American Men of Action | Page 3

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,