Until that time comes, dear reader, you yourself must supply the X-ray of insight. If you can learn to do that, you will find history and biography the most interesting of studies. Biography is, of course, the basis of all history, since history is merely the record of man's failures and successes; and, read thus, it is a wonderful and inspiring thing, for the successes so overtop the failures, the good so out-weighs the bad. By the touchstone of imagination, even badly written biography may be colored and vitalized. Try it—try to see the man you are reading about as an actual human being; make him come out of the pages of the book and stand before you; give him a personality. Watch for his humors, his mistakes, his failings—be sure he had them, however exalted he may have been—they will help to make him human. The spectacle of Washington, riding forward in a towering rage at the battle of Monmouth, has done more to make him real for us than any other incident in his life. So the picture that Franklin gives of his landing at Philadelphia and walking up Market street in the early morning, a loaf of bread under either arm, brings him right home to us; though this simple, kindly, and humorous philosopher is one of the realest figures on the pages of history. We love Andrew Jackson for his irascible wrong-headedness, Farragut for his burst of wrath in Mobile harbor, Lincoln for his homely wisdom.
I have said that, read as the record of man's failures and successes, history is an inspiring thing. Perhaps of the history of no country is this so true as of that of ours. By far the larger part of our great men have started at the very bottom of the ladder, in poverty and obscurity, and have fought their way up round by round against all the forces of society. Nowhere else have inherited wealth and inherited position counted for so little as in America. Again, we have had no wars of greed or ambition, unless the war with Mexico could be so called. We have, at least, had no tyrants—instead, we have witnessed the spectacle, unique in history, of a great general winning his country's freedom, and then disbanding his army and retiring to his farm. "The Cincinnatus of the West," Byron called him; and John Richard Green adds, "No nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life." He has emerged from the mists of tradition, from the sanctimonious wrappings in which the early biographers disguised him, has softened and broadened into the most human of men, and has won our love as well as our veneration.
George Washington was the founder. Beside his name, two others stand out, serene and dominant: Christopher Columbus, the discoverer; Abraham Lincoln, the preserver. And yet, neither Columbus, nor Washington, nor Lincoln was what we call a genius—a genius, that is, in the sense in which Shakespeare or Napoleon or Galileo was a genius. But they combined in singular degree those three characteristics without which no man may be truly great: sincerity and courage and singleness of purpose.
It is not without a certain awe that we contemplate these men—men like ourselves, let us always remember, but, in many ways, how different! Not different in that they were infallible or above temptation; not different in that they never made mistakes; but different in that they each of them possessed an inward vision of the true and the eternal, while most of us grope blindly amid the false and trivial. What that vision was, and with what high faith and complete devotion they followed it, we shall see in the story of their lives.
This is the basic difference between great men and little ones—the little ones are concerned solely with to-day; the great ones think only of the future. They have gained that largeness of vision and of understanding which perceives the pettiness of everyday affairs and which disregards them for greater things. They live in the world, indeed, but in a world modified and colored by the divine ferment within them. There are some who claim that America has never produced a genius of the first order, or, at most, but two; however that may be, she has produced, as has no other country, men with great hearts and seeing eyes and devoted souls who have spent themselves for their country and their race.
One hears, sometimes, a grumbler complaining of the defects of a republic; yet, certainly, in these United States, the republican form of government, established with no little fear and uncertainty by the Fathers, has, with all its defects, received triumphant vindication. Nowhere more triumphant than in the men it has produced, the story of whose lives is the story of its history.
There are two kinds of greatness—greatness of deed and greatness of thought. The first kind is shown in the lives of such men as Columbus and Washington and Farragut, who translated thought into action and who did great things. The second kind is the greatness of authors and artists and scientists, who write great books, or paint great pictures or make great discoveries, and this sort of greatness will be considered in a future volume; for all there has been room for in this one is the story of the lives of America's great "men of action." And even of them, only a sketch in broad outline has been possible in space so limited; but this little book is merely a guide-post, as it were, pointing toward the road leading to the city where these great men dwell—the City of American Biography.
It is a city peopled with heroes. There are Travis and Crockett and Bowie, who held The Alamo until they all were slain; there is Craven, who stepped aside that his pilot might escape from his sinking ship; there is Lawrence, whose last words are still ringing down the years; there is Nathan Hale, immortalized by his lofty bearing beneath the scaffold; there is Robert Gould Shaw, who led a forlorn hope at the head of a despised race;—even to name them is to review those great events in American history which bring proud tears to the eyes of every lover of his country.
Of all this we shall tell, as simply as may be, giving the story of our country's history and development in terms of its great men. So far as possible, the text has been kept free of dates, because great men are of all time, and, compared with the deeds themselves, their dates are of minor importance. But a summary at the end of each chapter gives, for purposes of convenient reference, the principal dates in the lives of the men whose achievements are considered in it.
In the preparation of these thumb-nail sketches, the present writer makes no pretense of original investigation. He has taken his material wherever he could find it, making sure only that it was accurate, and his sole purpose has been to give, in as few words as possible, a correct impression of the man and what he did. From the facts as given, however, he has drawn his own conclusions, with some of which, no doubt, many people will disagree. But he has tried to paint the men truly, in a few strokes, as they appeared to him, without seeking to conceal their weaknesses, but at the same time without magnifying them—remembering always that they were men, subject to mistakes and errors, to be honored for such true vision as they possessed; remarkable, many of them, for heroism and high devotion, and worthy a lasting place in the grateful memory of their country.
The passage of years has a way of diminishing the stature of men thought great, and often of increasing that of men thought little. Few American statesmen, for example, loom as large to-day as they appeared to their contemporaries. Looking back at them, we perceive that, for the most part, they wasted their days in fighting wind-mills, or in doing things which had afterwards to be undone. Only through the vista of the years do we get a true perspective, just as only from a distance can we see which peaks of the mountain-range loom highest. But even the mist of years cannot dim essential heroism and nobility of achievement. Indeed, it enhances them; the voyage of Columbus seems to us a far greater thing than his contemporaries thought it; Washington is for us a more venerable figure than he was for the new-born Union; and Lincoln is just coming into his own as a leader among men.
Every boy and girl ought to try to gain as true and clear an idea as possible of their country's history, and of the men who made that history. It is a pleasant study, and grows more and more fascinating as one proceeds with it. The great pleasure in reading is to understand every word, and so to catch the writer's thought completely. Knowledge always gives pleasure in just that way—by a wider understanding. Indeed, that is the principal aim of education: to enable the individual to get the most out of life by broadening his horizon, so that he sees more and understands more than he could do if he remained ignorant. And since you are an American, you will need especially