Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern
history,--Henry IV. of France. The career of the latter may be more
picturesque, as that of a daring captain always is; but in all its
vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that sudden change, as
by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the attorney's office in a country
town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times like these. The
analogy between the characters and circumstances of the two men is in
many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion rather than a
crown, Henry's chief material dependence was the Huguenot party, whose
doctrines sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if not
suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King only in name over
the greater part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it
yet gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic
party that he was the only centre of order and legitimate authority
round which France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held
the divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with
declamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to the heretic
dog of a Bearnois,--much as our _soi-disant_ Democrats have lately been
preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies of
the Declaration of Independence,--Henry bore both parties in hand till
he was convinced that only one course of action could possibly combine
his own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the Protestants
believed somewhat doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped
somewhat doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned
aside remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest or a
proverb (if a little _high_, he liked them none the worse), joking
continually as his manner was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously
compared to Sancho Panza by persons incapable of appreciating one of
the deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romance ever written;
namely, that, while Don Quixote was incomparable in theoretic and ideal
statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock of proverbs, the ready money of
human experience, made the best possible practical governor. Henry IV.
was as full of wise saws and modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but
beneath all this was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly
earnest man, around whom the fragments of France were to gather
themselves till she took her place again as a planet of the first
magnitude in the European system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more
fortunate than Henry. However some may think him wanting in zeal, the
most fanatical can find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor
can the most bitter charge him with being influenced by motives of
personal interest. The leading distinction between the policies of the
two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to the nation; Mr. Lincoln
has steadily drawn the nation over to him. One left a united France;
the other, we hope and believe, will leave a reunited America. We leave
our readers to trace the further points of difference and resemblance
for themselves, merely suggesting a general similarity which has often
occurred to us. One only point of melancholy interest we will allow
ourselves to touch upon. That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant,
we learn from certain English tourists who would consider similar
revelations in regard to Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in their
want of _bienseance_. It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his
fitness for the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is certainly
as fortunate as Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trust
contemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with
Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all
deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or see
in it any reason why he should govern Americans the less wisely.
People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are glad
that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us forever
from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom
America made, as God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried,
unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how much magnanimity,
and how much state-craft await the call of opportunity in simple
manhood when it believes in the justice of God and the worth of man.
Conventionalities are all very well in their proper place, but they
shrivel at the touch of nature like stubble in the fire. The genius
that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us than
that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the instincts and
convictions of an entire people. Autocracy may have something in it
more melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it in human value
and interest.
Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improvised
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,
which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and great
powers, at least demands the long and steady application of the best
powers of such men as it can command to master even its first
principles. It is curious, that, in a country which boasts of its
intelligence, the theory should be so generally held that the most
complicated of human contrivances, and one which every day becomes more
complicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to talk for an hour
or two without stopping to think.
Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-made ruler.
But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that he was a man
of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he had
in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that to which a
partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled him not
only to see that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon in
human affairs, but that there are always two sides to every question,
both of which must be fully understood in order to understand either,
and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the
strength than the weakness of his antagonist's position. Nothing is
more remarkable than the unerring tact with which, in his debate with
Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the question; nor have
we ever had a more striking lesson in political tactics than the fact,
that, opposed to a man exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice
and bigotry to his purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to
those baser motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of
barbarians, he should yet have won his case before a jury of the
people. Mr. Lincoln was as far as possible from an impromptu
politician. His wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as
of men; his sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honest
acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that the only
durable triumph of political opinion is based, not on any abstract
right, but upon so much of justice, the highest attainable at any given
moment in human affairs, as may be had in the balance of mutual
concession. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it was the ideal of a
practical statesman,--to aim at the best, and to take the next best, if
he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow, but singularly
masculine, intelligence taught him that precedent is only another name
for embodied experience, and that it counts for even more in the
guidance of communities of men than in that of the individual life. He
was not a man who held it good public economy to pull down on the mere
chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in God was qualified
by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom of man. Perhaps it was
his want of self-confidence that more than anything else won him the
unlimited confidence of the people, for they felt that there would be
no need of retreat from any position he had deliberately taken. The
cautious, but steady, advance of his policy during the war was like
that of a Roman army. He left behind him a firm road on which public
confidence could follow; he took America with him where he went; what
he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became colonies. The very
homeliness of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was
conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he,
nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of
the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness
touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there was no
trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to have had
but one rule of conduct, always that of practical and successful
politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were sure to
bring him out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to
unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at the desirable,
a longer road.
Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and
more permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not on the
sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the
tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly
is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such
considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that
the framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable and
therefore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every
sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject
himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion. The
course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers,
avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking
the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest
dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of
national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always
recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths
of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal
barriers of both. It is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to
combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish
them; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action,
which knows how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by
it,--that we demand in public men, and not obstinacy in prejudice,
sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is
impracticable. For the impracticable, however theoretically enticing,
is always politically unwise, sound statesmanship being the application
of that prudence to the public business which is the safest guide in
that of private men.
No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrassing question with
which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, and it was one which no man in
his position, whatever his opinions, could evade; for, though he might
withstand the clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to the
persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the problem upon
him at every turn and in every shape.
It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and repeated
here by people who measure their country rather by what is thought of
it than by what it is, that our war has not been distinctly and
avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for the
preservation of our national power and greatness, in which the
emancipation of the negro has been forced upon us by circumstances and
accepted as a necessity. We are very far from denying this; nay, we
admit that it is so far true that we were slow to renounce our
constitutional obligations even toward those who had absolved us by
their own act from the letter of our duty. We are speaking of the
government which, legally installed for the whole country, was bound,
so long as it was possible, not to overstep the limits of orderly
prescription, and could not, without abnegating its own very nature,
take the lead in making rebellion an excuse for resolution. There were,
no doubt, many ardent and sincere persons who seemed to think this as
simple a thing to do as to lead off a Virginia reel. They forgot what
should be forgotten least of all in a system like ours, that the
administration for the time being represents not only the majority
which elects it, but the minority as well,--a minority in this case
powerful, and so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed even
to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as general agent of an
antislavery society, but President of the United States, to perform
certain functions exactly defined by law. Whatever were his wishes, it
was no less duty than policy to mark out for himself a line of action
that would not further distract the country, by raising before their
time questions which plainly would soon enough compel attention, and
for which every day was making the answer more easy.
Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured.
Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not been such
as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most
trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat according to their
cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors of Atropos, it has been at
least not unworthy of the long-headed king of Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln had
the choice of Bassanio offered him. Which of the three caskets held the
prize that was to redeem the fortunes of the country? There was the
golden one whose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain man; the
silver of compromise, which might have decided the choice of a merely
acute one; and the leaden,--dull and homely looking, as prudence always
is,--yet with something about it sure to attract the eye of practical
wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision perhaps longer than
seemed needful to those on whom its awful responsibility was not to
rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of his cautious but
sure-footed understanding. The moral of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a
deep one, lies in the childish simplicity of the solution. Those who
fail in guessing it, fail because they are over ingenious, and cast
about for an answer that shall suit their own notion of the gravity of
the occasion and of their own dignity, rather than the occasion itself.
In a matter which must be finally settled by public opinion, and in
regard to which the ferment of prejudice and passion on both sides has
not yet subsided to that equilibrium of compromise from which alone a
sound public opinion can result, it is proper enough for the private
citizen to press his own convictions with all possible force of
argument and persuasion; but the popular magistrate, whose judgment
must become action, and whose action involves the whole country, is
bound to wait till the sentiment of the people is so far advanced
toward his own point of view, that what he does shall find support in
it, instead of merely confusing it with new elements of division. It
was not unnatural that men earnestly devoted to the saving of their
country, and profoundly convinced that slavery was its only real enemy,
should demand a decided policy round which all patriots might
rally,--and this might have been the wisest course for an absolute
ruler. But in the then unsettled state of the public mind, with a large
party decrying even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion as not
only unwise, but even unlawful; with a majority, perhaps, even of the
would-be loyal so long accustomed to regard the Constitution as a deed
of gift conveying to the South their own judgment as to policy and
instinct as to right, that they were in doubt at first whether their
loyalty were due to the country or to slavery; and with a respectable
body of honest and influential men who still believed in the
possibility of conciliation,--Mr. Lincoln judged wisely, that, in
laying down a policy in deference to one party, he should be giving to
the other the very fulcrum for which their disloyalty had been waiting.
It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not to yield so far to
an honest indignation against the brokers of treason in the North as to
lose sight of the materials for misleading which were their stock in
trade, and to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry which is
to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with it to make it
specious,--that it is not the knavery of the leaders so much as the
honesty of the followers they may seduce, that gives them power for
evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing which might help the
people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless disputes about
its inevitable consequences.
The doctrine of state rights can be so handled by an adroit demagogue
as easily to confound the distinction between liberty and lawlessness
in the minds of ignorant persons, accustomed always to be influenced by
the sound of certain words, rather than to reflect upon the principles
which give them meaning. For, though Secession involves the manifest
absurdity of denying to a State the right of making war against any
foreign power while permitting it against the United States; though it
supposes a compact of mutual concessions and guaranties among States
without any arbiter in case of dissension; though it contradicts
common-sense in assuming that the men who framed our government did not
know what they meant when they substituted Union for Confederation;
though it falsifies history, which shows that the main opposition to
the adoption of the Constitution was based on the argument that it did
not allow that independence in the several States which alone would
justify them in seceding;--yet, as slavery was universally admitted to
be a reserved right, an inference could be drawn from any direct attack
upon it (though only in self-defence) to a natural right of resistance,
logical enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as the
majority of men always are, and now too much disturbed by the disorder
of the times to consider that the order of events had any legitimate
bearing on the argument. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give
the Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired and even
strove to provoke, yet from the beginning of the war the most
persistent efforts have been made to confuse the public mind as to its
origin and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down
from the national position they had instinctively taken to the old
level of party squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked
rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner-stone of
free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence
venturing to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, "that
slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do with difference of
complexion," has been represented as a legitimate and gallant attempt
to maintain the true principles of democracy. The rightful endeavor of
an established government, the least onerous that ever existed, to
defend itself against a treacherous attack on its very existence, has
been cunningly made to seem the wicked effort of a fanatical clique to
force its doctrines on an oppressed population.
Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of the danger
and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuade himself of
Union majorities at the South, and to carry on a war that was half
peace in the hope of a peace that would have been all war,--while he
was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, under some theory that
Secession, however it might absolve States from their obligations,
could not escheat them of their claims under the Constitution, and that
slaveholders in rebellion had alone among mortals the privilege of
having their cake and eating it at the same time,--the enemies of free
government were striving to persuade the people that the war was an
Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was proclaimed as one of the
rights of man, while it was carefully kept out of sight that to
suppress rebellion is the first duty of government. All the evils that
have come upon the country have been attributed to the Abolitionists,
though it is hard to see how any party can become permanently powerful
except in one of two ways,--either by the greater truth of its
principles, or the extravagance of the party opposed to it. To fancy
the ship of state, riding safe at her constitutional moorings, suddenly
engulfed by a huge kraken of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths
and grasping it with slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history
of the matter with the eyes of Pontoppidan. To believe that the leaders
in the Southern treason feared any danger from Abolitionism would be to
deny them ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubt that
they made use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears of their
deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought slavery
weak, but because they believed it strong enough, not to overthrow the
government, but to get possession of it; for it becomes daily clearer
that they used rebellion only as a means of revolution, and if they got
revolution, though not in the shape they looked for, is the American
people to save them from its consequences at the cost of its own
existence? The election of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their
power to prevent had they wished, was the occasion merely, and not the
cause, of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was
the despised heresy of a few earnest persons, without political weight
enough to carry the election of a parish constable; and their cardinal
principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the
Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb,
great effects do not follow from small causes,--that is,
disproportionately small,--but from adequate causes acting under
certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that
of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its
slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real
miracle lies in that divine league which bound all the forces of nature
to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything
has been at work for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery,
but Garrison and Phillips have been far less successful propagandists
than the slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance
of their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the question
upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by defiantly
putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But, even after the
Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on the part of the
North to commit aggressions, though there was a growing determination
to resist them. The popular unanimity in favor of the war three years
ago was but in small measure the result of anti-slavery sentiment, far
less of any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war, every
movement of the allies of slavery in the Free States, has been making
Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses of any people, however
intelligent, are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity
and justice, until those principles are interpreted for them by the
stinging commentary of some infringement upon their own rights, and
then their instincts and passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an
incalculable reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher
ideas, those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force
till they are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or
imminent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin to fight
against Sisera. Had any one doubted before that the rights of human
nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world over, no
matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one failed to see what
the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts of the advocates of
slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon the fundamental axioms
of the Declaration of Independence and the radical doctrines of
Christianity could not fail to sharpen his eyes.