, honnete homme, abolit l'esclavage, retablit l'union, sauva la Republique, sans voiler la statue de la liberte." The medal is now the property of the President's son, Mr. Robert T. Lincoln.

[243] A very long article by L. de Gaillard, April 30, 1868.

[244] La Victoire du Nord, Paris, 1865, pp. 7, 11, 20, 23.

[245] In the Avenir National, May 3, 1865.

[246] April 29, 1865.

[247] Abraham Lincoln, sa naissance, sa vie, sa mort, par Achille Arnaud, Redacteur a "l'Opinion Nationale." Paris, 1865, p. 96.

[248] Bibliotheque Liberale—Abraham Lincoln, by Augustin Cochin, Paris, 1869.