all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, it was wise
in Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this
country, where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure
at last to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the
best genius for statesmanship. Hitherto the wisdom of the President's
measures has been justified by the fact that they have always resulted
in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the things particularly
admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain
tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult
attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal
character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective
ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without
forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through
the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason
and intelligence of those who have elected him. No higher compliment
was ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence, the fireside
plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always addresses himself to the
reason of the American people. This was, indeed, a true democrat, who
grounded himself on the assumption that a democracy can think. "Come,
let us reason together about this matter," has been the tone of all his
addresses to the people; and accordingly we have never had a chief
magistrate who so won to himself the love and at the same time the
judgment of his countrymen. To us, that simple confidence of his in the
right-mindedness of his fellow-men is very touching, and its success is
as strong an argument as we have ever seen in favor of the theory that
men can govern themselves. He never appeals to any vulgar sentiment, he
never alludes to the humbleness of his origin; it probably never
occurred to him, indeed, that there was anything higher to start from
than manhood; and he put himself on a level with those he addressed,
not by going down to them, but only by taking it for granted that they
had brains and would come up to a common ground of reason. In an
article lately printed in "The Nation," Mr. Bayard Taylor mentions the
striking fact, that in the foulest dens of the Five Points he found the
portrait of Lincoln. The wretched population that makes its hive there
threw all its votes and more against him, and yet paid this instinctive
tribute to the sweet humanity of his nature. Their ignorance sold its
vote and took its money, but all that was left of manhood in them
recognized its saint and martyr.
Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, "This is _my_ opinion, or
_my_ theory," but, "This is the conclusion to which, in my judgment,
the time has come, and to which, accordingly, the sooner we come the
better for us." His policy has been the policy of public opinion based
on adequate discussion and on a timely recognition of the influence of
passing events in shaping the features of events to come.
One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in captivating the
popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which enables
him, though under the necessity of constantly using the capital _I_, to
do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single vowel which
men's mouths can pronounce with such difference of effect. That which
one shall hide away, as it were, behind the substance of his discourse,
or, if he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an agreeable
accent of individuality to what he says, another shall make an
offensive challenge to the self-satisfaction of all his hearers, and an
unwarranted intrusion upon each man's sense of personal importance,
irritating every pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a
goose-flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied
Quinctilian; but he has, in the earnest simplicity and unaffected
Americanism of his own character, one art of oratory worth all the
rest. He forgets himself so entirely in his object as to give his _I_
the sympathetic and persuasive effect of _We_ with the great body of
his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged
process of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his
conclusions with an honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently
our representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people
were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought
owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement
that comes of settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows not
what rhetoric means. There has been nothing of Cleon, still less of
Strepsiades striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the
public utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the
intelligence of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their
ignorance.
* * * * * * *
On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, who according to
one party was a vulgar joker, and whom the _doctrinaires_ among
his own supporters accused of wanting every element of statesmanship,
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely by the hold
his good-humored sagacity had laid on the hearts and understandings of
his countrymen. Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had drawn the
great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but of mankind also,
to his side. So strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a
single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military achievement, awkward,
with no skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind
him a fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher
than that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere
breeding. Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes
of men shed tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with
him a friendly presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving
them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the
silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that
day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.
RECONSTRUCTION
1865
In the glare of our civil war, certain truths, hitherto unobserved or
guessed at merely, have been brought out with extraordinary sharpness
of relief; and two of them have been specially impressive, the one for
European observers, the other for ourselves. The first, and perhaps the
most startling to the Old World watcher of the political skies, upon
whose field of vision the flaming sword of our western heavens grew
from a misty speck to its full comet-like proportions, perplexing them
with fear of change, has been the amazing strength and no less amazing
steadiness of democratic institutions. An army twice larger than
England, with the help of bounties, drafts, and the purchase of foreign
vagabonds, ever set in the field during the direst stress of her
struggle with Napoleon has been raised in a single year by voluntary
enlistment. A people untrained to bear the burden of heavy taxes not
only devotes to the public service sums gathered by private
subscription that in any other country would be deemed fabulous, but by
sheer force of public opinion compels its legislators to the utmost
ingenuity and searchingness of taxation. What was uttered as a sarcasm
on the want of public spirit in Florence is here only literally true:--
"Many refuse to bear the common burden;
But thy solicitous people answereth
Unasked, and cries, 'I bend my back to it.'"
And that the contrast may be felt in its fullest completeness, we must
consider that no private soldier is tempted into the ranks by hopes of
plunder, or driven into them by want of fair wages for fair work,--that
no officer can look forward to the splendid prizes of hereditary wealth
and title. Love of their country was the only incentive, its gratitude
their only reward. And in the matter of taxation also, a willingness to
help bear the common burden has more of generosity in it where the
wealth of the people is in great part the daily result of their daily
toil, and not a hoard inherited without merit, as without industry.
Nor have the qualities which lead to such striking results been
exhibited only by the North. The same public spirit, though misled by
wicked men for selfish ends, has shown itself in almost equal strength
at the South. And in both cases it has been unmistakably owing to that
living and active devotion of the people to institutions in whose
excellence they share, and their habit of obedience to laws of their
own making. If we have not hitherto had that conscious feeling of
nationality, the ideal abstract of history and tradition, which belongs
to older countries, compacted, by frequent war and united by memories
of common danger and common triumph, it has been simply because our
national existence has never been in such peril as to force upon us the
conviction that it was both the title-deed of our greatness and its
only safeguard. But what splendid possibilities has not our trial
revealed even to ourselves! What costly stuff whereof to make a nation!
Here at last is a state whose life is not narrowly concentred in a
despot or a class, but feels itself in every limb; a government which
is not a mere application of force from without, but dwells as a vital
principle in the will of every citizen. Our enemies--and wherever a man
is to be found bribed by an abuse, or who profits by a political
superstition, we have a natural enemy--have striven to laugh and sneer
and lie this apparition of royal manhood out of existence. They
conspired our murder; but in this vision is the prophecy of a dominion
which is to push them from their stools, and whose crown doth sear
their eyeballs. America lay asleep, like the princess of the fairy
tale, enchanted by prosperity; but at the first fiery kiss of war the
spell is broken, the blood tingles along her veins again, and she
awakes conscious of her beauty and her sovereignty.
It is true that, by the side of the self-devotion and public spirit,
the vices and meannesses of troubled times have shown themselves, as
they will and must. We have had shoddy, we have had contracts, we have
had substitute-brokerage, we have had speculators in patriotism, and,
still worse, in military notoriety. Men have striven to make the blood
of our martyrs the seed of wealth or office. But in times of public and
universal extremity, when habitual standards of action no longer serve,
and ordinary currents of thought are swamped in the flood of enthusiasm
or excitement, it always happens that the evil passions of some men are
stimulated by what serves only to exalt the nobler qualities of others.
In such epochs, evil as well as good is exaggerated. A great social
convulsion shakes up the lees which underlie society, forgotten because
quiescent, and the stimulus of calamity brings out the extremes of
human nature, whether for good or evil.
What is especially instructive in the events we have been witnessing
for the past four years is the fact that the people have been the chief
actors in the drama. They have not been the led, but the leaders. They
have not been involved in war by the passions or interests of their
rulers, but deliberately accepted the ordeal of battle in defence of
institutions which were the work of their own hands, and of whose
beneficence experience had satisfied them. Loyalty has hitherto been a
sentiment rather than a virtue; it has been more often a superstition
or a prejudice than a conviction of the conscience or of the
understanding. Now for the first time it is identical with patriotism,
and has its seat in the brain, and not the blood. It has before been
picturesque, devoted, beautiful, as forgetfulness of self always is,
but now it is something more than all these,--it is logical. Here we
have testimony that cannot be gainsaid to the universal vitality and
intelligence which our system diffuses with healthy pulse through all
its members. Every man feels himself a part, and not a subject, of the
government, and can say in a truer and higher sense than Louis XIV., "I
am the state." But we have produced no Cromwell, no Napoleon. Let us be
thankful that we have passed beyond that period of political
development when such productions are necessary, or even possible. It
is but another evidence of the excellence of the democratic principle.
Where power is the privilege of a class or of a single person, it may
be usurped; but where it is the expression of the common will, it can
no more be monopolized than air or light. The ignorant and unreasoning
force of a populace, sure of losing nothing and with a chance of
gaining something by any change, that restless material out of which
violent revolutions are made, if it exist here at all, is to be found
only in our great cities, among a class who have learned in other
countries to look upon all law as their natural enemy. Nor is it by any
fault of American training, but by the want of it, that these people
are what they are. When Lord Derby says that the government of this
country is at the mercy of an excited mob, he proves either that the
demagogue is no exclusive product of a democracy, or that England would
be in less danger of war if her governing class knew something less of
ancient Greece and a little more of modern America.
Whether or no there be any truth in the assertion that democracy tends
to bring men down to a common level (as it surely brings them up to
one), we shall not stop to inquire, for the world has not yet had a
long enough experience of it to warrant any safe conclusion. During our
revolutionary struggle, it seems to us that both our civil and military
leaders compare very well in point of ability with the British product
of the same period, and the same thing may very well be true at the
present time. But while it may be the glory, it can hardly be called
the duty of a country to produce great men; and if forms of polity have
anything to do in the matter, we should incline to prefer that which
could make a great nation felt to be such and loved as such by every
human fibre in it, to one which stunted the many that a few favored
specimens might grow the taller and fairer.
While the attitude of the government was by the necessity of the case
expectant so far as slavery was concerned, it is also true that the
people ran before it, and were moved by a deeper impulse than the mere
instinct of self-preservation. The public conscience gave energy and
intention to the public will, and the bounty which drew our best
soldiers to the ranks was an idea. The game was the ordinary game of
war, and they but the unreasoning pieces on the board; but they felt
that a higher reason was moving them in a game where the stake was the
life not merely of their country, but of a principle whose rescue was
to make America in very deed a New World, the cradle of a fairer
manhood. Weakness was to be no longer the tyrant's opportunity, but the
victim's claim; labor should never henceforth be degraded as a curse,
but honored as that salt of the earth which keeps life sweet, and gives
its savor to duty. To be of good family should mean being a child of
the one Father of us all; and good birth, the being born into God's
world, and not into a fool's paradise of man's invention. But even had
this moral leaven been wanting, had the popular impulse been merely one
of patriotism, we should have been well content to claim as the result
of democracy that for the first time in the history of the world it had
mustered an army that knew for what it was fighting. Nationality is no
dead abstraction, no unreal sentiment, but a living and operative
virtue in the heart and moral nature of men. It enlivens the dullest
soul with an ideal out of and beyond itself, lifting every faculty to a
higher level of vision and action. It enlarges the narrowest intellect
with a fealty to something better than self. It emancipates men from
petty and personal interests, to make them conscious of sympathies
whose society ennobles. Life has a deeper meaning when its throb beats
time to a common impulse and catches its motion from the general heart.
But while the experience of the last four years has been such, with all
its sorrows, as to make us proud of our strength and grateful for the
sources of it, we cannot but feel that peace will put to the test those
higher qualities which war leaves in reserve. What are we to do with
the country our arms have regained? It is by our conduct in this
stewardship, and not by our rights under the original compact of the
States, that our policy is to be justified. The glory of conquest is
trifling and barren, unless victory clear the way to a higher
civilization, a more solid prosperity, and a Union based upon
reciprocal benefits. In what precise manner the seceding States shall
return, whether by inherent right, or with some preliminary penance and
ceremony of readoption, is of less consequence than what they shall be
after their return. Dependent provinces, sullenly submitting to a
destiny which they loathe, would be a burden to us, rather than an
increase of strength or an element of prosperity. War would have won us
a peace stripped of all the advantages that make peace a blessing. We
should have so much more territory, and so much less substantial
greatness. We did not enter upon war to open a new market, or fresh
fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to
save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a
fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our
business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a
purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as
wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other
conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength,
receive no detriment.
We would not be understood to mean that Congress should lay down in
advance a fixed rule not to be departed from to suit the circumstances
of special cases as they arise. What may do very well for Tennessee may
not be as good for South Carolina. Wise statesmanship does not so much
consist in the agreement of its forms with any abstract ideal, however
perfect, as in its adaptation to the wants of the governed and its
capacity of shaping itself to the demands of the time. It is not to be
judged by its intention, but by its results, and those will be
proportioned to its practical, and not its theoretic, excellence. The
Anglo-Saxon soundness of understanding has shown itself in nothing more
clearly than in allowing institutions to be formulated gradually by
custom, convenience, or necessity, and in preferring the practical
comfort of a system that works, to the French method of a scientific
machinery of perpetual motion, demonstrably perfect in all its parts,
and yet refusing to go. We do not wish to see scientific treatment,
however admirable, applied to the details of reconstruction, if that is
to be, as now seems probable, the next problem that is to try our
intelligence and firmness. But there are certain points, it seems to
us, on which it is important that public opinion should come to some
sort of understanding in advance.
The peace negotiations have been of service in demonstrating that it is
not any ill blood engendered by war, any diversity of interests
properly national, any supposed antagonism of race, but simply the
slaveholding class, that now stands between us and peace, as four years
ago it forced us into war. Precisely as the principle of Divine right
could make no lasting truce with the French Revolution, the Satanic
right of the stronger to enslave the weaker can come to no
understanding with democracy. The conflict is in the things, not in the
men, and one or the other must abdicate. Of course the leaders, to whom
submission would be ruin, and a few sincere believers in the doctrine
of State rights, are willing to sacrifice even slavery for
independence, a word which has a double meaning for some of them; but
there can be no doubt that an offer to receive the seceding States back
to their old position under the Constitution would have put the war
party in a hopeless minority at the South. We think there are manifest
symptoms that the chinks made by the four years' struggle have let in
new light to the Southern people, however it may be with their ruling
faction, and that they begin to suspect a diversity of interest between
themselves, who chiefly suffer by the war, and the small class who
bullied them into it for selfish purposes of their own. However that
may be, the late proposal of Davis and Lee for the arming of slaves,
though they certainly did not so intend it, has removed a very serious
obstacle from our path. It is true that the emancipating clause was
struck out of the act as finally passed by the shadowy Congress at
Richmond. But this was only for the sake of appearances. Once arm and
drill the negroes, and they can never be slaves again. This is admitted
on all hands, and accordingly, whatever the words of the act may be, it
practically at once promotes the negro to manhood by brevet, as it
were, but at any rate to manhood. For the offer of emancipation as a
bounty implies reason in him to whom it is offered; nay, more, implies
a capacity for progress and a wish, for it, which are in themselves
valid titles to freedom. This at a step puts the South back to the
position held by her greatest men in regard to slavery. All the
Scriptural arguments, all the fitness of things, all the physiological
demonstrations, all Mr. Stephens's corner-stones, Ham, Onesimus, heels,
hair, and facial angle,--all are swept out, by one flirt of the besom
of Fate, into the inexorable limbo of things that were and never should
have been. How is Truth wounded to death in the house of her friends!
The highest authority of the South has deliberately renounced its
vested interest in the curse of Noah, and its right to make beasts of
black men because St. Paul sent back a white one to his master. Never
was there a more exact verification of the Spanish proverb, that he who
went out for wool may come back shorn. Alas for Nott and Gliddon!
Thrice alas for Bishop Hopkins! With slavery they lose their hold on
the last clue by which human reason could find its way to a direct
proof of the benevolence of God and the plenary inspiration of
Scripture.
All that we have learned of the blacks during the war makes the plan of
arming a part of them to help maintain the master's tyranny over the
rest seem so futile, and the arguments urged against it by Mr. Gholson
and Mr. Hunter are so convincing, that we can hardly persuade ourselves
that the authors of it did not intend it to make the way easier, not to
independence, but to reunion. It is said to argue desperation on the
part of the chief conspirators at Richmond, and it undoubtedly does;
but we see in what we believe to be the causes of their despair
something more hopeful than the mere exhaustion it indicates. It is
simply incredible that the losses of a four years' war should have
drained the fighting men of a population of five millions, or anything
like it; and the impossibility of any longer filling the Rebel armies
even by the most elaborate system of press-gangs proves to our mind
that the poorer class of whites have for some reason or other deserted
the cause of the wealthy planters. The men are certainly there, but
they have lost all stomach for fighting. Here again we see something
which is likely to make a final settlement more easy than it would have
been even a year ago. Though the fact that so large a proportion of the
Southern people cannot read makes it harder to reach them, yet our
soldiers have circulated among them like so many Northern newspapers,
and it is impossible that this intercourse, which has been constant,
should not have suggested to them many ideas of a kind which their
treacherous guides would gladly keep from them. The frantic rage of
Southern members of Congress against such books as Helper's can be
explained only by their fear lest their poorer constituents should be
set a-thinking, for the notion of corrupting a field-hand by an
Abolition document is too absurd even for a Wigfall or a Charleston
editor.