turned from its original intention, as if this implied that a cheat had
thereby been put upon the country. The truth is, that the popular
understanding has been gradually enlightened as to the real causes of
the war, and, in consequence of that enlightenment, a purpose has grown
up, defining itself slowly into clearer consciousness, to finish the
war in the only way that will keep it finished, by rooting out the evil
principle from which it sprang. The country has been convinced that a
settlement which should stop short of this would be nothing more than a
truce favorable only to the weaker party in the struggle, to the very
criminals who forced it upon us. The single question is, Shall we have
peace by submission or by victory? General McClellan's election insures
the one, Mr. Lincoln's gives us our only chance of the other. It is
Slavery, and not the Southern people, that is our enemy; we must
conquer this to be at peace with them. With the relations of the
several States of the Rebel Confederacy to the Richmond government we
have nothing to do; but to say that, after being beaten as foreign
enemies, they are to resume their previous relations to our own
government as if nothing had happened, seems to us a manifest
absurdity. From whom would General McClellan, if elected under his plan
of conciliation, exact the penalties of rebellion? The States cannot be
punished, and the only merciful way in which we can reach the real
criminals is by that very policy of emancipation whose efficacy is
proved by the bitter opposition of all the allies of the Rebellion in
the North. This is a punishment which will not affect the independence
of individual States, which will improve the condition of the mass of
the Southern population, and which alone will remove the rock of
offence from the pathway of democratic institutions. So long as slavery
is left, there is antipathy between the two halves of the country, and
the recurrence of actual war will be only a question of time. It is the
nature of evil to be aggressive. Without moral force in itself, it is
driven, by the necessity of things, to seek material props. It cannot
make peace with truth, if it would. Good, on the other hand, is by its
very nature peaceful. Strong in itself, strong in the will of God and
the sympathy of man, its conquests are silent and beneficent as those
of summer, warming into life, and bringing to blossom and fruitage,
whatever is wholesome in men and the institutions of men.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
1864-1865.
There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South
Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose
assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation
they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not
control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without
dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor.
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning
to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for
elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of
instinct and tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his
thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be
gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might
gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless
associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up
messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have
evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our
past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon
whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of
our people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions
of national peril. We felt an only too natural distrust of immense
public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which the war
was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that the slackening of
public spirit should be proportionate to the previous over-tension,
might well be foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history.
Men acting gregariously are always in extremes. As they are one moment
capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser
depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall
multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more
surely to distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of
principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all
weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp
mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but
the statesman needs something more durable to work in,--must be able to
rely on the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people,
without which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of
moral than of material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment.
Would this fervor of the Free States hold out? Was it kindled by a just
feeling of the value of constitutional liberty? Had it body enough to
withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our
population intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was
between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government by
law and the tussle of misrule by _pronunciamiento_? Could a war be
maintained without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and
with the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious questions,
and with no precedent to aid in answering them.
[Illustration: _Abraham Lincoln_]
At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for the most
anxious apprehension. A President known to be infected with the
political heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the
Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not say
of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the representative
of a party whose leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in
the conduct of affairs; an empty treasury was called on to supply
resources beyond precedent in the history of finance; the trees were
yet growing and the iron unmined with, which a navy was to be built and
armored; officers without discipline were to make a mob into an army;
and, above all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced
with every vague hint and every specious argument of despondency by a
powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or
actively hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this
latter element of disintegration and discouragement among a people
where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a
reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor in the North were the most
effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no more
insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its
electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the community,
till the excited imagination makes every real danger loom heightened
with its unreal double.
And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem to
be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate relations
and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution were so
intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable
contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were,
from their novelty, incapable of arrangement under any of the
categories of historical precedent, that there were moments of crisis
when the firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the
democratic theory of government might well hold his breath in vague
apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy,
solemnly arguing from the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or
Flemish city, whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and
then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught us that
democracies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated
and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in
material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of exceptional
restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but
centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last
into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military
despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from
books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who,
having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the
"Times" demanding redress, and drawing a mournful inference of
democratic instability. Nor were men wanting among ourselves who had so
steeped their brains in London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for
European culture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan
breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all they were to
democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join in the
shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.
But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or
the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against
any over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we consider the
expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or
the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times--was to be waged by a people divided at home,
unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate without
experience and without reputation, whose every measure was sure to be
cunningly hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who,
while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a
hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All
this was to be done without warning and without preparation, while at
the same time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the
political condition of four millions of people, by softening the
prejudices, allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the
cooperation, of their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were
an occasion when the heightened imagination of the historian might see
Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of
her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three years;
never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that strength be
so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people,--to
that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political framework like our
own. We find it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be blind
to the grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on here,--to
the heroic energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving
that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we own
that it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and moral condition
of the American who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by
being even a spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a
steady purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forces
which, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the discussion
of schemes which could only become operative, if at all, after the war
was over; that a popular excitement has been slowly intensified into an
earnest national will; that a somewhat impracticable moral sentiment
has been made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that
the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal
of friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even
useful for good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the
horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a
domestic with a foreign war;--all these results, any one of which might
suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good
sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large--mindedness, and the
unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it
seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous and difficult
eminence of modern times. It is by presence of mind in untried
emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested; it is by the
sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth
there may be in an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to
expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that a reasoner at length
gains for his mere statement of a fact the force of argument; it is by
a wise forecast which allows hostile combinations to go so far as by
the inevitable reaction to become elements of his own power, that a
politician proves his genius for state-craft; and especially it is by
so gently guiding public sentiment that he seems to follow it, by so
yielding doubtful points that he can be firm without seeming obstinate
in essential ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise without
the weakness of concession; by so instinctively comprehending the
temper and prejudices of a people as to make them gradually conscious
of the superior wisdom of his freedom from temper and prejudice,--it is
by qualities such as these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be
chief in a commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such as
these that we firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the
most prudent of statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we wish
to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the inevitable chaos in
which we should now be weltering, had a weak man or an unwise one been
chosen in his stead.
"Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it";
and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary
ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible
resources of _prestige_, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent
interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these
out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character,
by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular
tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr.
Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. Long
habit had accustomed the American people to the notion of a party in
power, and of a President as its creature and organ, while the more
vital fact, that the executive for the time being represents the
abstract idea of government as a permanent principle superior to all
party and all private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They
had so long seen the public policy more or less directed by views of
party, and often even of personal advantage, as to be ready to suspect
the motives of a chief magistrate compelled, for the first time in our
history, to feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and to
act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that the
first duty of a government is to defend and maintain its own existence.
Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into the hands of the
opposition by the necessity under which the administration found itself
of applying this old truth to new relations. Nor were the opposition
his only nor his most dangerous opponents.
The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in which ethics
were more directly and visibly mingled with politics than usual. Their
leaders were trained to a method of oratory which relied for its effect
rather on the moral sense than the understanding. Their arguments were
drawn, not so much from experience as from general principles of right
and wrong. When the war came, their system continued to be applicable
and effective, for here again the reason of the people was to be
reached and kindled through their sentiments. It was one of those
periods of excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while
they last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
_country_, _human rights_, _democracy_, a meaning and a force beyond
that of sober and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained
and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran
in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens
and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was
awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to
circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But
enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better
than cant,--and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them
with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of
meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the
lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more
striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the
passions of men except a political system that will work, and that
there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity
formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain
of sentiment over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction;
and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a
tendency of his own supporters which chimed with his own private
desires, while wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be wise
policy.
The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable to be
passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be laid
to heart. Never did a President enter upon office with less means at
his command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning
it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he
was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his _availability_,--that is,
because he had no history,--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that a
man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could
rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who was at best
only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly
represent even that, would fail of political, much more of popular,
support. And certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few
resources of power in the past, and so many materials of weakness in
the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which
acknowledged him as President, there was a large and at that time
dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and
even in the party that elected him there was also a large minority that
suspected him of being secretly a communicant with the church of
Laodicea. All that he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra
by one side; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of
lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Meanwhile, he was to carry
on a truly colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the
country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril
undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to win from the
crowning dangers of his administration, in the confidence of the
people, the means of his safety and their own. He has contrived to do
it, and perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so
firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration.
Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down
no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise,
no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they
rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen
Mazarin's motto, _Le temps et moi_. The _moi_ to be sure, was not very
prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so, till the world
is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a character of marked
individuality and capacity for affairs. Time was his prime-minister,
and, we began to think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At
first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of
progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he
took the breath away from those who think there is no getting on safely
while there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being
who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize
occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr.
Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have
sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a
wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his reserves.
_Semper nocuit differre paratis_ is a sound axiom, but the really
efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is _not_ ready, and
be firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that
the chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly
accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe
politician than a conscientiously rigid _doctrinaire_, nothing more
sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits
of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of
an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of
mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest
facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we
commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies,
and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr.
Lincoln's perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through
the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch
opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to
assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and
keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith
that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.