No American can study the character and career of Abraham Lincoln
without being carried away by sentimental emotions. We are always
inclined to idealize that which we love,—a state of mind very
unfavorable to the exercise of sober critical judgment. It is therefore
not surprising that most of those who have written or spoken on that
extraordinary man, even while conscientiously endeavoring to draw a
lifelike portraiture of his being, and to form a just estimate of his
public conduct, should have drifted into more or less indiscriminating
eulogy, painting his great features in the most glowing colors, and
covering with tender shadings whatever might look like a blemish.
But his standing before posterity will not be exalted by mere praise of
his virtues and abilities, nor by any concealment of his limitations
and faults. The stature of the great man, one of whose peculiar charms
consisted in his being so unlike all other great men, will rather lose
than gain by the idealization which so easily runs into the commonplace.
For it was distinctly the weird mixture of qualities and forces in him,
of the lofty with the common, the ideal with the uncouth, of that which
he had become with that which he had not ceased to be, that made him
so fascinating a character among his fellow-men, gave him his singular
power over their minds and hearts, and fitted him to be the greatest
leader in the greatest crisis of our national life.
His was indeed a marvellous growth. The statesman or the military hero
born and reared in a log cabin is a familiar figure in American history;
but we may search in vain among our celebrities for one whose origin and
early life equalled Abraham Lincoln’s in wretchedness. He first saw the
light in a miserable hovel in Kentucky, on a farm consisting of a
few barren acres in a dreary neighborhood; his father a typical “poor
Southern white,” shiftless and without ambition for himself or his
children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might
make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and
bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily
toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void
of elevating inspirations.... Only when the family had “moved” into the
malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother,
a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the
shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old,
“began to feel like a human being.” Hard work was his early lot. When a
mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, either on his father’s
clearing, or hired out to other farmers to plough, or dig ditches, or
chop wood, or drive ox teams; occasionally also to “tend the baby,”
when the farmer’s wife was otherwise engaged. He could regard it as an
advancement to a higher sphere of activity when he obtained work in a
“crossroads store,” where he amused the customers by his talk over the
counter; for he soon distinguished himself among the backwoods folk
as one who had something to say worth listening to. To win that
distinction, he had to draw mainly upon his wits; for, while his thirst
for knowledge was great, his opportunities for satisfying that thirst
were wofully slender.
In the log schoolhouse, which he could visit but little, he was taught
only reading, writing, and elementary arithmetic. Among the people
of the settlement, bush farmers and small tradesmen, he found none of
uncommon intelligence or education; but some of them had a few books,
which he borrowed eagerly. Thus he read and reread, AEsop’s Fables,
learning to tell stories with a point and to argue by parables; he read
Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim’s Progress, a short history of the United
States, and Weems’s Life of Washington. To the town constable’s he went
to read the Revised Statutes of Indiana. Every printed page that fell
into his hands he would greedily devour, and his family and friends
watched him with wonder, as the uncouth boy, after his daily work,
crouched in a corner of the log cabin or outside under a tree, absorbed
in a book while munching his supper of corn bread. In this manner he
began to gather some knowledge, and sometimes he would astonish the
girls with such startling remarks as that the earth was moving around
the sun, and not the sun around the earth, and they marvelled where
“Abe” could have got such queer notions. Soon he also felt the impulse
to write; not only making extracts from books he wished to remember, but
also composing little essays of his own. First he sketched these with
charcoal on a wooden shovel scraped white with a drawing-knife, or on
basswood shingles. Then he transferred them to paper, which was a scarce
commodity in the Lincoln household; taking care to cut his expressions
close, so that they might not cover too much space,—a style-forming
method greatly to be commended. Seeing boys put a burning coal on the
back of a wood turtle, he was moved to write on cruelty to animals.
Seeing men intoxicated with whiskey, he wrote on temperance. In
verse-making, too, he tried himself, and in satire on persons offensive
to him or others,—satire the rustic wit of which was not always fit for
ears polite. Also political thoughts he put upon paper, and some of
his pieces were even deemed good enough for publication in the county
weekly.
Thus he won a neighborhood reputation as a clever young man, which he
increased by his performances as a speaker, not seldom drawing upon
himself the dissatisfaction of his employers by mounting a stump in the
field, and keeping the farm hands from their work by little speeches in
a jocose and sometimes also a serious vein. At the rude social frolics
of the settlement he became an important person, telling funny, stories,
mimicking the itinerant preachers who had happened to pass by, and
making his mark at wrestling matches, too; for at the age of seventeen
he had attained his full height, six feet four inches in his stockings,
if he had any, and a terribly muscular clodhopper he was. But he
was known never to use his extraordinary strength to the injury or
humiliation of others; rather to do them a kindly turn, or to enforce
justice and fair dealing between them. All this made him a favorite in
backwoods society, although in some things he appeared a little odd,
to his friends. Far more than any of them, he was given not only to
reading, but to fits of abstraction, to quiet musing with himself, and
also to strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in
a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor. But on the whole he
was one of the people among whom he lived; in appearance perhaps even
a little more uncouth than most of them,—a very tall, rawboned youth,
with large features, dark, shrivelled skin, and rebellious hair; his
arms and legs long, out of proportion; clad in deerskin trousers, which
from frequent exposure to the rain had shrunk so as to sit tightly on
his limbs, leaving several inches of bluish shin exposed between their
lower end and the heavy tan-colored shoes; the nether garment held
usually by only one suspender, that was strung over a coarse homemade
shirt; the head covered in winter with a coonskin cap, in summer with a
rough straw hat of uncertain shape, without a band.
It is doubtful whether he felt himself much superior to his
surroundings, although he confessed to a yearning for some knowledge
of the world outside of the circle in which he lived. This wish was
gratified; but how? At the age of nineteen he went down the Mississippi
to New Orleans as a flatboat hand, temporarily joining a trade many
members of which at that time still took pride in being called “half
horse and half alligator.” After his return he worked and lived in the
old way until the spring of 1830, when his father “moved again,” this
time to Illinois; and on the journey of fifteen days “Abe” had to drive
the ox wagon which carried the household goods. Another log cabin was
built, and then, fencing a field, Abraham Lincoln split those historic
rails which were destined to play so picturesque a part in the
Presidential campaign twenty-eight years later.
Having come of age, Lincoln left the family, and “struck out for
himself.” He had to “take jobs whenever he could get them.” The first
of these carried him again as a flatboat hand to New Orleans. There
something happened that made a lasting impression upon his soul:
he witnessed a slave auction. “His heart bled,” wrote one of his
companions; “said nothing much; was silent; looked bad. I can say,
knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion on
slavery. It run its iron in him then and there, May, 1831. I have
heard him say so often.” Then he lived several years at New Salem,
in Illinois, a small mushroom village, with a mill, some “stores” and
whiskey shops, that rose quickly, and soon disappeared again. It was a
desolate, disjointed, half-working and half-loitering life, without any
other aim than to gain food and shelter from day to day. He served as
pilot on a steamboat trip, then as clerk in a store and a mill; business
failing, he was adrift for some time. Being compelled to measure his
strength with the chief bully of the neighborhood, and overcoming him,
he became a noted person in that muscular community, and won the esteem
and friendship of the ruling gang of ruffians to such a degree that,
when the Black Hawk war broke out, they elected him, a young man of
twenty-three, captain of a volunteer company, composed mainly of roughs
of their kind. He took the field, and his most noteworthy deed of valor
consisted, not in killing an Indian, but in protecting against his own
men, at the peril of his own life, the life of an old savage who had
strayed into his camp.
The Black Hawk war over, he turned to politics. The step from the
captaincy of a volunteer company to a candidacy for a seat in the
Legislature seemed a natural one. But his popularity, although great
in New Salem, had not spread far enough over the district, and he was
defeated. Then the wretched hand-to-mouth struggle began again. He “set
up in store-business” with a dissolute partner, who drank whiskey while
Lincoln was reading books. The result was a disastrous failure and a
load of debt. Thereupon he became a deputy surveyor, and was appointed
postmaster of New Salem, the business of the post-office being so small
that he could carry the incoming and outgoing mail in his hat. All this
could not lift him from poverty, and his surveying instruments and horse
and saddle were sold by the sheriff for debt.
But while all this misery was upon him his ambition rose to higher aims.
He walked many miles to borrow from a schoolmaster a grammar with which
to improve his language. A lawyer lent him a copy of Blackstone, and he
began to study law.
People would look wonderingly at the grotesque figure lying in the
grass, “with his feet up a tree,” or sitting on a fence, as, absorbed
in a book, he learned to construct correct sentences and made himself
a jurist. At once he gained a little practice, pettifogging before a
justice of the peace for friends, without expecting a fee. Judicial
functions, too, were thrust upon him, but only at horse-races or
wrestling matches, where his acknowledged honesty and fairness gave his
verdicts undisputed authority. His popularity grew apace, and soon
he could be a candidate for the Legislature again. Although he called
himself a Whig, an ardent admirer of Henry Clay, his clever stump
speeches won him the election in the strongly Democratic district.
Then for the first time, perhaps, he thought seriously of his outward
appearance. So far he had been content with a garb of “Kentucky jeans,”
not seldom ragged, usually patched, and always shabby. Now, he borrowed
some money from a friend to buy a new suit of clothes—“store clothes”
fit for a Sangamon County statesman; and thus adorned he set out for the
state capital, Vandalia, to take his seat among the lawmakers.
His legislative career, which stretched over several sessions—for
he was thrice re-elected, in 1836, 1838, and 1840—was not remarkably
brilliant. He did, indeed, not lack ambition. He dreamed even of making
himself “the De Witt Clinton of Illinois,” and he actually distinguished
himself by zealous and effective work in those “log-rolling” operations
by which the young State received “a general system of internal
improvements” in the shape of railroads, canals, and banks,—a reckless
policy, burdening the State with debt, and producing the usual crop of
political demoralization, but a policy characteristic of the time and
the impatiently enterprising spirit of the Western people. Lincoln,
no doubt with the best intentions, but with little knowledge of the
subject, simply followed the popular current. The achievement in which,
perhaps, he gloried most was the removal of the State government from
Vandalia to Springfield; one of those triumphs of political management
which are apt to be the pride of the small politician’s statesmanship.
One thing, however, he did in which his true nature asserted itself, and
which gave distinct promise of the future pursuit of high aims. Against
an overwhelming preponderance of sentiment in the Legislature, followed
by only one other member, he recorded his protest against a proslavery
resolution,—that protest declaring “the institution of slavery to
be founded on both injustice and bad policy.” This was not only the
irrepressible voice of his conscience; it was true moral valor, too; for
at that time, in many parts of the West, an abolitionist was regarded
as little better than a horse-thief, and even “Abe Lincoln” would hardly
have been forgiven his antislavery principles, had he not been known
as such an “uncommon good fellow.” But here, in obedience to the great
conviction of his life, he manifested his courage to stand alone, that
courage which is the first requisite of leadership in a great cause.
Together with his reputation and influence as a politician grew his law
practice, especially after he had removed from New Salem to Springfield,
and associated himself with a practitioner of good standing. He had now
at last won a fixed position in society. He became a successful lawyer,
less, indeed, by his learning as a jurist than by his effectiveness as
an advocate and by the striking uprightness of his character; and it may
truly be said that his vivid sense of truth and justice had much to do
with his effectiveness as an advocate. He would refuse to act as the
attorney even of personal friends when he saw the right on the other
side. He would abandon cases, even during trial, when the testimony
convinced him that his client was in the wrong. He would dissuade those
who sought his service from pursuing an obtainable advantage when their
claims seemed to him unfair. Presenting his very first case in the
United States Circuit Court, the only question being one of authority,
he declared that, upon careful examination, he found all the authorities
on the other side, and none on his. Persons accused of crime, when he
thought them guilty, he would not defend at all, or, attempting their
defence, he was unable to put forth his powers. One notable exception is
on record, when his personal sympathies had been strongly aroused. But
when he felt himself to be the protector of innocence, the defender
of justice, or the prosecutor of wrong, he frequently disclosed such
unexpected resources of reasoning, such depth of feeling, and rose to
such fervor of appeal as to astonish and overwhelm his hearers, and make
him fairly irresistible. Even an ordinary law argument, coming from him,
seldom failed to produce the impression that he was profoundly convinced
of the soundness of his position. It is not surprising that the mere
appearance of so conscientious an attorney in any case should have
carried, not only to juries, but even to judges, almost a presumption
of right on his side, and that the people began to call him, sincerely
meaning it, “honest Abe Lincoln.”
In the meantime he had private sorrows and trials of a painfully
afflicting nature. He had loved and been loved by a fair and estimable
girl, Ann Rutledge, who died in the flower of her youth and beauty, and
he mourned her loss with such intensity of grief that his friends feared
for his reason. Recovering from his morbid depression, he bestowed
what he thought a new affection upon another lady, who refused him.
And finally, moderately prosperous in his worldly affairs, and having
prospects of political distinction before him, he paid his addresses to
Mary Todd, of Kentucky, and was accepted. But then tormenting doubts of
the genuineness of his own affection for her, of the compatibility
of their characters, and of their future happiness came upon him. His
distress was so great that he felt himself in danger of suicide, and
feared to carry a pocket-knife with him; and he gave mortal offence
to his bride by not appearing on the appointed wedding day. Now the
torturing consciousness of the wrong he had done her grew unendurable.
He won back her affection, ended the agony by marrying her, and became a
faithful and patient husband and a good father. But it was no secret
to those who knew the family well that his domestic life was full of
trials. The erratic temper of his wife not seldom put the gentleness
of his nature to the severest tests; and these troubles and struggles,
which accompanied him through all the vicissitudes of his life from
the modest home in Springfield to the White House at Washington,
adding untold private heart-burnings to his public cares, and sometimes
precipitating upon him incredible embarrassments in the discharge of his
public duties, form one of the most pathetic features of his career.
He continued to “ride the circuit,” read books while travelling in his
buggy, told funny stories to his fellow-lawyers in the tavern, chatted
familiarly with his neighbors around the stove in the store and at the
post-office, had his hours of melancholy brooding as of old, and became
more and more widely known and trusted and beloved among the people
of his State for his ability as a lawyer and politician, for the
uprightness of his character and the overflowing spring of sympathetic
kindness in his heart. His main ambition was confessedly that of
political distinction; but hardly any one would at that time have seen
in him the man destined to lead the nation through the greatest crisis
of the century.
His time had not yet come when, in 1846, he was elected to Congress. In
a clever speech in the House of Representatives he denounced President
Polk for having unjustly forced war upon Mexico, and he amused the
Committee of the Whole by a witty attack upon General Cass. More
important was the expression he gave to his antislavery impulses
by offering a bill looking to the emancipation of the slaves in the
District of Columbia, and by his repeated votes for the famous Wilmot
Proviso, intended to exclude slavery from the Territories acquired from
Mexico. But when, at the expiration of his term, in March, 1849, he left
his seat, he gloomily despaired of ever seeing the day when the cause
nearest to his heart would be rightly grasped by the people, and when he
would be able to render any service to his country in solving the great
problem. Nor had his career as a member of Congress in any sense been
such as to gratify his ambition. Indeed, if he ever had any belief in a
great destiny for himself, it must have been weak at that period; for he
actually sought to obtain from the new Whig President, General Taylor,
the place of Commissioner of the General Land Office; willing to
bury himself in one of the administrative bureaus of the government.
Fortunately for the country, he failed; and no less fortunately, when,
later, the territorial governorship of Oregon was offered to him, Mrs.
Lincoln’s protest induced him to decline it. Returning to Springfield,
he gave himself with renewed zest to his law practice, acquiesced in the
Compromise of 1850 with reluctance and a mental reservation, supported
in the Presidential campaign of 1852 the Whig candidate in some
spiritless speeches, and took but a languid interest in the politics of
the day. But just then his time was drawing near.
The peace promised, and apparently inaugurated, by the Compromise of
1850 was rudely broken by the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill
in 1854. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, opening the Territories
of the United States, the heritage of coming generations, to the
invasion of slavery, suddenly revealed the whole significance of the
slavery question to the people of the free States, and thrust itself
into the politics of the country as the paramount issue. Something like
an electric shock flashed through the North. Men who but a short time
before had been absorbed by their business pursuits, and deprecated all
political agitation, were startled out of their security by a sudden
alarm, and excitedly took sides. That restless trouble of conscience
about slavery, which even in times of apparent repose had secretly
disturbed the souls of Northern people, broke forth in an utterance
louder than ever. The bonds of accustomed party allegiance gave way.
Antislavery Democrats and antislavery Whigs felt themselves drawn
together by a common overpowering sentiment, and soon they began to
rally in a new organization. The Republican party sprang into being to
meet the overruling call of the hour. Then Abraham Lincoln’s time was
come. He rapidly advanced to a position of conspicuous championship in
the struggle. This, however, was not owing to his virtues and abilities
alone. Indeed, the slavery question stirred his soul in its profoundest
depths; it was, as one of his intimate friends said, “the only one on
which he would become excited”; it called forth all his faculties and
energies. Yet there were many others who, having long and arduously
fought the antislavery battle in the popular assembly, or in the press,
or in the halls of Congress, far surpassed him in prestige, and compared
with whom he was still an obscure and untried man. His reputation,
although highly honorable and well earned, had so far been essentially
local. As a stump-speaker in Whig canvasses outside of his State he had
attracted comparatively little attention; but in Illinois he had been
recognized as one of the foremost men of the Whig party. Among the
opponents of the Nebraska Bill he occupied in his State so important
a position, that in 1856 he was the choice of a large majority of the
“Anti-Nebraska men” in the Legislature for a seat in the Senate of the
United States which then became vacant; and when he, an old Whig, could
not obtain the votes of the Anti-Nebraska Democrats necessary to make
a majority, he generously urged his friends to transfer their votes
to Lyman Trumbull, who was then elected. Two years later, in the
first national convention of the Republican party, the delegation from
Illinois brought him forward as a candidate for the vice-presidency, and
he received respectable support. Still, the name of Abraham Lincoln was
not widely known beyond the boundaries of his own State. But now it was
this local prominence in Illinois that put him in a position of peculiar
advantage on the battlefield of national politics. In the assault on the
Missouri Compromise which broke down all legal barriers to the spread
of slavery Stephen Arnold Douglas was the ostensible leader and central
figure; and Douglas was a Senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s State.
Douglas’s national theatre of action was the Senate, but in his
constituency in Illinois were the roots of his official position and
power. What he did in the Senate he had to justify before the people
of Illinois, in order to maintain himself in place; and in Illinois all
eyes turned to Lincoln as Douglas’s natural antagonist.
As very young men they had come to Illinois, Lincoln from Indiana,
Douglas from Vermont, and had grown up together in public life, Douglas
as a Democrat, Lincoln as a Whig. They had met first in Vandalia, in
1834, when Lincoln was in the Legislature and Douglas in the lobby; and
again in 1836, both as members of the Legislature. Douglas, a very able
politician, of the agile, combative, audacious, “pushing” sort, rose in
political distinction with remarkable rapidity. In quick succession he
became a member of the Legislature, a State’s attorney, secretary
of state, a judge on the supreme bench of Illinois, three times a
Representative in Congress, and a Senator of the United States when only
thirty-nine years old. In the National Democratic convention of 1852 he
appeared even as an aspirant to the nomination for the Presidency, as
the favorite of “young America,” and received a respectable vote. He had
far outstripped Lincoln in what is commonly called political success
and in reputation. But it had frequently happened that in political
campaigns Lincoln felt himself impelled, or was selected by his Whig
friends, to answer Douglas’s speeches; and thus the two were looked
upon, in a large part of the State at least, as the representative
combatants of their respective parties in the debates before
popular meetings. As soon, therefore, as, after the passage of his
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, Douglas returned to Illinois to defend his cause
before his constituents, Lincoln, obeying not only his own impulse, but
also general expectation, stepped forward as his principal opponent.
Thus the struggle about the principles involved in the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill, or, in a broader sense, the struggle between freedom and slavery,
assumed in Illinois the outward form of a personal contest between
Lincoln and Douglas; and, as it continued and became more animated,
that personal contest in Illinois was watched with constantly increasing
interest by the whole country. When, in 1858, Douglas’s senatorial term
being about to expire, Lincoln was formally designated by the Republican
convention of Illinois as their candidate for the Senate, to take
Douglas’s place, and the two contestants agreed to debate the questions
at issue face to face in a series of public meetings, the eyes of the
whole American people were turned eagerly to that one point: and the
spectacle reminded one of those lays of ancient times telling of two
armies, in battle array, standing still to see their two principal
champions fight out the contested cause between the lines in single
combat.
Lincoln had then reached the full maturity of his powers. His equipment
as a statesman did not embrace a comprehensive knowledge of public
affairs. What he had studied he had indeed made his own, with the eager
craving and that zealous tenacity characteristic of superior minds
learning under difficulties. But his narrow opportunities and the
unsteady life he had led during his younger years had not permitted
the accumulation of large stores in his mind. It is true, in political
campaigns he had occasionally spoken on the ostensible issues between
the Whigs and the Democrats, the tariff, internal improvements, banks,
and so on, but only in a perfunctory manner. Had he ever given much
serious thought and study to these subjects, it is safe to assume that
a mind so prolific of original conceits as his would certainly have
produced some utterance upon them worth remembering. His soul had
evidently never been deeply stirred by such topics. But when his moral
nature was aroused, his brain developed an untiring activity until it
had mastered all the knowledge within reach. As soon as the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise had thrust the slavery question into politics
as the paramount issue, Lincoln plunged into an arduous study of all
its legal, historical, and moral aspects, and then his mind became a
complete arsenal of argument. His rich natural gifts, trained by long
and varied practice, had made him an orator of rare persuasiveness. In
his immature days, he had pleased himself for a short period with that
inflated, high-flown style which, among the uncultivated, passes for
“beautiful speaking.” His inborn truthfulness and his artistic instinct
soon overcame that aberration and revealed to him the noble beauty and
strength of simplicity. He possessed an uncommon power of clear and
compact statement, which might have reminded those who knew the story
of his early youth of the efforts of the poor boy, when he copied his
compositions from the scraped wooden shovel, carefully to trim his
expressions in order to save paper. His language had the energy of
honest directness and he was a master of logical lucidity. He loved
to point and enliven his reasoning by humorous illustrations, usually
anecdotes of Western life, of which he had an inexhaustible store at his
command. These anecdotes had not seldom a flavor of rustic robustness
about them, but he used them with great effect, while amusing the
audience, to give life to an abstraction, to explode an absurdity, to
clinch an argument, to drive home an admonition. The natural kindliness
of his tone, softening prejudice and disarming partisan rancor, would
often open to his reasoning a way into minds most unwilling to receive
it.
Yet his greatest power consisted in the charm of his individuality. That
charm did not, in the ordinary way, appeal to the ear or to the eye. His
voice was not melodious; rather shrill and piercing, especially when it
rose to its high treble in moments of great animation. His figure was
unhandsome, and the action of his unwieldy limbs awkward. He commanded
none of the outward graces of oratory as they are commonly understood.
His charm was of a different kind. It flowed from the rare depth and
genuineness of his convictions and his sympathetic feelings. Sympathy
was the strongest element in his nature. One of his biographers, who
knew him before he became President, says: “Lincoln’s compassion might
be stirred deeply by an object present, but never by an object absent
and unseen. In the former case he would most likely extend relief, with
little inquiry into the merits of the case, because, as he expressed it
himself, it ‘took a pain out of his own heart.’” Only half of this is
correct. It is certainly true that he could not witness any individual
distress or oppression, or any kind of suffering, without feeling a pang
of pain himself, and that by relieving as much as he could the suffering
of others he put an end to his own. This compassionate impulse to help
he felt not only for human beings, but for every living creature. As in
his boyhood he angrily reproved the boys who tormented a wood turtle by
putting a burning coal on its back, so, we are told, he would, when a
mature man, on a journey, dismount from his buggy and wade waist-deep
in mire to rescue a pig struggling in a swamp. Indeed, appeals to his
compassion were so irresistible to him, and he felt it so difficult
to refuse anything when his refusal could give pain, that he himself
sometimes spoke of his inability to say “no” as a positive weakness.
But that certainly does not prove that his compassionate feeling was
confined to individual cases of suffering witnessed with his own eyes.
As the boy was moved by the aspect of the tortured wood turtle to
compose an essay against cruelty to animals in general, so the aspect of
other cases of suffering and wrong wrought up his moral nature, and set
his mind to work against cruelty, injustice, and oppression in general.
As his sympathy went forth to others, it attracted others to him.
Especially those whom he called the “plain people” felt themselves drawn
to him by the instinctive feeling that he understood, esteemed, and
appreciated them. He had grown up among the poor, the lowly, the
ignorant. He never ceased to remember the good souls he had met among
them, and the many kindnesses they had done him. Although in his mental
development he had risen far above them, he never looked down upon them.
How they felt and how they reasoned he knew, for so he had once felt and
reasoned himself. How they could be moved he knew, for so he had once
been moved himself and practised moving others. His mind was much larger
than theirs, but it thoroughly comprehended theirs; and while he thought
much farther than they, their thoughts were ever present to him. Nor had
the visible distance between them grown as wide as his rise in the world
would seem to have warranted. Much of his backwoods speech and manners
still clung to him. Although he had become “Mr. Lincoln” to his later
acquaintances, he was still “Abe” to the “Nats” and “Billys” and “Daves”
of his youth; and their familiarity neither appeared unnatural to
them, nor was it in the least awkward to him. He still told and
enjoyed stories similar to those he had told and enjoyed in the Indiana
settlement and at New Salem. His wants remained as modest as they had
ever been; his domestic habits had by no means completely accommodated
themselves to those of his more highborn wife; and though the “Kentucky
jeans” apparel had long been dropped, his clothes of better material
and better make would sit ill sorted on his gigantic limbs. His cotton
umbrella, without a handle, and tied together with a coarse string to
keep it from flapping, which he carried on his circuit rides, is said to
be remembered still by some of his surviving neighbors. This rusticity
of habit was utterly free from that affected contempt of refinement and
comfort which self-made men sometimes carry into their more affluent
circumstances. To Abraham Lincoln it was entirely natural, and all those
who came into contact with him knew it to be so. In his ways of thinking
and feeling he had become a gentleman in the highest sense, but the
refining process had polished but little the outward form. The plain
people, therefore, still considered “honest Abe Lincoln” one of
themselves; and when they felt, which they no doubt frequently did, that
his thoughts and aspirations moved in a sphere above their own,
they were all the more proud of him, without any diminution
of fellow-feeling. It was this relation of mutual sympathy and
understanding between Lincoln and the plain people that gave him his
peculiar power as a public man, and singularly fitted him, as we shall
see, for that leadership which was preeminently required in the great
crisis then coming on,—the leadership which indeed thinks and moves
ahead of the masses, but always remains within sight and sympathetic
touch of them.
He entered upon the campaign of 1858 better equipped than he had ever
been before. He not only instinctively felt, but he had convinced
himself by arduous study, that in this struggle against the spread of
slavery he had right, justice, philosophy, the enlightened opinion of
mankind, history, the Constitution, and good policy on his side. It
was observed that after he began to discuss the slavery question his
speeches were pitched in a much loftier key than his former oratorical
efforts. While he remained fond of telling funny stories in private
conversation, they disappeared more and more from his public discourse.
He would still now and then point his argument with expressions of
inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty
irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine
solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his
wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment,
disclosed in language of rare precision, strength, and beauty, not
seldom astonished his old friends.
Neither of the two champions could have found a more formidable
antagonist than each now met in the other. Douglas was by far the most
conspicuous member of his party. His admirers had dubbed him “the Little
Giant,” contrasting in that nickname the greatness of his mind with the
smallness of his body. But though of low stature, his broad-shouldered
figure appeared uncommonly sturdy, and there was something lion-like in
the squareness of his brow and jaw, and in the defiant shake of his long
hair. His loud and persistent advocacy of territorial expansion, in the
name of patriotism and “manifest destiny,” had given him an enthusiastic
following among the young and ardent. Great natural parts, a highly
combative temperament, and long training had made him a debater
unsurpassed in a Senate filled with able men. He could be as forceful in
his appeals to patriotic feelings as he was fierce in denunciation and
thoroughly skilled in all the baser tricks of parliamentary pugilism.
While genial and rollicking in his social intercourse—the idol of the
“boys” he felt himself one of the most renowned statesmen of his time,
and would frequently meet his opponents with an overbearing haughtiness,
as persons more to be pitied than to be feared. In his speech opening
the campaign of 1858, he spoke of Lincoln, whom the Republicans had
dared to advance as their candidate for “his” place in the Senate, with
an air of patronizing if not contemptuous condescension, as “a kind,
amiable, and intelligent gentleman and a good citizen.” The Little Giant
would have been pleased to pass off his antagonist as a tall dwarf. He
knew Lincoln too well, however, to indulge himself seriously in such a
delusion. But the political situation was at that moment in a curious
tangle, and Douglas could expect to derive from the confusion great
advantage over his opponent.
By the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, opening the Territories to the
ingress of slavery, Douglas had pleased the South, but greatly alarmed
the North. He had sought to conciliate Northern sentiment by appending
to his Kansas-Nebraska Bill the declaration that its intent was “not
to legislate slavery into any State or Territory, nor to exclude it
therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form
and regulate their institutions in their own way, subject only to the
Constitution of the United States.” This he called “the great principle
of popular sovereignty.” When asked whether, under this act, the people
of a Territory, before its admission as a State, would have the right
to exclude slavery, he answered, “That is a question for the courts
to decide.” Then came the famous “Dred Scott decision,” in which the
Supreme Court held substantially that the right to hold slaves
as property existed in the Territories by virtue of the Federal
Constitution, and that this right could not be denied by any act of a
territorial government. This, of course, denied the right of the people
of any Territory to exclude slavery while they were in a territorial
condition, and it alarmed the Northern people still more. Douglas
recognized the binding force of the decision of the Supreme Court, at
the same time maintaining, most illogically, that his great principle
of popular sovereignty remained in force nevertheless. Meanwhile, the
proslavery people of western Missouri, the so-called “border ruffians,”
had invaded Kansas, set up a constitutional convention, made
a constitution of an extreme pro-slavery type, the “Lecompton
Constitution,” refused to submit it fairly to a vote of the people of
Kansas, and then referred it to Congress for acceptance,—seeking thus
to accomplish the admission of Kansas as a slave State. Had Douglas
supported such a scheme, he would have lost all foothold in the North.
In the name of popular sovereignty he loudly declared his opposition to
the acceptance of any constitution not sanctioned by a formal popular
vote. He “did not care,” he said, “whether slavery be voted up or down,”
but there must be a fair vote of the people. Thus he drew upon himself
the hostility of the Buchanan administration, which was controlled by
the proslavery interest, but he saved his Northern following. More
than this, not only did his Democratic admirers now call him “the true
champion of freedom,” but even some Republicans of large influence,
prominent among them Horace Greeley, sympathizing with Douglas in his
fight against the Lecompton Constitution, and hoping to detach him
permanently from the proslavery interest and to force a lasting breach
in the Democratic party, seriously advised the Republicans of Illinois
to give up their opposition to Douglas, and to help re-elect him to the
Senate. Lincoln was not of that opinion. He believed that great popular
movements can succeed only when guided by their faithful friends, and
that the antislavery cause could not safely be entrusted to the keeping
of one who “did not care whether slavery be voted up or down.” This
opinion prevailed in Illinois; but the influences within the Republican
party over which it prevailed yielded only a reluctant acquiescence, if
they acquiesced at all, after having materially strengthened Douglas’s
position. Such was the situation of things when the campaign of 1858
between Lincoln and Douglas began.
Lincoln opened the campaign on his side at the convention which
nominated him as the Republican candidate for the senatorship, with
a memorable saying which sounded like a shout from the watchtower of
history: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this
government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not
expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but
I expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or
all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further
spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates
will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the
States,—old as well as new, North as well as South.” Then he proceeded
to point out that the Nebraska doctrine combined with the Dred Scott
decision worked in the direction of making the nation “all slave.” Here
was the “irrepressible conflict” spoken of by Seward a short time later,
in a speech made famous mainly by that phrase. If there was any new
discovery in it, the right of priority was Lincoln’s. This utterance
proved not only his statesmanlike conception of the issue, but also,
in his situation as a candidate, the firmness of his moral courage.
The friends to whom he had read the draught of this speech before he
delivered it warned him anxiously that its delivery might be fatal to
his success in the election. This was shrewd advice, in the ordinary
sense. While a slaveholder could threaten disunion with impunity, the
mere suggestion that the existence of slavery was incompatible with
freedom in the Union would hazard the political chances of any public
man in the North. But Lincoln was inflexible. “It is true,” said he,
“and I will deliver it as written.... I would rather be defeated with
these expressions in my speech held up and discussed before the people
than be victorious without them.” The statesman was right in his
far-seeing judgment and his conscientious statement of the truth, but
the practical politicians were also right in their prediction of the
immediate effect. Douglas instantly seized upon the declaration that a
house divided against itself cannot stand as the main objective point of
his attack, interpreting it as an incitement to a “relentless sectional
war,” and there is no doubt that the persistent reiteration of this
charge served to frighten not a few timid souls.
Lincoln constantly endeavored to bring the moral and philosophical side
of the subject to the foreground. “Slavery is wrong” was the keynote of
all his speeches. To Douglas’s glittering sophism that the right of the
people of a Territory to have slavery or not, as they might desire, was
in accordance with the principle of true popular sovereignty, he made
the pointed answer: “Then true popular sovereignty, according to Senator
Douglas, means that, when one man makes another man his slave, no
third man shall be allowed to object.” To Douglas’s argument that
the principle which demanded that the people of a Territory should be
permitted to choose whether they would have slavery or not “originated
when God made man, and placed good and evil before him, allowing him
to choose upon his own responsibility,” Lincoln solemnly replied: “No;
God—did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his
choice. On the contrary, God did tell him there was one tree of the
fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of death.” He did not,
however, place himself on the most advanced ground taken by the radical
anti-slavery men. He admitted that, under the Constitution, “the
Southern people were entitled to a Congressional fugitive slave law,”
although he did not approve the fugitive slave law then existing. He
declared also that, if slavery were kept out of the Territories during
their territorial existence, as it should be, and if then the people of
any Territory, having a fair chance and a clear field, should do such
an extraordinary thing as to adopt a slave constitution, uninfluenced by
the actual presence of the institution among them, he saw no alternative
but to admit such a Territory into the Union. He declared further that,
while he should be exceedingly glad to see slavery abolished in the
District of Columbia, he would, as a member of Congress, with his
present views, not endeavor to bring on that abolition except on
condition that emancipation be gradual, that it be approved by the
decision of a majority of voters in the District, and that compensation
be made to unwilling owners. On every available occasion, he pronounced
himself in favor of the deportation and colonization of the blacks, of
course with their consent. He repeatedly disavowed any wish on his part
to have social and political equality established between whites and
blacks. On this point he summed up his views in a reply to Douglas’s
assertion that the Declaration of Independence, in speaking of all men
as being created equal, did not include the negroes, saying: “I do not
understand the Declaration of Independence to mean that all men were
created equal in all respects. They are not equal in color. But I
believe that it does mean to declare that all men are equal in some
respects; they are equal in their right to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.”
With regard to some of these subjects Lincoln modified his position at
a later period, and it has been suggested that he would have professed
more advanced principles in his debates with Douglas, had he not feared
thereby to lose votes. This view can hardly be sustained. Lincoln had
the courage of his opinions, but he was not a radical. The man who
risked his election by delivering, against the urgent protest of his
friends, the speech about “the house divided against itself” would not
have shrunk from the expression of more extreme views, had he really
entertained them. It is only fair to assume that he said what at the
time he really thought, and that if, subsequently, his opinions changed,
it was owing to new conceptions of good policy and of duty brought
forth by an entirely new set of circumstances and exigencies. It
is characteristic that he continued to adhere to the impracticable
colonization plan even after the Emancipation Proclamation had already
been issued.
But in this contest Lincoln proved himself not only a debater, but
also a political strategist of the first order. The “kind, amiable, and
intelligent gentleman,” as Douglas had been pleased to call him, was by
no means as harmless as a dove. He possessed an uncommon share of that
worldly shrewdness which not seldom goes with genuine simplicity of
character; and the political experience gathered in the Legislature
and in Congress, and in many election campaigns, added to his keen
intuitions, had made him as far-sighted a judge of the probable effects
of a public man’s sayings or doings upon the popular mind, and as
accurate a calculator in estimating political chances and forecasting
results, as could be found among the party managers in Illinois. And
now he perceived keenly the ugly dilemma in which Douglas found himself,
between the Dred Scott decision, which declared the right to hold slaves
to exist in the Territories by virtue of the Federal Constitution, and
his “great principle of popular sovereignty,” according to which the
people of a Territory, if they saw fit, were to have the right to
exclude slavery therefrom. Douglas was twisting and squirming to
the best of his ability to avoid the admission that the two were
incompatible. The question then presented itself if it would be good
policy for Lincoln to force Douglas to a clear expression of his opinion
as to whether, the Dred Scott decision notwithstanding, “the people of a
Territory could in any lawful way exclude slavery from its limits prior
to the formation of a State constitution.” Lincoln foresaw and predicted
what Douglas would answer: that slavery could not exist in a Territory
unless the people desired it and gave it protection by territorial
legislation. In an improvised caucus the policy of pressing the
interrogatory on Douglas was discussed. Lincoln’s friends unanimously
advised against it, because the answer foreseen would sufficiently
commend Douglas to the people of Illinois to insure his re-election to
the Senate. But Lincoln persisted. “I am after larger game,” said he.
“If Douglas so answers, he can never be President, and the battle of
1860 is worth a hundred of this.” The interrogatory was pressed upon
Douglas, and Douglas did answer that, no matter what the decision of
the Supreme Court might be on the abstract question, the people of
a Territory had the lawful means to introduce or exclude slavery by
territorial legislation friendly or unfriendly to the institution.
Lincoln found it easy to show the absurdity of the proposition that, if
slavery were admitted to exist of right in the Territories by virtue
of the supreme law, the Federal Constitution, it could be kept out or
expelled by an inferior law, one made by a territorial Legislature.
Again the judgment of the politicians, having only the nearest object in
view, proved correct: Douglas was reelected to the Senate. But Lincoln’s
judgment proved correct also: Douglas, by resorting to the expedient
of his “unfriendly legislation doctrine,” forfeited his last chance of
becoming President of the United States. He might have hoped to win, by
sufficient atonement, his pardon from the South for his opposition
to the Lecompton Constitution; but that he taught the people of the
Territories a trick by which they could defeat what the proslavery men
considered a constitutional right, and that he called that trick
lawful, this the slave power would never forgive. The breach between
the Southern and the Northern Democracy was thenceforth irremediable and
fatal.
The Presidential election of 1860 approached. The struggle in Kansas,
and the debates in Congress which accompanied it, and which not
unfrequently provoked violent outbursts, continually stirred the popular
excitement. Within the Democratic party raged the war of factions. The
national Democratic convention met at Charleston on the 23d of April,
1860. After a struggle of ten days between the adherents and the
opponents of Douglas, during which the delegates from the cotton States
had withdrawn, the convention adjourned without having nominated any
candidates, to meet again in Baltimore on the 18th of June. There was no
prospect, however, of reconciling the hostile elements. It appeared very
probable that the Baltimore convention would nominate Douglas, while
the seceding Southern Democrats would set up a candidate of their own,
representing extreme proslavery principles.
Meanwhile, the national Republican convention assembled at Chicago on
the 16th of May, full of enthusiasm and hope. The situation was easily
understood. The Democrats would have the South. In order to succeed
in the election, the Republicans had to win, in addition to the States
carried by Fremont in 1856, those that were classed as “doubtful,”—New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, or Illinois in the place of either
New Jersey or Indiana. The most eminent Republican statesmen and leaders
of the time thought of for the Presidency were Seward and Chase, both
regarded as belonging to the more advanced order of antislavery men.
Of the two, Seward had the largest following, mainly from New York,
New England, and the Northwest. Cautious politicians doubted seriously
whether Seward, to whom some phrases in his speeches had undeservedly
given the reputation of a reckless radical, would be able to command the
whole Republican vote in the doubtful States. Besides, during his long
public career he had made enemies. It was evident that those who thought
Seward’s nomination too hazardous an experiment would consider Chase
unavailable for the same reason. They would then look round for an
“available” man; and among the “available” men Abraham Lincoln was
easily discovered to stand foremost. His great debate with Douglas had
given him a national reputation. The people of the East being eager
to see the hero of so dramatic a contest, he had been induced to visit
several Eastern cities, and had astonished and delighted large and
distinguished audiences with speeches of singular power and originality.
An address delivered by him in the Cooper Institute in New York, before
an audience containing a large number of important persons, was then,
and has ever since been, especially praised as one of the most logical
and convincing political speeches ever made in this country. The people
of the West had grown proud of him as a distinctively Western great man,
and his popularity at home had some peculiar features which could be
expected to exercise a potent charm. Nor was Lincoln’s name as that of
an available candidate left to the chance of accidental discovery. It
is indeed not probable that he thought of himself as a Presidential
possibility, during his contest with Douglas for the senatorship. As
late as April, 1859, he had written to a friend who had approached him
on the subject that he did not think himself fit for the Presidency.
The Vice-Presidency was then the limit of his ambition. But some of
his friends in Illinois took the matter seriously in hand, and Lincoln,
after some hesitation, then formally authorized “the use of his name.”
The matter was managed with such energy and excellent judgment that,
in the convention, he had not only the whole vote of Illinois to start
with, but won votes on all sides without offending any rival. A large
majority of the opponents of Seward went over to Abraham Lincoln, and
gave him the nomination on the third ballot. As had been foreseen,
Douglas was nominated by one wing of the Democratic party at Baltimore,
while the extreme proslavery wing put Breckinridge into the field as
its candidate. After a campaign conducted with the energy of genuine
enthusiasm on the antislavery side the united Republicans defeated the
divided Democrats, and Lincoln was elected President by a majority of
fifty-seven votes in the electoral colleges.
The result of the election had hardly been declared when the disunion
movement in the South, long threatened and carefully planned and
prepared, broke out in the shape of open revolt, and nearly a month
before Lincoln could be inaugurated as President of the United States
seven Southern States had adopted ordinances of secession, formed an
independent confederacy, framed a constitution for it, and elected
Jefferson Davis its president, expecting the other slaveholding
States soon to join them. On the 11th of February, 1861, Lincoln left
Springfield for Washington; having, with characteristic simplicity,
asked his law partner not to change the sign of the firm “Lincoln
and Herndon” during the four years unavoidable absence of the senior
partner, and having taken an affectionate and touching leave of his
neighbors.
The situation which confronted the new President was appalling: the
larger part of the South in open rebellion, the rest of the slaveholding
States wavering preparing to follow; the revolt guided by determined,
daring, and skillful leaders; the Southern people, apparently full of
enthusiasm and military spirit, rushing to arms, some of the forts
and arsenals already in their possession; the government of the Union,
before the accession of the new President, in the hands of men some of
whom actively sympathized with the revolt, while others were hampered by
their traditional doctrines in dealing with it, and really gave it aid
and comfort by their irresolute attitude; all the departments full of
“Southern sympathizers” and honeycombed with disloyalty; the treasury
empty, and the public credit at the lowest ebb; the arsenals ill
supplied with arms, if not emptied by treacherous practices; the regular
army of insignificant strength, dispersed over an immense surface, and
deprived of some of its best officers by defection; the navy small and
antiquated. But that was not all. The threat of disunion had so often
been resorted to by the slave power in years gone by that most Northern
people had ceased to believe in its seriousness. But, when disunion
actually appeared as a stern reality, something like a chill swept
through the whole Northern country. A cry for union and peace at any
price rose on all sides. Democratic partisanship reiterated this cry
with vociferous vehemence, and even many Republicans grew afraid of
the victory they had just achieved at the ballot-box, and spoke of
compromise. The country fairly resounded with the noise of “anticoercion
meetings.” Expressions of firm resolution from determined antislavery
men were indeed not wanting, but they were for a while almost drowned
by a bewildering confusion of discordant voices. Even this was not
all. Potent influences in Europe, with an ill-concealed desire for the
permanent disruption of the American Union, eagerly espoused the cause
of the Southern seceders, and the two principal maritime powers of the
Old World seemed only to be waiting for a favorable opportunity to lend
them a helping hand.
This was the state of things to be mastered by “honest Abe Lincoln” when
he took his seat in the Presidential chair,—“honest Abe Lincoln,” who
was so good-natured that he could not say “no”; the greatest achievement
in whose life had been a debate on the slavery question; who had never
been in any position of power; who was without the slightest experience
of high executive duties, and who had only a speaking acquaintance with
the men upon whose counsel and cooperation he was to depend. Nor was
his accession to power under such circumstances greeted with general
confidence even by the members of his party. While he had indeed won
much popularity, many Republicans, especially among those who had
advocated Seward’s nomination for the Presidency, saw the simple
“Illinois lawyer” take the reins of government with a feeling little
short of dismay. The orators and journals of the opposition were
ridiculing and lampooning him without measure. Many people actually
wondered how such a man could dare to undertake a task which, as he
himself had said to his neighbors in his parting speech, was “more
difficult than that of Washington himself had been.”
But Lincoln brought to that task, aside from other uncommon qualities,
the first requisite,—an intuitive comprehension of its nature. While
he did not indulge in the delusion that the Union could be maintained or
restored without a conflict of arms, he could indeed not foresee all the
problems he would have to solve. He instinctively understood, however,
by what means that conflict would have to be conducted by the government
of a democracy. He knew that the impending war, whether great or small,
would not be like a foreign war, exciting a united national enthusiasm,
but a civil war, likely to fan to uncommon heat the animosities of party
even in the localities controlled by the government; that this war would
have to be carried on not by means of a ready-made machinery, ruled
by an undisputed, absolute will, but by means to be furnished by the
voluntary action of the people:—armies to be formed by voluntary
enlistments; large sums of money to be raised by the people, through
representatives, voluntarily taxing themselves; trust of extraordinary
power to be voluntarily granted; and war measures, not seldom
restricting the rights and liberties to which the citizen was
accustomed, to be voluntarily accepted and submitted to by the people,
or at least a large majority of them; and that this would have to be
kept up not merely during a short period of enthusiastic excitement; but
possibly through weary years of alternating success and disaster, hope
and despondency. He knew that in order to steer this government by
public opinion successfully through all the confusion created by the
prejudices and doubts and differences of sentiment distracting the
popular mind, and so to propitiate, inspire, mould, organize, unite, and
guide the popular will that it might give forth all the means required
for the performance of his great task, he would have to take into
account all the influences strongly affecting the current of popular
thought and feeling, and to direct while appearing to obey.
This was the kind of leadership he intuitively conceived to be needed
when a free people were to be led forward en masse to overcome a
great common danger under circumstances of appalling difficulty, the
leadership which does not dash ahead with brilliant daring, no matter
who follows, but which is intent upon rallying all the available forces,
gathering in the stragglers, closing up the column, so that the front
may advance well supported. For this leadership Abraham Lincoln was
admirably fitted, better than any other American statesman of his day;
for he understood the plain people, with all their loves and hates,
their prejudices and their noble impulses, their weaknesses and their
strength, as he understood himself, and his sympathetic nature was apt
to draw their sympathy to him.
His inaugural address foreshadowed his official course in characteristic
manner. Although yielding nothing in point of principle, it was by no
means a flaming antislavery manifesto, such as would have pleased the
more ardent Republicans. It was rather the entreaty of a sorrowing
father speaking to his wayward children. In the kindliest language
he pointed out to the secessionists how ill advised their attempt at
disunion was, and why, for their own sakes, they should desist. Almost
plaintively, he told them that, while it was not their duty to destroy
the Union, it was his sworn duty to preserve it; that the least he
could do, under the obligations of his oath, was to possess and hold the
property of the United States; that he hoped to do this peaceably; that
he abhorred war for any purpose, and that they would have none
unless they themselves were the aggressors. It was a masterpiece of
persuasiveness, and while Lincoln had accepted many valuable amendments
suggested by Seward, it was essentially his own. Probably Lincoln
himself did not expect his inaugural address to have any effect upon the
secessionists, for he must have known them to be resolved upon disunion
at any cost. But it was an appeal to the wavering minds in the North,
and upon them it made a profound impression. Every candid man, however
timid and halting, had to admit that the President was bound by his oath
to do his duty; that under that oath he could do no less than he said
he would do; that if the secessionists resisted such an appeal as
the President had made, they were bent upon mischief, and that the
government must be supported against them. The partisan sympathy with
the Southern insurrection which still existed in the North did indeed
not disappear, but it diminished perceptibly under the influence of such
reasoning. Those who still resisted it did so at the risk of appearing
unpatriotic.
It must not be supposed, however, that Lincoln at once succeeded in
pleasing everybody, even among his friends,—even among those nearest to
him. In selecting his cabinet, which he did substantially before he left
Springfield for Washington, he thought it wise to call to his assistance
the strong men of his party, especially those who had given evidence of
the support they commanded as his competitors in the Chicago convention.
In them he found at the same time representatives of the
different shades of opinion within the party, and of the different
elements—former Whigs and former Democrats—from which the party had
recruited itself. This was sound policy under the circumstances. It
might indeed have been foreseen that among the members of a cabinet so
composed, troublesome disagreements and rivalries would break out. But
it was better for the President to have these strong and ambitious
men near him as his co-operators than to have them as his critics in
Congress, where their differences might have been composed in a common
opposition to him. As members of his cabinet he could hope to control
them, and to keep them busily employed in the service of a common
purpose, if he had the strength to do so. Whether he did possess this
strength was soon tested by a singularly rude trial.
There can be no doubt that the foremost members of his cabinet, Seward
and Chase, the most eminent Republican statesmen, had felt themselves
wronged by their party when in its national convention it preferred
to them for the Presidency a man whom, not unnaturally, they thought
greatly their inferior in ability and experience as well as in service.
The soreness of that disappointment was intensified when they saw this
Western man in the White House, with so much of rustic manner and speech
as still clung to him, meeting his fellow-citizens, high and low, on a
footing of equality, with the simplicity of his good nature unburdened
by any conventional dignity of deportment, and dealing with the great
business of state in an easy-going, unmethodical, and apparently
somewhat irreverent way. They did not understand such a man. Especially
Seward, who, as Secretary of State, considered himself next to the
Chief Executive, and who quickly accustomed himself to giving orders and
making arrangements upon his own motion, thought it necessary that he
should rescue the direction of public affairs from hands so unskilled,
and take full charge of them himself. At the end of the first month of
the administration he submitted a “memorandum” to President Lincoln,
which has been first brought to light by Nicolay and Hay, and is one of
their most valuable contributions to the history of those days. In that
paper Seward actually told the President that at the end of a month’s
administration the government was still without a policy, either
domestic or foreign; that the slavery question should be eliminated from
the struggle about the Union; that the matter of the maintenance of the
forts and other possessions in the South should be decided with that
view; that explanations should be demanded categorically from the
governments of Spain and France, which were then preparing, one for the
annexation of San Domingo, and both for the invasion of Mexico; that
if no satisfactory explanations were received war should be declared
against Spain and France by the United States; that explanations should
also be sought from Russia and Great Britain, and a vigorous continental
spirit of independence against European intervention be aroused all over
the American continent; that this policy should be incessantly pursued
and directed by somebody; that either the President should devote
himself entirely to it, or devolve the direction on some member of his
cabinet, whereupon all debate on this policy must end.
This could be understood only as a formal demand that the President
should acknowledge his own incompetency to perform his duties, content
himself with the amusement of distributing post-offices, and resign his
power as to all important affairs into the hands of his Secretary of
State. It seems to-day incomprehensible how a statesman of Seward’s
calibre could at that period conceive a plan of policy in which the
slavery question had no place; a policy which rested upon the utterly
delusive assumption that the secessionists, who had already formed their
Southern Confederacy and were with stern resolution preparing to fight
for its independence, could be hoodwinked back into the Union by some
sentimental demonstration against European interference; a policy which,
at that critical moment, would have involved the Union in a foreign war,
thus inviting foreign intervention in favor of the Southern Confederacy,
and increasing tenfold its chances in the struggle for independence. But
it is equally incomprehensible how Seward could fail to see that this
demand of an unconditional surrender was a mortal insult to the head
of the government, and that by putting his proposition on paper he
delivered himself into the hands of the very man he had insulted; for,
had Lincoln, as most Presidents would have done, instantly dismissed
Seward, and published the true reason for that dismissal, it would
inevitably have been the end of Seward’s career. But Lincoln did what
not many of the noblest and greatest men in history would have been
noble and great enough to do. He considered that Seward was still
capable of rendering great service to his country in the place in
which he was, if rightly controlled. He ignored the insult, but
firmly established his superiority. In his reply, which he forthwith
despatched, he told Seward that the administration had a domestic policy
as laid down in the inaugural address with Seward’s approval; that
it had a foreign policy as traced in Seward’s despatches with the
President’s approval; that if any policy was to be maintained or
changed, he, the President, was to direct that on his responsibility;
and that in performing that duty the President had a right to the
advice of his secretaries. Seward’s fantastic schemes of foreign war
and continental policies Lincoln brushed aside by passing them over in
silence. Nothing more was said. Seward must have felt that he was at
the mercy of a superior man; that his offensive proposition had been
generously pardoned as a temporary aberration of a great mind, and that
he could atone for it only by devoted personal loyalty. This he did.
He was thoroughly subdued, and thenceforth submitted to Lincoln his
despatches for revision and amendment without a murmur. The war with
European nations was no longer thought of; the slavery question found in
due time its proper place in the struggle for the Union; and when, at
a later period, the dismissal of Seward was demanded by dissatisfied
senators, who attributed to him the shortcomings of the administration,
Lincoln stood stoutly by his faithful Secretary of State.
Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, a man of superb presence, of
eminent ability and ardent patriotism, of great natural dignity and a
certain outward coldness of manner, which made him appear more difficult
of approach than he really was, did not permit his disappointment to
burst out in such extravagant demonstrations. But Lincoln’s ways were
so essentially different from his that they never became quite
intelligible, and certainly not congenial to him. It might, perhaps,
have been better had there been, at the beginning of the administration,
some decided clash between Lincoln and Chase, as there was between
Lincoln and Seward, to bring on a full mutual explanation, and to make
Chase appreciate the real seriousness of Lincoln’s nature. But, as it
was, their relations always remained somewhat formal, and Chase never
felt quite at ease under a chief whom he could not understand, and whose
character and powers he never learned to esteem at their true value.
At the same time, he devoted himself zealously to the duties of his
department, and did the country arduous service under circumstances of
extreme difficulty. Nobody recognized this more heartily than Lincoln
himself, and they managed to work together until near the end of
Lincoln’s first Presidential term, when Chase, after some disagreements
concerning appointments to office, resigned from the treasury; and,
after Taney’s death, the President made him Chief Justice.
The rest of the cabinet consisted of men of less eminence, who
subordinated themselves more easily. In January, 1862, Lincoln found it
necessary to bow Cameron out of the war office, and to put in his place
Edwin M. Stanton, a man of intensely practical mind, vehement impulses,
fierce positiveness, ruthless energy, immense working power, lofty
patriotism, and severest devotion to duty. He accepted the war office
not as a partisan, for he had never been a Republican, but only to
do all he could in “helping to save the country.” The manner in
which Lincoln succeeded in taming this lion to his will, by frankly
recognizing his great qualities, by giving him the most generous
confidence, by aiding him in his work to the full of his power, by
kindly concession or affectionate persuasiveness in cases of differing
opinions, or, when it was necessary, by firm assertions of superior
authority, bears the highest testimony to his skill in the management of
men. Stanton, who had entered the service with rather a mean opinion
of Lincoln’s character and capacity, became one of his warmest, most
devoted, and most admiring friends, and with none of his secretaries
was Lincoln’s intercourse more intimate. To take advice with candid
readiness, and to weigh it without any pride of his own opinion, was one
of Lincoln’s preeminent virtues; but he had not long presided over his
cabinet council when his was felt by all its members to be the ruling
mind.
The cautious policy foreshadowed in his inaugural address, and pursued
during the first period of the civil war, was far from satisfying all
his party friends. The ardent spirits among the Union men thought that
the whole North should at once be called to arms, to crush the rebellion
by one powerful blow. The ardent spirits among the antislavery men
insisted that, slavery having brought forth the rebellion, this powerful
blow should at once be aimed at slavery. Both complained that the
administration was spiritless, undecided, and lamentably slow in its
proceedings. Lincoln reasoned otherwise. The ways of thinking and
feeling of the masses, of the plain people, were constantly present to
his mind. The masses, the plain people, had to furnish the men for the
fighting, if fighting was to be done. He believed that the plain people
would be ready to fight when it clearly appeared necessary, and that
they would feel that necessity when they felt themselves attacked. He
therefore waited until the enemies of the Union struck the first blow.
As soon as, on the 12th of April, 1861, the first gun was fired in
Charleston harbor on the Union flag upon Fort Sumter, the call was
sounded, and the Northern people rushed to arms.
Lincoln knew that the plain people were now indeed ready to fight in
defence of the Union, but not yet ready to fight for the destruction of
slavery. He declared openly that he had a right to summon the people to
fight for the Union, but not to summon them to fight for the abolition
of slavery as a primary object; and this declaration gave him numberless
soldiers for the Union who at that period would have hesitated to do
battle against the institution of slavery. For a time he succeeded
in rendering harmless the cry of the partisan opposition that the
Republican administration were perverting the war for the Union into an
“abolition war.” But when he went so far as to countermand the acts of
some generals in the field, looking to the emancipation of the slaves
in the districts covered by their commands, loud complaints arose from
earnest antislavery men, who accused the President of turning his back
upon the antislavery cause. Many of these antislavery men will now,
after a calm retrospect, be willing to admit that it would have been
a hazardous policy to endanger, by precipitating a demonstrative fight
against slavery, the success of the struggle for the Union.
Lincoln’s views and feelings concerning slavery had not changed. Those
who conversed with him intimately upon the subject at that period know
that he did not expect slavery long to survive the triumph of the Union,
even if it were not immediately destroyed by the war. In this he was
right. Had the Union armies achieved a decisive victory in an early
period of the conflict, and had the seceded States been received back
with slavery, the “slave power” would then have been a defeated power,
defeated in an attempt to carry out its most effective threat. It would
have lost its prestige. Its menaces would have been hollow sound, and
ceased to make any one afraid. It could no longer have hoped to expand,
to maintain an equilibrium in any branch of Congress, and to control the
government. The victorious free States would have largely overbalanced
it. It would no longer have been able to withstand the onset of a
hostile age. It could no longer have ruled,—and slavery had to rule in
order to live. It would have lingered for a while, but it would surely
have been “in the course of ultimate extinction.” A prolonged war
precipitated the destruction of slavery; a short war might only have
prolonged its death struggle. Lincoln saw this clearly; but he saw also
that, in a protracted death struggle, it might still have kept disloyal
sentiments alive, bred distracting commotions, and caused great mischief
to the country. He therefore hoped that slavery would not survive the
war.
But the question how he could rightfully employ his power to bring on
its speedy destruction was to him not a question of mere sentiment. He
himself set forth his reasoning upon it, at a later period, in one
of his inimitable letters. “I am naturally antislavery,” said he. “If
slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember the time when
I did not so think and feel. And yet I have never understood that the
Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act upon that
judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the
best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of
the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath.
Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break
the oath in using that power. I understood, too, that, in ordinary civil
administration, this oath even forbade me practically to indulge my
private abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I did
understand, however, also, that my oath imposed upon me the duty of
preserving, to the best of my ability, by every indispensable means,
that government, that nation, of which the Constitution was the organic
law. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tied
to preserve the Constitution—if, to save slavery, or any minor matter,
I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution
all together.” In other words, if the salvation of the government, the
Constitution, and the Union demanded the destruction of slavery, he
felt it to be not only his right, but his sworn duty to destroy it. Its
destruction became a necessity of the war for the Union.
As the war dragged on and disaster followed disaster, the sense of that
necessity steadily grew upon him. Early in 1862, as some of his friends
well remember, he saw, what Seward seemed not to see, that to give
the war for the Union an antislavery character was the surest means to
prevent the recognition of the Southern Confederacy as an independent
nation by European powers; that, slavery being abhorred by the moral
sense of civilized mankind, no European government would dare to offer
so gross an insult to the public opinion of its people as openly to
favor the creation of a state founded upon slavery to the prejudice of
an existing nation fighting against slavery. He saw also that slavery
untouched was to the rebellion an element of power, and that in order
to overcome that power it was necessary to turn it into an element
of weakness. Still, he felt no assurance that the plain people were
prepared for so radical a measure as the emancipation of the slaves by
act of the government, and he anxiously considered that, if they were
not, this great step might, by exciting dissension at the North, injure
the cause of the Union in one quarter more than it would help it in
another. He heartily welcomed an effort made in New York to mould and
stimulate public sentiment on the slavery question by public meetings
boldly pronouncing for emancipation. At the same time he himself
cautiously advanced with a recommendation, expressed in a special
message to Congress, that the United States should co-operate with any
State which might adopt the gradual abolishment of slavery, giving
such State pecuniary aid to compensate the former owners of emancipated
slaves. The discussion was started, and spread rapidly. Congress adopted
the resolution recommended, and soon went a step farther in passing a
bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The plain people
began to look at emancipation on a larger scale as a thing to be
considered seriously by patriotic citizens; and soon Lincoln thought
that the time was ripe, and that the edict of freedom could be ventured
upon without danger of serious confusion in the Union ranks.
The failure of McClellan’s movement upon Richmond increased immensely
the prestige of the enemy. The need of some great act to stimulate the
vitality of the Union cause seemed to grow daily more pressing. On
July 21, 1862, Lincoln surprised his cabinet with the draught of a
proclamation declaring free the slaves in all the States that should be
still in rebellion against the United States on the 1st of January, 1863.
As to the matter itself he announced that he had fully made up his mind;
he invited advice only concerning the form and the time of publication.
Seward suggested that the proclamation, if then brought out, amidst
disaster and distress, would sound like the last shriek of a perishing
cause. Lincoln accepted the suggestion, and the proclamation was
postponed. Another defeat followed, the second at Bull Run. But when,
after that battle, the Confederate army, under Lee, crossed the Potomac
and invaded Maryland, Lincoln vowed in his heart that, if the Union army
were now blessed with success, the decree of freedom should surely
be issued. The victory of Antietam was won on September 17, and the
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation came forth on the a 22d. It was
Lincoln’s own resolution and act; but practically it bound the nation,
and permitted no step backward. In spite of its limitations, it was the
actual abolition of slavery. Thus he wrote his name upon the books of
history with the title dearest to his heart, the liberator of the slave.
It is true, the great proclamation, which stamped the war as one for
“union and freedom,” did not at once mark the turning of the tide on the
field of military operations. There were more disasters, Fredericksburg
and Chancellorsville. But with Gettysburg and Vicksburg the whole aspect
of the war changed. Step by step, now more slowly, then more rapidly,
but with increasing steadiness, the flag of the Union advanced from
field to field toward the final consummation. The decree of emancipation
was naturally followed by the enlistment of emancipated negroes in the
Union armies. This measure had a anther reaching effect than merely
giving the Union armies an increased supply of men. The laboring force
of the rebellion was hopelessly disorganized. The war became like a
problem of arithmetic. As the Union armies pushed forward, the area
from which the Southern Confederacy could draw recruits and supplies
constantly grew smaller, while the area from which the Union recruited
its strength constantly grew larger; and everywhere, even within the
Southern lines, the Union had its allies. The fate of the rebellion
was then virtually decided; but it still required much bloody work to
convince the brave warriors who fought for it that they were really
beaten.
Neither did the Emancipation Proclamation forthwith command universal
assent among the people who were loyal to the Union. There were even
signs of a reaction against the administration in the fall elections of
1862, seemingly justifying the opinion, entertained by many, that the
President had really anticipated the development of popular feeling. The
cry that the war for the Union had been turned into an “abolition war”
was raised again by the opposition, and more loudly than ever. But
the good sense and patriotic instincts of the plain people gradually
marshalled themselves on Lincoln’s side, and he lost no opportunity to
help on this process by personal argument and admonition. There never
has been a President in such constant and active contact with the public
opinion of the country, as there never has been a President who, while
at the head of the government, remained so near to the people. Beyond
the circle of those who had long known him the feeling steadily grew
that the man in the White House was “honest Abe Lincoln” still, and
that every citizen might approach him with complaint, expostulation, or
advice, without danger of meeting a rebuff from power-proud authority,
or humiliating condescension; and this privilege was used by so many
and with such unsparing freedom that only superhuman patience could
have endured it all. There are men now living who would to-day read with
amazement, if not regret, what they ventured to say or write to him. But
Lincoln repelled no one whom he believed to speak to him in good faith
and with patriotic purpose. No good advice would go unheeded. No candid
criticism would offend him. No honest opposition, while it might pain
him, would produce a lasting alienation of feeling between him and the
opponent. It may truly be said that few men in power have ever been
exposed to more daring attempts to direct their course, to severer
censure of their acts, and to more cruel misrepresentation of their
motives: And all this he met with that good-natured humor peculiarly his
own, and with untiring effort to see the right and to impress it
upon those who differed from him. The conversations he had and the
correspondence he carried on upon matters of public interest, not only
with men in official position, but with private citizens, were almost
unceasing, and in a large number of public letters, written ostensibly
to meetings, or committees, or persons of importance, he addressed
himself directly to the popular mind. Most of these letters stand among
the finest monuments of our political literature. Thus he presented the
singular spectacle of a President who, in the midst of a great civil
war, with unprecedented duties weighing upon him, was constantly in
person debating the great features of his policy with the people.
While in this manner he exercised an ever-increasing influence upon the
popular understanding, his sympathetic nature endeared him more and
more to the popular heart. In vain did journals and speakers of the
opposition represent him as a lightminded trifler, who amused himself
with frivolous story-telling and coarse jokes, while the blood of the
people was flowing in streams. The people knew that the man at the head
of affairs, on whose haggard face the twinkle of humor so frequently
changed into an expression of profoundest sadness, was more than any
other deeply distressed by the suffering he witnessed; that he felt
the pain of every wound that was inflicted on the battlefield, and the
anguish of every woman or child who had lost husband or father; that
whenever he could he was eager to alleviate sorrow, and that his mercy
was never implored in vain. They looked to him as one who was with them
and of them in all their hopes and fears, their joys and sorrows, who
laughed with them and wept with them; and as his heart was theirs; so
their hearts turned to him. His popularity was far different from
that of Washington, who was revered with awe, or that of Jackson,
the unconquerable hero, for whom party enthusiasm never grew weary
of shouting. To Abraham Lincoln the people became bound by a genuine
sentimental attachment. It was not a matter of respect, or confidence,
or party pride, for this feeling spread far beyond the boundary lines of
his party; it was an affair of the heart, independent of mere reasoning.
When the soldiers in the field or their folks at home spoke of “Father
Abraham,” there was no cant in it. They felt that their President was
really caring for them as a father would, and that they could go to him,
every one of them, as they would go to a father, and talk to him of what
troubled them, sure to find a willing ear and tender sympathy. Thus,
their President, and his cause, and his endeavors, and his success
gradually became to them almost matters of family concern. And this
popularity carried him triumphantly through the Presidential election
of 1864, in spite of an opposition within his own party which at first
seemed very formidable.
Many of the radical antislavery men were never quite satisfied with
Lincoln’s ways of meeting the problems of the time. They were very
earnest and mostly very able men, who had positive ideas as to “how this
rebellion should be put down.” They would not recognize the necessity
of measuring the steps of the government according to the progress
of opinion among the plain people. They criticised Lincoln’s cautious
management as irresolute, halting, lacking in definite purpose and in
energy; he should not have delayed emancipation so long; he should not
have confided important commands to men of doubtful views as to slavery;
he should have authorized military commanders to set the slaves free
as they went on; he dealt too leniently with unsuccessful generals; he
should have put down all factious opposition with a strong hand instead
of trying to pacify it; he should have given the people accomplished
facts instead of arguing with them, and so on. It is true, these
criticisms were not always entirely unfounded. Lincoln’s policy had,
with the virtues of democratic government, some of its weaknesses, which
in the presence of pressing exigencies were apt to deprive governmental
action of the necessary vigor; and his kindness of heart, his
disposition always to respect the feelings of others, frequently made
him recoil from anything like severity, even when severity was urgently
called for. But many of his radical critics have since then revised
their judgment sufficiently to admit that Lincoln’s policy was, on the
whole, the wisest and safest; that a policy of heroic methods, while it
has sometimes accomplished great results, could in a democracy like
ours be maintained only by constant success; that it would have quickly
broken down under the weight of disaster; that it might have been
successful from the start, had the Union, at the beginning of the
conflict, had its Grants and Shermans and Sheridans, its Farraguts and
Porters, fully matured at the head of its forces; but that, as the great
commanders had to be evolved slowly from the developments of the war,
constant success could not be counted upon, and it was best to follow
a policy which was in friendly contact with the popular force, and
therefore more fit to stand trial of misfortune on the battlefield. But
at that period they thought differently, and their dissatisfaction with
Lincoln’s doings was greatly increased by the steps he took toward the
reconstruction of rebel States then partially in possession of the Union
forces.
In December, 1863, Lincoln issued an amnesty proclamation, offering
pardon to all implicated in the rebellion, with certain specified
exceptions, on condition of their taking and maintaining an oath to
support the Constitution and obey the laws of the United States and the
proclamations of the President with regard to slaves; and also promising
that when, in any of the rebel States, a number of citizens equal to one
tenth of the voters in 1860 should re-establish a state government in
conformity with the oath above mentioned, such should be recognized
by the Executive as the true government of the State. The proclamation
seemed at first to be received with general favor. But soon another
scheme of reconstruction, much more stringent in its provisions, was put
forward in the House of Representatives by Henry Winter Davis. Benjamin
Wade championed it in the Senate. It passed in the closing moments of
the session in July, 1864, and Lincoln, instead of making it a law by
his signature, embodied the text of it in a proclamation as a plan of
reconstruction worthy of being earnestly considered. The differences of
opinion concerning this subject had only intensified the feeling against
Lincoln which had long been nursed among the radicals, and some of
them openly declared their purpose of resisting his re-election to
the Presidency. Similar sentiments were manifested by the advanced
antislavery men of Missouri, who, in their hot faction-fight with the
“conservatives” of that State, had not received from Lincoln the active
support they demanded. Still another class of Union men, mainly in the
East, gravely shook their heads when considering the question whether
Lincoln should be re-elected. They were those who cherished in their
minds an ideal of statesmanship and of personal bearing in high office
with which, in their opinion, Lincoln’s individuality was much out of
accord. They were shocked when they heard him cap an argument upon grave
affairs of state with a story about “a man out in Sangamon County,”—a
story, to be sure, strikingly clinching his point, but sadly lacking in
dignity. They could not understand the man who was capable, in opening
a cabinet meeting, of reading to his secretaries a funny chapter from a
recent book of Artemus Ward, with which in an unoccupied moment he had
relieved his care-burdened mind, and who then solemnly informed the
executive council that he had vowed in his heart to issue a proclamation
emancipating the slaves as soon as God blessed the Union arms with
another victory. They were alarmed at the weakness of a President who
would indeed resist the urgent remonstrances of statesmen against his
policy, but could not resist the prayer of an old woman for the pardon
of a soldier who was sentenced to be shot for desertion. Such men,
mostly sincere and ardent patriots, not only wished, but earnestly set
to work, to prevent Lincoln’s renomination. Not a few of them actually
believed, in 1863, that, if the national convention of the Union party
were held then, Lincoln would not be supported by the delegation of a
single State. But when the convention met at Baltimore, in June, 1864,
the voice of the people was heard. On the first ballot Lincoln received
the votes of the delegations from all the States except Missouri; and
even the Missourians turned over their votes to him before the result of
the ballot was declared.
But even after his renomination the opposition to Lincoln within the
ranks of the Union party did not subside. A convention, called by the
dissatisfied radicals in Missouri, and favored by men of a similar
way of thinking in other States, had been held already in May, and
had nominated as its candidate for the Presidency General Fremont. He,
indeed, did not attract a strong following, but opposition movements
from different quarters appeared more formidable. Henry Winter Davis and
Benjamin Wade assailed Lincoln in a flaming manifesto. Other Union men,
of undoubted patriotism and high standing, persuaded themselves, and
sought to persuade the people, that Lincoln’s renomination was ill
advised and dangerous to the Union cause. As the Democrats had put off
their convention until the 29th of August, the Union party had, during
the larger part of the summer, no opposing candidate and platform to
attack, and the political campaign languished. Neither were the tidings
from the theatre of war of a cheering character. The terrible losses
suffered by Grant’s army in the battles of the Wilderness spread general
gloom. Sherman seemed for a while to be in a precarious position before
Atlanta. The opposition to Lincoln within the Union party grew louder in
its complaints and discouraging predictions. Earnest demands were heard
that his candidacy should be withdrawn. Lincoln himself, not knowing
how strongly the masses were attached to him, was haunted by dark
forebodings of defeat. Then the scene suddenly changed as if by magic.
The Democrats, in their national convention, declared the war a failure,
demanded, substantially, peace at any price, and nominated on such a
platform General McClellan as their candidate. Their convention had
hardly adjourned when the capture of Atlanta gave a new aspect to the
military situation. It was like a sun-ray bursting through a dark
cloud. The rank and file of the Union party rose with rapidly growing
enthusiasm. The song “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred
thousand strong,” resounded all over the land. Long before the decisive
day arrived, the result was beyond doubt, and Lincoln was re-elected
President by overwhelming majorities. The election over even his
severest critics found themselves forced to admit that Lincoln was the
only possible candidate for the Union party in 1864, and that neither
political combinations nor campaign speeches, nor even victories in the
field, were needed to insure his success. The plain people had all the
while been satisfied with Abraham Lincoln: they confided in him; they
loved him; they felt themselves near to him; they saw personified in him
the cause of Union and freedom; and they went to the ballot-box for him
in their strength.
The hour of triumph called out the characteristic impulses of his
nature. The opposition within the Union party had stung him to the
quick. Now he had his opponents before him, baffled and humiliated. Not
a moment did he lose to stretch out the hand of friendship to all. “Now
that the election is over,” he said, in response to a serenade, “may not
all, having a common interest, reunite in a common effort to save our
common country? For my own part, I have striven, and will strive, to
place no obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not
willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom. While I am deeply
sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, it adds nothing to
my satisfaction that any other man may be pained or disappointed by the
result. May I ask those who were with me to join with me in the same
spirit toward those who were against me?” This was Abraham Lincoln’s
character as tested in the furnace of prosperity.
The war was virtually decided, but not yet ended. Sherman was
irresistibly carrying the Union flag through the South. Grant had his
iron hand upon the ramparts of Richmond. The days of the Confederacy
were evidently numbered. Only the last blow remained to be struck. Then
Lincoln’s second inauguration came, and with it his second inaugural
address. Lincoln’s famous “Gettysburg speech” has been much and justly
admired. But far greater, as well as far more characteristic, was that
inaugural in which he poured out the whole devotion and tenderness of
his great soul. It had all the solemnity of a father’s last admonition
and blessing to his children before he lay down to die. These were
its closing words: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this
mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it
continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondman’s two hundred and
fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of
blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice
toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God
gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in;
to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the
battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve
and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations.”
This was like a sacred poem. No American President had ever spoken words
like these to the American people. America never had a President who
found such words in the depth of his heart.
Now followed the closing scenes of the war. The Southern armies fought
bravely to the last, but all in vain. Richmond fell. Lincoln himself
entered the city on foot, accompanied only by a few officers and a
squad of sailors who had rowed him ashore from the flotilla in the James
River, a negro picked up on the way serving as a guide. Never had the
world seen a more modest conqueror and a more characteristic triumphal
procession, no army with banners and drums, only a throng of those who
had been slaves, hastily run together, escorting the victorious chief
into the capital of the vanquished foe. We are told that they pressed
around him, kissed his hands and his garments, and shouted and danced
for joy, while tears ran down the President’s care-furrowed cheeks.
A few days more brought the surrender of Lee’s army, and peace was
assured. The people of the North were wild with joy. Everywhere
festive guns were booming, bells pealing, the churches ringing with
thanksgivings, and jubilant multitudes thronging the thoroughfares, when
suddenly the news flashed over the land that Abraham Lincoln had been
murdered. The people were stunned by the blow. Then a wail of sorrow
went up such as America had never heard before. Thousands of Northern
households grieved as if they had lost their dearest member. Many a
Southern man cried out in his heart that his people had been robbed
of their best friend in their humiliation and distress, when Abraham
Lincoln was struck down. It was as if the tender affection which his
countrymen bore him had inspired all nations with a common sentiment.
All civilized mankind stood mourning around the coffin of the dead
President. Many of those, here and abroad, who not long before had
ridiculed and reviled him were among the first to hasten on with their
flowers of eulogy, and in that universal chorus of lamentation and
praise there was not a voice that did not tremble with genuine emotion.
Never since Washington’s death had there been such unanimity of judgment
as to a man’s virtues and greatness; and even Washington’s death,
although his name was held in greater reverence, did not touch so
sympathetic a chord in the people’s hearts.
Nor can it be said that this was owing to the tragic character of
Lincoln’s end. It is true, the death of this gentlest and most merciful
of rulers by the hand of a mad fanatic was well apt to exalt him beyond
his merits in the estimation of those who loved him, and to make his
renown the object of peculiarly tender solicitude. But it is also true
that the verdict pronounced upon him in those days has been affected
little by time, and that historical inquiry has served rather to
increase than to lessen the appreciation of his virtues, his abilities,
his services. Giving the fullest measure of credit to his great
ministers,—to Seward for his conduct of foreign affairs, to Chase for
the management of the finances under terrible difficulties, to Stanton
for the performance of his tremendous task as war secretary,—and
readily acknowledging that without the skill and fortitude of the great
commanders, and the heroism of the soldiers and sailors under them,
success could not have been achieved, the historian still finds that
Lincoln’s judgment and will were by no means governed by those around
him; that the most important steps were owing to his initiative; that
his was the deciding and directing mind; and that it was pre-eminently
he whose sagacity and whose character enlisted for the administration
in its struggles the countenance, the sympathy, and the support of the
people. It is found, even, that his judgment on military matters was
astonishingly acute, and that the advice and instructions he gave to the
generals commanding in the field would not seldom have done honor to the
ablest of them. History, therefore, without overlooking, or palliating,
or excusing any of his shortcomings or mistakes, continues to place
him foremost among the saviours of the Union and the liberators of the
slave. More than that, it awards to him the merit of having accomplished
what but few political philosophers would have recognized as
possible,—of leading the republic through four years of furious civil
conflict without any serious detriment to its free institutions.
He was, indeed, while President, violently denounced by the opposition
as a tyrant and a usurper, for having gone beyond his constitutional
powers in authorizing or permitting the temporary suppression of
newspapers, and in wantonly suspending the writ of habeas corpus and
resorting to arbitrary arrests. Nobody should be blamed who, when such
things are done, in good faith and from patriotic motives protests
against them. In a republic, arbitrary stretches of power, even when
demanded by necessity, should never be permitted to pass without a
protest on the one hand, and without an apology on the other. It is well
they did not so pass during our civil war. That arbitrary measures were
resorted to is true. That they were resorted to most sparingly, and only
when the government thought them absolutely required by the safety of
the republic, will now hardly be denied. But certain it is that the
history of the world does not furnish a single example of a government
passing through so tremendous a crisis as our civil war was with so
small a record of arbitrary acts, and so little interference with the
ordinary course of law outside the field of military operations. No
American President ever wielded such power as that which was thrust into
Lincoln’s hands. It is to be hoped that no American President ever
will have to be entrusted with such power again. But no man was ever
entrusted with it to whom its seductions were less dangerous than they
proved to be to Abraham Lincoln. With scrupulous care he endeavored,
even under the most trying circumstances, to remain strictly within the
constitutional limitations of his authority; and whenever the boundary
became indistinct, or when the dangers of the situation forced him
to cross it, he was equally careful to mark his acts as exceptional
measures, justifiable only by the imperative necessities of the civil
war, so that they might not pass into history as precedents for similar
acts in time of peace. It is an unquestionable fact that during the
reconstruction period which followed the war, more things were done
capable of serving as dangerous precedents than during the war itself.
Thus it may truly be said of him not only that under his guidance the
republic was saved from disruption and the country was purified of the
blot of slavery, but that, during the stormiest and most perilous crisis
in our history, he so conducted the government and so wielded his almost
dictatorial power as to leave essentially intact our free institutions
in all things that concern the rights and liberties of the citizens.
He understood well the nature of the problem. In his first message to
Congress he defined it in admirably pointed language: “Must a government
be of necessity too strong for the liberties of its own people, or
too weak to maintain its own existence? Is there in all republics this
inherent weakness?” This question he answered in the name of the great
American republic, as no man could have answered it better, with a
triumphant “No....”
It has been said that Abraham Lincoln died at the right moment for his
fame. However that may be, he had, at the time of his death, certainly
not exhausted his usefulness to his country. He was probably the only
man who could have guided the nation through the perplexities of the
reconstruction period in such a manner as to prevent in the work of
peace the revival of the passions of the war. He would indeed not have
escaped serious controversy as to details of policy; but he could have
weathered it far better than any other statesman of his time, for his
prestige with the active politicians had been immensely strengthened by
his triumphant re-election; and, what is more important, he would have
been supported by the confidence of the victorious Northern people that
he would do all to secure the safety of the Union and the rights of
the emancipated negro, and at the same time by the confidence of the
defeated Southern people that nothing would be done by him from motives
of vindictiveness, or of unreasoning fanaticism, or of a selfish party
spirit. “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” the foremost
of the victors would have personified in himself the genius of
reconciliation.
He might have rendered the country a great service in another direction.
A few days after the fall of Richmond, he pointed out to a friend the
crowd of office-seekers besieging his door. “Look at that,” said he.
“Now we have conquered the rebellion, but here you see something that
may become more dangerous to this republic than the rebellion itself.”
It is true, Lincoln as President did not profess what we now call civil
service reform principles. He used the patronage of the government
in many cases avowedly to reward party work, in many others to form
combinations and to produce political effects advantageous to the Union
cause, and in still others simply to put the right man into the right
place. But in his endeavors to strengthen the Union cause, and in his
search for able and useful men for public duties, he frequently went
beyond the limits of his party, and gradually accustomed himself to the
thought that, while party service had its value, considerations of
the public interest were, as to appointments to office, of far greater
consequence. Moreover, there had been such a mingling of different
political elements in support of the Union during the civil war that
Lincoln, standing at the head of that temporarily united motley mass,
hardly felt himself, in the narrow sense of the term, a party man.
And as he became strongly impressed with the dangers brought upon the
republic by the use of public offices as party spoils, it is by no means
improbable that, had he survived the all-absorbing crisis and found time
to turn to other objects, one of the most important reforms of later
days would have been pioneered by his powerful authority. This was
not to be. But the measure of his achievements was full enough for
immortality.
To the younger generation Abraham Lincoln has already become a
half-mythical figure, which, in the haze of historic distance, grows
to more and more heroic proportions, but also loses in distinctness of
outline and feature. This is indeed the common lot of popular heroes;
but the Lincoln legend will be more than ordinarily apt to become
fanciful, as his individuality, assembling seemingly incongruous
qualities and forces in a character at the same time grand and most
lovable, was so unique, and his career so abounding in startling
contrasts. As the state of society in which Abraham Lincoln grew up
passes away, the world will read with increasing wonder of the man who,
not only of the humblest origin, but remaining the simplest and
most unpretending of citizens, was raised to a position of power
unprecedented in our history; who was the gentlest and most peace-loving
of mortals, unable to see any creature suffer without a pang in his own
breast, and suddenly found himself called to conduct the greatest and
bloodiest of our wars; who wielded the power of government when stern
resolution and relentless force were the order of the day and then won
and ruled the popular mind and heart by the tender sympathies of his
nature; who was a cautious conservative by temperament and mental habit,
and led the most sudden and sweeping social revolution of our time;
who, preserving his homely speech and rustic manner even in the most
conspicuous position of that period, drew upon himself the scoffs of
polite society, and then thrilled the soul of mankind with utterances of
wonderful beauty and grandeur; who, in his heart the best friend of the
defeated South, was murdered because a crazy fanatic took him for its
most cruel enemy; who, while in power, was beyond measure lampooned and
maligned by sectional passion and an excited party spirit, and around
whose bier friend and foe gathered to praise him which they have since
never ceased to do—as one of the greatest of Americans and the best of
men.