abatement of judgment than a report. It was perfectly proper that he
should endeavor to put everything in its true light, and he would be
sure of the sympathy of all right-minded men in so doing; but an _ex
parte_ statement at once rouses and justifies adverse criticism. He
has omitted many documents essential to the formation of a just
opinion; and it is only when we have read these also, in the Report of
the Committee on the Conduct of the War, that we feel the full weight
of the cumulative evidence going to show the hearty support in men and
confidence that he received from the Administration, and, when there
were no more men to be sent, and confidence began to yield before
irresistible facts, the prolonged forbearance with which he was still
favored. Nothing can be kinder or more cordial than the despatches and
letters both of the President and Mr. Stanton, down to the time when
General McClellan wrote the following sentences at the end of an
official communication addressed to the latter: "If I save this army
now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you, or to any other
persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this
army." (28th June, 1862.) We shall seek no epithet to characterize
language like this. All but the most bigoted partisans will qualify it
as it deserves. We have here a glaring example of that warping of good
sense and good feeling which the consciousness of having a political
stake at risk will produce in a gallant soldier and a courteous
gentleman. Can General McClellan, after a year to grow cool in, either
himself believe, or expect any one else to believe, that the President
and the Secretary of War would "do their best to sacrifice" an army of
a hundred and fifty thousand brave men, in order to lessen his possible
chances as a candidate for the Presidency? It was of vastly more
importance to them than to him that he should succeed. The dignified
good temper of Mr. Lincoln's answer to this wanton insult does him
honor: "I have not said you were ungenerous for saying you needed
reinforcements; I thought you were ungenerous in assuming that I did
not send them as fast as I could. I feel any misfortune to you and your
army quite as keenly as you feel it yourself." Mr. Stanton could only
be silent; and whatever criticisms may be made on some traits of his
character, he is quite safe in leaving the rebuke of such an imputation
to whoever feels that earnestness, devotion, and unflagging purpose are
high qualities in a public officer.
If General McClellan had been as prompt in attacking the enemy as he
showed himself in this assault on his superiors, we think his campaign
in the Peninsula would have ended more satisfactorily. We have no doubt
that he would conduct a siege or a defence with all the science and all
the proprieties of warfare, but we think he has proved himself
singularly wanting in the qualities which distinguish the natural
leaders of men. He had every theoretic qualification, but no ardor, no
leap, no inspiration. A defensive general is an earthen redoubt, not an
ensign to rally enthusiasm and inspire devotion. Caution will never
make an army, though it may sometimes save one. We think General
McClellan reduced the efficiency and lowered the tone of his soldiers
by his six months' dose of prudence. With every day he gave the enemy,
he lessened his chances of success, and added months to the duration of
the war. He never knew how to find opportunity, much less to make it.
He was an accomplished soldier, but lacked that downright common sense
which is only another name for genius with its coat off for actual work
in hand.
Were General McClellan's Report nothing more than a report, were the
General himself nothing more than an officer endeavoring to palliate a
failure, we should not have felt called on to notice his plea, unless
to add publicity to any new facts he might be able to bring forward.
But the Report is a political manifesto, and not only that, but an
attack on the administration which appointed him to the command,
supported him with all its resources, and whose only fault it was not
sooner to discover his incapacity to conduct aggressive movements.
General McClellan is a candidate for the Presidency, and as he has had
no opportunity to show his capacity in any civil function, his claim
must rest on one of two grounds,--either the ability he has shown as a
general, or the specific principles of policy he is supposed to
represent. Whatever may be the success of our operations in the field,
our Chief Magistracy for the next four years will demand a person of
great experience and ability. Questions cannot fail to arise taxing
prudence of the longest forecast and decision of the firmest quality.
How far is General McClellan likely to fulfill these conditions? What
are the qualities of mind of which both his career and his Report give
the most irrefragable evidence?
General McClellan's mind seems to be equally incapable of appreciating
the value of time as the material of action, and its power in changing
the relations of facts, and thus modifying the basis of opinion. He is
a good maker of almanacs, but no good judge of the weather. Judging by
the political counsel which he more than once felt called upon to offer
the President, and which, as he has included it in his Report, we must
presume to represent his present opinions, he does not seem even yet to
appreciate the fact that this is not a war between two nations, but an
attempt at revolution within ourselves, which can be adequately met
only by revolutionary measures. And yet, if he were at this moment
elevated to the conduct of our affairs, he would find himself
controlled by the same necessities which have guided Mr. Lincoln, and
must either adopt his measures, or submit to a peace dictated by the
South. No side issue as to how the war shall be conducted is any longer
possible. The naked question is one of war or submission, for
compromise means surrender; and if the choice be war, we cannot afford
to give the enemy fifty in the game, by standing upon scruples which he
would be the last to appreciate or to act upon. It is one of the most
terrible features of war that it must be inexorable by its very nature.
Great statesmanship and great generalship have been more than once
shown by the same man, and, naturally enough, because they both result
from the same qualities of mind, an instant apprehension of the demand
of the moment, and a self-confidence that can as instantly meet it, so
that every energy of the man is gathered to one intense focus. It is
the faculty of being a present man, instead of a prospective one; of
being ready, instead of getting ready. Though we think great injustice
has been done by the public to General McClellan's really high merits
as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely
the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded
of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but,
be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion
of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of
elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself
to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that
judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days' sight, of
which General McClellan has shown least.
Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose
leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to
be our surest guide? If the war is still to be carried on,--and surely
the nation has shown no symptoms of slackening in its purpose,--what
modifications of it would General McClellan introduce? The only
information that is vouchsafed us is, that he is to be the
"conservative" candidate, a phrase that may mean too little or too
much. As well as we can understand it, it is the convenient formula by
which to express the average want of opinions of all who are out of
place, out of humor, or dislike the dust which blinds and chokes
whoever is behind the times. Sometimes it is used as the rallying-cry
of an amiable class of men, who still believe, in a vague sort of way,
that the rebels can be conciliated by offering them a ruler more
_comme il faut_ than Mr. Lincoln, a country where a flatboat-man
may rise to the top, by virtue of mere manhood, being hardly the place
for people of truly refined sensibilities. Or does it really mean
nothing more nor less than that we are to try to put slavery back again
where it was before (only that it is not quite convenient just now to
say so), on the theory that teleologically the pot of ointment was made
to conserve the dead fly?
In the providence of God the first thoughtless enthusiasm of the nation
has settled to deep purpose, their anger has been purified by trial
into a conviction of duty, and they are face to face with one of those
rare occasions where duty and advantage are identical. The man who is
fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows
how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned. He
must be one who comprehends that three years of war have made vast
changes in the relative values of things. He must be one who feels to
the very marrow of his bones that this is a war, not to conserve the
forms, but the essence, of free institutions. He must be willing to
sacrifice everything to the single consideration of success, because
success means truth and honor; to use every means, though they may
alarm the fears of men who are loyal with a reservation, or shock the
prejudices of would-be traitors. No middle course is safe in troubled
times, and the only way to escape the dangers of revolution is by
directing its forces and giving it useful work to do.
THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
1864
In spite of the popular theory that nothing is so fallacious as
circumstantial evidence, there is no man of observation who would not
deem it more trustworthy than any human testimony, however honest,
which was made up from personal recollection. The actors in great
affairs are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either to the order
of events or their bearing upon results; for even where selfish
interest is not to be taken into account, the mythic instinct erelong
begins to shape things as they ought to have been, rather than as they
were. This is true even of subjects in which we have no personal
interest, and not only do no two men describe the same street-scene in
the same way, but the same man, unless prosaic to a degree below the
freezing-point of Tupper, will never do it twice in the same way. Few
men, looking into their old diaries, but are astonished at the
contrast, sometimes even the absolute unlikeness, between the matters
of fact recorded there and their own recollection of them. Shortly
after the battle of Lexington it was the interest of the Colonies to
make the British troops not only wanton, but unresisted, aggressors;
and if primitive Christians could be manufactured by affidavit, so
large a body of them ready to turn the other cheek also was never
gathered as in the minute-men before the meeting-house on the 19th of
April, 1775. The Anglo-Saxon could not fight comfortably without the
law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local
pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Redcoats under Pitcairn
almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the
Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary
pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable
for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is,
perhaps, nothing on which so little reliance is to be placed as facts,
especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to
our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees
according to his prejudices, and is stone-blind to whatever he did not
expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be
suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great
caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such
poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes.
The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of
Captain Kidd, and which was still to be bought at street-stalls within
a few years, affirms three times in a single stanza that the pirate's
name was Robert. Yet he was commissioned, indicted, convicted, and
hanged as William Kidd. Nor was he, as is generally supposed, convicted
of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural
to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from
another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem
mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained organs
of scientific men.
History, we are told, is philosophy teaching by example. But how if the
example does not apply? Le Verrier discovers Neptune when, according to
his own calculations, the planet should not have been in the place
where his telescope found it. Does the example redound to the credit of
luck or of mathematics? The historian may give a thoroughly false view
of an event by simply assuming that _after_ means _in consequence of_,
or even by the felicitous turn of a sentence. Style will find readers
and shape convictions, while mere truth only gathers dust on the shelf.
The memory first, and by degrees the judgment, is enslaved by the
epigrams of Tacitus or Michelet. Our conception of scenes and men is
outlined and colored for us by the pictorial imagination of Carlyle.
Indeed, after reading history, one can only turn round, with Montaigne,
and say, _What know I?_ There was a time when the reputation of Judas
might have been thought past mending, but a German has whitewashed him
as thoroughly as Malone did Shakespeare's bust, and an English poet
made him the hero of a tragedy, as the one among the disciples who
believed too much. Call no one happy till he is dead? Rather call no
one safe, whether in good repute or evil, after he has been dead long
enough to have his effigy done in historical wax-work. Only get the
real clothes, that is, only be careful to envelop him in a sufficiently
probable dressing of facts, and the public will be entirely satisfied.
What's Hecuba to us, or we to Hecuba? Or is Thackeray's way any nearer
the truth, who strips Louis the Great of all his stage-properties, and
shows him to us the miserable forked radish of decrepitude?
There are many ways of writing what is called history. The earliest and
simplest was to record in the form of annals, without investigating,
whatever the writer could lay hold of, the only thread of connection
being the order of time, so that events have no more relation to each
other than so many beads on a string. Higher then this, because more
picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are
the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes
sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems
to take life and motion as we read. The annalist still survives, a kind
of literary dodo, in the "standard" historian, respectable,
immitigable,--with his philosophy of history, and his stereotyped
phrase, his one Amurath succeeding another, so very dead, so unlike
anything but historical characters, that we can scarce believe they
ever lived,--and only differing from his ancient congener of the
monastery by his skill in making ten words do the duty of one. His are
the fatal books without which no gentleman's library can be complete;
his the storied pages which ingenuous youth is invited to turn, and is
apt to turn four or five together. With him something is still always
sure to transpire in the course of these negotiations, still the
traditional door is opened to the inroad of democratic innovation,
still it is impossible to interpret the motives which inspired the
conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he
himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters
that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of
history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and
ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the
Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless
investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those
Sirens, keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fellow-men call
by another name. Unhappy books, which we know by heart before we read
them, and which a mysterious superstition yet compels many unoffending
persons to read! What has not the benevolent reader had to suffer at
the hands of the so-called impartial historian, who, wholly
disinterested and disinteresting, writes with as mechanic an industry
and as little emotion as he would have brought to the weaving of calico
or the digging of potatoes, under other circumstances! Far truer, at
least to nature and to some conceivable theory of an immortal soul in
man, is the method of the poet, who makes his personages luminous from
within by an instinctive sympathy with human motives of action, and a
conception of the essential unity of character through every change of
fate.
Of late years men have begun to question the prescriptive right of this
"great gyant Asdryasdust, who has choked many men," to choke them also
because he had worked his wicked will on their fathers. It occurred to
an inquiring mind here and there that if the representation of men's
action and passion on the theatre could be made interesting, there was
no good reason why the great drama of history should be dull as a
miracle-play. Need philosophy teaching by example be so tiresome that
the pupils would rather burst in ignorance than go within earshot of
the pedagogue? Hence the historical romance, sometimes honestly called
so, and limited by custom in number of volumes; sometimes not called
so, and without any such limitation. This latter variety admits several
styles of treatment. Sometimes a special epoch is chosen, where one
heroic figure may serve as a centre round which events and subordinate
characters group themselves, with no more sacrifice of truth than is
absolutely demanded by artistic keeping. This may be called the epic
style, of which Carlyle is the acknowledged master. Sometimes a period
is selected, where the facts, by coloring and arrangement, may be made
to support the views of a party, and history becomes a political
pamphlet indefinitely prolonged. Here point is the one thing
needful,--to be attained at all hazards, whether by the turn of a
sentence or the twisting of a motive. Macaulay is preeminent in this
kind, and woe to the party or the man that comes between him and his
epigrammatic necessity! Again, there is the new light, or perhaps, more
properly, the forlorn-hope method, where the author accepts a brief
against the _advocatus diaboli_, and strives to win a reverse of
judgment, as Mr. Froude has done in the case of Henry VIII. The latest
fashion of all is the _a priori_, in which a certain dominant principle
is taken for granted, and everything is deduced from _x_, instead of
serving to prove what _x_ may really be. The weakness of this heroic
treatment, it seems to us, is in allowing too little to human nature as
an element in the problem. This would be a fine world, if facts would
only be as subservient to theory in real life as in the author's
inkstand. Mr. Buckle stands at the head of this school, and has just
found a worthy disciple in M. Taine, who, in his _Histoire de la
Litterature Anglaise_, having first assumed certain ethnological
postulates, seems rather to shape the character of the literature to
the race than to illustrate that of the race by the literature.
In short, whether we consider the incompetence of men in general as
observers, their carelessness about things at the moment indifferent,
but which may become of consequence hereafter (as, for example, in the
dating of letters), their want of impartiality, both in seeing and
stating occurrences and in tracing or attributing motives, it is plain
that history is not to be depended on in any absolute sense. That
smooth and indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or
a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are,
is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold
the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or
political prescience, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy,
is enough to prove, either that it is impossible to know all the terms
of our problem, or that history does not repeat itself with anything
like the exactness of coincidence which is so pleasing to the
imagination. Six months _after_ the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851,
Mr. Savage Landor, who knew him well, said to us that Louis Napoleon
had ten times the political sagacity of his uncle; but who foresaw or
foretold an Augustus in the dull-eyed frequenter of Lady Blessington's,
the melodramatic hero of Strasburg and Bologne, with his cocked hat and
his eagle from Astley's? What insurance company would have taken the
risk of his hare-brained adventure? Coleridge used to take credit to
himself for certain lucky vaticinations, but his memory was always
inexact, his confounding of what he did and what he thought he meant to
do always to be suspected, and his prophecies, when examined, are
hardly more precise than an ancient oracle or a couplet of Nostradamus.
The almanac-makers took the wisest course, stretching through a whole
month their "about this time expect a change of weather."
That history repeats itself has become a kind of truism, but of as
little practical value in helping us to form our opinions as other
similar labor-saving expedients to escape thought. Sceptical minds see
in human affairs a regular oscillation, hopeful ones a continual
progress, and both can support their creeds with abundance of pertinent
example. Both seem to admit a law of recurrence, but the former make it
act in a circle, the latter in a spiral. There is, no doubt, one
constant element in the reckoning, namely, human nature, and perhaps
another in human nature itself,--the tendency to reaction from all
extremes; but the way in which these shall operate, and the force they
shall exert, are dependent on a multitude of new and impredicable
circumstances. Coincidences there certainly are, but our records are
hardly yet long enough to furnish the basis for secure induction. Such
parallelisms are merely curious, and entertain the fancy rather than
supply precedent for the judgment. When Tacitus tells us that
gladiators have not so much stomach for fighting as soldiers, we
remember our own roughs and shoulder-hitters at the beginning of the
war, and are inclined to think that Macer and Billy Wilson illustrated
a general truth. But, unfortunately, Octavius found prize-fighters of
another metal, not to speak of Spartacus. Perhaps the objections to our
making use of colored soldiers (_hic niger est, hunc tu, Romane,
caveto_) will seem as absurd one of these days as the outcry that Caesar
was degrading the service by enlisting Gauls; but we will not hazard a
prophecy. In the alarm of the Pannonian revolt, his nephew recruited
the army of Italy by a conscription of slaves, who thereby became free,
and this measure seems to have been acquiesced in by the unwarlike
citizens, who preferred that the experiment of death should be made _in
corpore vili_ rather than in their own persons.