for not having, after a four months' session, arrived at any definite
plan of settlement. There has been, perhaps, a little eagerness on the
part of honorable members to associate their names with the particular
nostrum that is to build up our national system again. In a country
where, unhappily, any man may be President, it is natural that a means
of advertising so efficacious as this should not be neglected. But
really, we do not see how Congress can be blamed for not being ready
with a plan definite and precise upon every point of possible
application, when it is not yet in possession of the facts according to
whose varying complexion the plan must be good or bad. The question
with us is much more whether another branch of the government,--to
which, from its position and its opportunity for a wider view, the
country naturally looks for initiative suggestion, and in which a few
months ago even decisive action would have been pardoned,--whether this
did not let the lucky moment go by without using it. That moment was
immediately after Mr. Lincoln's murder, when the victorious nation was
ready to apply, and the conquered faction would have submitted without
a murmur to that bold and comprehensive policy which is the only wise
as it is the only safe one for great occasions. To let that moment slip
was to descend irrecoverably from the vantage ground where
statesmanship is an exact science to the experimental level of
tentative politics. We cannot often venture to set our own house on
fire with civil war, in order to heat our iron up to that point of easy
forging at which it glowed, longing for the hammer of the master-smith,
less than a year ago. That Occasion is swift we learned long ago from
the adage; but this volatility is meant only of moments where force of
personal character is decisive, where the fame or fortune of a single
man is at stake. The life of nations can afford to take less strict
account of time, and in their affairs there may always be a hope that
the slow old tortoise, Prudence, may overtake again the opportunity
that seemed flown by so irrecoverably. Our people have shown so much of
this hard-shelled virtue during the last five years, that we look with
more confidence than apprehension to the result of our present
difficulties. Never was the common-sense of a nation more often and
directly appealed to, never was it readier in coming to its conclusion
and making it operative in public affairs, than during the war whose
wounds we are now endeavoring to stanch. It is the duty of patriotic
men to keep this great popular faculty always in view, to satisfy its
natural demand for clearness and practicality in the measures proposed,
and not to distract it and render it nugatory by the insubstantial
metaphysics of abstract policy. From the splitting of heads to the
splitting of hairs would seem to be a long journey, and yet some are
already well on their way to the end of it, who should be the leaders
of public opinion and not the skirmishing harassers of its march. It
would be well if some of our public men would consider that Providence
has saved their modesty the trial of an experiment in cosmogony, and
that their task is the difficult, no doubt, but much simpler and less
ambitious one, of bringing back the confused material which lies ready
to their hand, always with a divinely implanted instinct of order in
it, to as near an agreement with the providential intention as their
best wisdom can discern. The aggregate opinion of a nation moves
slowly. Like those old migrations of entire tribes, it is encumbered
with much household stuff; a thousand unforeseen things may divert or
impede it; a hostile check or the temptation of present convenience may
lead it to settle far short of its original aim; the want of some
guiding intellect and central will may disperse it; but experience
shows one constant element of its progress, which those who aspire to
be its leaders should keep in mind, namely, that the place of a wise
general should be oftener in the rear or the centre than the extreme
front. The secret of permanent leadership is to know how to be
moderate. The rashness of conception that makes opportunity, the
gallantry that heads the advance, may win admiration, may possibly
achieve a desultory and indecisive exploit; but it is the slow
steadiness of temper, bent always on the main design and the general
movement, that gains by degrees a confidence as unshakable as its own,
the only basis for permanent power over the minds of men. It was the
surest proof of Mr. Lincoln's sagacity and the deliberate reach of his
understanding, that he never thought time wasted while he waited for
the wagon that brought his supplies. The very immovability of his
purpose, fixed always on what was attainable, laid him open to the
shallow criticism of having none,--for a shooting star draws more eyes,
and seems for the moment to have a more definite aim, than a
planet,--but it gained him at last such a following as made him
irresistible. It lays a much lighter tax on the intellect, and proves
its resources less, to suggest a number of plans, than to devise and
carry through a single one.
Mr. Johnson has an undoubted constitutional right to choose any, or to
reject all, of the schemes of settlement proposed by Congress, though
the wisdom of his action in any case is a perfectly proper subject of
discussion among those who put him where he is, who are therefore
responsible for his power of good or evil, and to whom the consequences
of his decision must come home at last. He has an undoubted personal
right to propose any scheme of settlement himself, and to advocate it
with whatever energy of reason or argument he possesses, but is liable,
in our judgment, to very grave reprehension if he appeal to the body of
the people against those who are more immediately its representatives
than himself in any case of doubtful expediency, before discussion is
exhausted, and where the difference may well seem one of personal pique
rather than of considerate judgment. This is to degrade us from a
republic, in whose fore-ordered periodicity of submission to popular
judgment democracy has guarded itself against its own passions, to a
mass meeting, where momentary interest, panic, or persuasive
sophistry--all of them gregarious influences, and all of them
contagious--may decide by a shout what years of afterthought may find
it hard, or even impossible, to undo. There have been some things in
the deportment of the President of late that have suggested to
thoughtful men rather the pettish foible of wilfulness than the
strength of well-trained and conscientious will. It is by the objects
for whose sake the force of volition is called into play that we decide
whether it is childish or manly, whether we are to call it obstinacy or
firmness. Our own judgment can draw no favorable augury from meetings
gathered "to sustain the President," as it is called, especially if we
consider the previous character of those who are prominent in them, nor
from the ill-considered gossip about a "President's party;" and they
would excite our apprehension of evil to come, did we not believe that
the experience of the last five years had settled into convictions in
the mind of the people. The practical result to which all benevolent
men finally come is that it is idle to try to sustain any man who has
not force of character enough to sustain himself without their help,
and the only party which has any chance now before the people is that
of resolute good sense. What is now demanded of Congress is unanimity
in the best course that is feasible. They should recollect that Wisdom
is more likely to be wounded in the division of those who should be her
friends, than either of the parties to the quarrel. Our difficulties
are by no means so great as timid or interested people would represent
them to be. We are to decide, it is true, for posterity; but the
question presented to us is precisely that which every man has to
decide in making his will,--neither greater nor less than that, nor
demanding a wisdom above what that demands. The power is in our own
hands, so long as it is prudent for us to keep it there; and we are
justified, not in doing simply what we will with our own, but what is
best to be done. The great danger in the present posture of affairs
seems to be lest the influence which in Mr. Lincoln's case was inherent
in the occasion and the man should have held over in the popular mind
as if it were entailed upon the office. To our minds more is to be
apprehended in such a conjuncture from the weakness than from the
strength of the President's character.
There is another topic which we feel obliged to comment on, regretting
deeply, as we do, that the President has given us occasion for it, and
believing, as we would fain do, that his own better judgment will lead
him to abstain from it in the future. He has most unfortunately
permitted himself to assume a sectional ground. Geography is learned to
little purpose in Tennessee, if it does not teach that the Northeast as
well as the Southwest is an integral and necessary part of the United
States. By the very necessity of his high office, a President becomes
an American, whose concern is with the outward boundaries of his
country, and not its internal subdivisions. One great object of the
war, we had supposed, was to abolish all fallacies of sectional
distinction in a patriotism that could embrace something wider than a
township, a county, or even a State. But Mr. Johnson has chosen to
revive the paltry party-cries from before that deluge which we hoped
had washed everything clean, and to talk of treason at both ends of the
Union, as if there were no difference between men who attempted the
life of their country, and those who differ from him in their judgment
of what is best for her future safety and greatness. We have heard
enough of New England radicalism, as if that part of the country where
there is the most education and the greatest accumulation of property
in the hands of the most holders were the most likely to be carried
away by what are called agrarian theories. All that New England and the
West demand is that America should be American; that every relic of a
barbarism more archaic than any institution of the Old World should be
absolutely and irrecoverably destroyed; that there should be no longer
two peoples here, but one, homogeneous and powerful by a sympathy in
idea. Does Mr. Johnson desire anything more? Does he, alas! desire
anything less? If so, it may be the worse for his future fame, but it
will not and cannot hinder the irresistible march of that national
instinct which forced us into war, brought us out of it victorious, and
will not now be cheated of its fruits. If we may trust those who have
studied the matter, it is moderate to say that more than half the
entire population of the Free States is of New England descent, much
more than half the native population. It is by the votes of these men
that Mr. Johnson holds his office; it was as the exponent of their
convictions of duty and policy that he was chosen to it. Not a vote did
he or could he get in a single one of the States in rebellion. If they
were the American people when they elected him to execute their will,
are they less the American people now? It seems to us the idlest of all
possible abstractions now to discuss the question whether the
rebellious States were ever out of the Union or not, as if that settled
the right of secession. The victory of superior strength settled it,
and nothing else. For four years they were practically as much out of
the Union as Japan; had they been strong enough, they would have
continued out of it; and what matters it where they were theoretically?
Why, until Queen Victoria, every English sovereign assumed the style of
King of France. The King of Sardinia was, and the King of Italy, we
suppose, is still titular King of Jerusalem. Did either monarch ever
exercise sovereignty or levy taxes in those imaginary dominions? What
the war accomplished for us was the reduction of an insurgent
population; and what it settled was, not the right of secession, for
that must always depend on will and strength, but that every inhabitant
of every State was a subject as well as a citizen of the United
States,--in short, that the theory of freedom was limited by the
equally necessary theory of authority. We hoped to hear less in future
of the possible interpretations by which the Constitution may be made
to mean this or that, and more of what will help the present need and
conduce to the future strength and greatness of the whole country. It
was by precisely such constitutional quibbles, educating men to believe
they had a right to claim whatever they could sophistically demonstrate
to their own satisfaction,--and self-interest is the most cunning of
sophists,--that we were interpreted, in spite of ourselves, into civil
war. It was by just such a misunderstanding of one part of the country
by another as that to which Mr. Johnson has lent the weight of his name
and the authority of his place, that rendered a hearty national
sympathy, and may render a lasting reorganization, impossible.
If history were still written as it was till within two centuries, and
the author put into the mouth of his speakers such words as his
conception of the character and the situation made probable and
fitting, we could conceive an historian writing a hundred years hence
to imagine some such speech as this for Mr. Johnson in an interview
with a Southern delegation.
"Gentlemen, I am glad to meet you once more as friends, I wish I might
say as fellow-citizens. How soon we may again stand in that relation to
each other depends wholly upon yourselves. You have been pleased to say
that my birth and lifelong associations gave you confidence that I
would be friendly to the South. In so saying, you do no more than
justice to my heart and my intentions; but you must allow me to tell
you frankly, that, if you use the word South in any other than a purely
geographical sense, the sooner you convince yourselves of its
impropriety as addressed to an American President, the better. The
South as a political entity was Slavery, and went out of existence with
it. And let me also, as naturally connected with this topic, entreat
you to disabuse your minds of the fatally mistaken theory that you have
been conquered by the North. It is the American people who are victors
in this conflict, and who intend to inflict no worse penalty on you
than that of admitting you to an entire equality with themselves. They
are resolved, by God's grace, to Americanize you, and America means
education, equality before the law, and every upward avenue of life
made as free to one man as another. You urge upon me, with great force
and variety of argument, the manifold evils of the present unsettled
state of things, the propriety and advantage of your being represented
in both houses of Congress, the injustice of taxation without
representation. I admit the importance of every one of these
considerations, but I think you are laboring under some misapprehension
of the actual state of affairs. I know not if any of you have been in
America since the spring of 1861, or whether (as I rather suspect) you
have all been busy in Europe endeavoring to--but I beg pardon, I did
not intend to say anything that should recall old animosities. But
intelligence is slow to arrive in any part of the world, and
intelligence from America painfully so in reaching Europe. You do not
seem to be aware that _something has happened here during the last
four years_, something that has made a very painful and lasting
impression on the memory of the American people, whose voice on this
occasion I have the honor to be. They feel constrained to demand that
you shall enter into bonds to keep the peace. They do not, I regret to
say, agree with you in looking upon what has happened here of late as
only a more emphatic way of settling a Presidential election, the
result of which leaves both parties entirely free to try again. They
seem to take the matter much more seriously. Nor do they, so far as I
can see, agree with you in your estimate of the importance of
conserving your several state sovereignties, as you continue to call
them, insisting much rather on the conservation of America and of
American ideas. They say that the only thing which can individualize or
perpetuate a commonwealth is to have a history; and they ask which of
the States lately in rebellion, except Virginia and South Carolina, had
anything of the kind? In spite of my natural sympathies, gentlemen, my
reason compels me to agree with them. Your strength, such as it was,
was due less to the fertility of your brains than to that of your soil
and to the invention of the Yankee Whitney which you used and never
paid for. You tell me it is hard to put you on a level with your
negroes. As a believer in the superiority of the white race, I cannot
admit the necessity of enforcing that superiority by law. A Roman
emperor once said that gold never retained the unpleasant odor of its
source, and I must say to you that loyalty is sweet to me, whether it
throb under a black skin or a white. The American people has learned of
late to set a greater value on the color of ideas than on shades of
complexion. As to the injustice of taxation without representation,
that is an idea derived from our English ancestors, and is liable, like
all rules, to the exceptions of necessity. I see no reason why a State
may not as well be disfranchised as a borough for an illegal abuse of
its privileges; nor do I quite feel the parity of the reason which
should enable you to do that with a loyal black which we may not do
with a disloyal white. Remember that this government is bound by every
obligation, ethical and political, to protect these people because they
are weak, and to reward them (if the common privilege of manhood may be
called a reward) because they are faithful. We are not fanatics, but a
nation that has neither faith in itself nor faith toward others must
soon crumble to pieces by moral dry-rot. If we may conquer you,
gentlemen, (and you forced the necessity upon us,) we may surely impose
terms upon you; for it is an old principle of law that _cui liceat
majus, ei licet etiam minus_.
"In your part of the country, gentlemen, that which we should naturally
appeal to as the friend of order and stability--property--is blindly
against us; prejudice is also against us; and we have nothing left to
which we can appeal but human nature and the common privilege of
manhood. You seem to have entertained some hope that I would gather
about myself a 'President's party,' which should be more friendly to
you and those animosities which you mistake for interests. But you
grossly deceive yourselves; I have nor sympathy but with my whole
country, and there is nothing out of which such a party as you dream of
could be constructed, except the broken remnant of those who deserted
you when for the first time you needed their help and not their
subserviency, and those feathery characters who are drawn hither and
thither by the chances of office. I need not say to you that I am and
can be nothing in this matter but the voice of the nation's deliberate
resolve. The recent past is too painful, the immediate future too
momentous, to tolerate any personal considerations. You throw
yourselves upon our magnanimity, and I must be frank with you. My
predecessor, Mr. Buchanan, taught us the impolicy of weakness and
concession. The people are magnanimous, but they understand by
magnanimity a courageous steadiness in principle. They do not think it
possible that a large heart should consist with a narrow brain; and
they would consider it pusillanimous in them to consent to the weakness
of their country by admitting you to a share in its government before
you have given evidence of sincere loyalty to its principles, or, at
least, of wholesome fear of its power. They believe, and I heartily
agree with them, that a strong nation begets strong citizens, and a
weak one weak,--that the powers of the private man are invigorated and
enlarged by his confidence in the power of the body politic; and they
see no possible means of attaining or securing this needed strength but
in that homogeneousness of laws and institutions which breeds unanimity
of ideas and sentiments, no way of arriving at that homogeneousness but
the straightforward path of perfect confidence in freedom. All nations
have a right to security, ours to greatness; and must have the one as
an essential preliminary to the other. If your prejudices stand in the
way, and you are too weak to rid yourselves of them, it will be for the
American people to consider whether the plain duty of conquering them
for you will be, after all, so difficult a conquest as some they have
already achieved. By yourselves or us they must be conquered.
Gentlemen, in bidding you farewell, I ask you to consider whether you
have not forgotten that, in order to men's living peacefully together
in communities, the idea of government must precede that of liberty,
and that the one is as much the child of necessity as the other is a
slow concession to civilization, which itself mainly consists in the
habit of obedience to something more refined than force."
THE SEWARD-JOHNSON REACTION
1866
The late Philadelphia experiment at making a party out of nullities
reminds us of nothing so much as of the Irishman's undertaking to
produce a very palatable soup out of no more costly material than a
pebble. Of course he was to be furnished with a kettle as his field of
operations, and after that he asked only for just the least bit of beef
in the world to give his culinary miracle a flavor, and a pinch of salt
by way of relish. As nothing could be more hollow and empty than the
pretence on which the new movement was founded, nothing more coppery
than the material out of which it was mainly composed, we need look no
further for the likeness of a kettle wherewith to justify our
comparison; as for the stone, nothing could be more like that than the
Northern disunion faction, which was to be the chief ingredient in the
newfangled pottage, and whose leading characteristic for the last five
years has been a uniform alacrity in going under; the offices in the
gift of the President might very well be reckoned on to supply the beef
which should lead by their noses the weary expectants whose hunger
might be too strong for their nicety of stomach; and the pinch of
salt,--why could not that be found in the handful of Republicans who
might be drawn over by love of notoriety, private disgusts, or that
mixture of motives which has none of the substance of opinion, much
less of the tenacity of principle, but which is largely operative in
the action of illogical minds? But the people? Would they be likely to
have their appetite aroused by the fumes of this thin decoction? Where
a Chinaman is cook, one is apt to be a little suspicious; and if the
Address in which the Convention advertised their ingenious mess had not
a little in its verbiage to remind one of the flowery kingdom, there
was something in that part of the assemblage which could claim any
bygone merit of Republicanism calculated to stimulate rather than to
allay any dreadful surmise of the sagacious rodent which our antipodes
are said to find savory. And as for the people, it is a curious fact,
that the party which has always been loudest to profess its faith in
their capacity of self-government has been the last to conceive it
possible that they should apprehend a principle, arrive at a logical
conclusion, or be influenced by any other than a mean motive. The
_cordons bleus_ of the political cooks at Philadelphia were men
admirably adapted for the petty intrigues of a local caucus, but by
defect of nature profoundly unconscious of that simple process of
generalization from a few plain premises by which the popular mind is
guided in times like these, and upon questions which appeal to the
moral instincts of men.