batten on it, we shall pass over lightly, we mean that part which
relates to his love affairs and his marriage. Criticism, and even
biography, should respect as far as possible the sanctuary of affection.
That a man has dedicated his life to the service of the public is no
reason why the public should be licensed to amuse itself by playing with
his heart-strings. Not only as a storekeeper, but in every capacity, Mr.
Lincoln was far more happy in his relations with men than with women. He
however loved, and loved deeply, Ann Rutledge, who appears to have been
entirely worthy of his attachment, and whose death at the moment when
she would have felt herself at liberty to marry him threw him into a
transport of grief, which threatened his reason and excited the gravest
apprehensions of his friends. In stormy weather especially he would rave
piteously, crying that "he could never be reconciled to have the snow,
rains and storms to beat upon her grave." This first love he seems never
to have forgotten. He next had an affair, not so creditable to him, with
a Miss Owens, of whom, after their rupture, he wrote things which he had
better have left unwritten. Finally, he made a match of which the world
has heard more than enough, though the Western Boy was too true a
gentleman to let it hear anything about the matter from his lips. It is
enough to say that this man was not wanting in that not inconsiderable
element of worth, even of the worth of statesmen, strong and pure
affection.
"If ever," said Abraham Lincoln, "American society and the United States
Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the
voracious desire of office--this wriggle to live without toil, from
which I am not free myself." These words ought to be written up in the
largest characters in every schoolroom in the United States. The
confession with which they conclude is as true as the rest. Mr. Lincoln,
we are told, took no part in the promotion of local enterprises,
railroads, schools, churches, asylums. The benefits he proposed for his
fellow men were to be accomplished by political means alone "Politics
were his world--a world filled with hopeful enchantments. Ordinarily he
disliked to discuss any other subject." "In the office," says his
partner, Mr. Herndon, "he sat down or spilt himself (_sic_) on his
lounge, read aloud, told stories, talked politics--never science, art,
literature, railroad gatherings, colleges, asylums, hospitals, commerce,
education, progress--nothing that interested the world generally, except
politics." "He seldom," says his present biographer, "took an active
part in local or minor elections, or wasted his power to advance a
friend. He did nothing out of mere gratitude, and forgot the devotion of
his warmest partisans, as soon as the occasion for their services had
passed. What they did for him was quietly appropriated as the reward of
superior merit, calling for no return in kind." We are told that while
he was "wriggling," he was in effect boarded and clothed for some years
by his friend, Hon. W. Butler, at Springfield, and that, when in power,
he refused to exercise his patronage in favour of his friend. On that
occasion, his biographer tells us, that he considered his patronage a
solemn trust. We give him credit for a conscientiousness above the
ordinary level of his species on this as well as on other subjects. But
his sense of the solemn character of his trust, though it prevented him
from giving a petty place to the old friend who had helped him in the
day of his need, did not prevent him, as President, from sometimes
paying for support by a far more questionable use of the highest
patronage in his gift.
The fact is not that the man was by nature wanting in gratitude or in
any kindly quality, on the contrary, he seems to have abounded in them
all. But the excitement of the game was so intense that it swallowed up
all other considerations and emotions. In a dead season of politics, his
depression was extreme. "He said gloomily, despairingly, sadly, 'How
hard, oh! how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than
if one had never lived for it. This world is dead to hope, deaf to its
own death-struggle.'" Possibly this is the way in which "wriggling"
politicians generally put the case to themselves.
Lincoln's fundamental principle was devotion to the popular will. In his
address to the people of Sangamon County, he says, "while acting as
their representative I shall be governed by their will on all subjects
upon which I have the means of knowing what their will is, and upon all
others I will do what my own judgment teaches me will advance their
interests." "'It is a maxim,' with many politicians, just to keep along
even with the humour of the people right or wrong." "This maxim," adds
the biographer, "Mr. Lincoln held then, as ever since, in very high
estimation." It may occur to some enquiring minds to ask what, upon
those principles, is the use of having representation at all, and
whether it would not be better to let the people themselves vote
directly on all questions without interposing a representative to
diminish their sense of responsibility, to say nothing of the sacrifice
of the representative's conscience, which, in the cases of the statesmen
here described, was probably not very great. With regard to Slavery,
however, Mr. Lincoln showed forecast, if not conscientious independence.
He stepped forth in advance of the sentiments of his party, and to his
political friends appeared rash in the extreme.
Lincoln's first attempt to get elected to the State Legislature was
unsuccessful. It however brought him the means of "doing something for
his country," and partly averting the "death-struggle of the world," in
the shape of the postmastership of New Salem. The business of the office
was not on a large scale, for it was carried on in Mr. Lincoln's hat--an
integument of which it is recorded, that he refused to give it to a
conjurer to play the egg trick in, "not from respect for his own hat,
but for the conjurer's eggs." The future President did not fail to
signalize his first appearance as an administrator by a sally of the
jocularity which was always struggling with melancholy in his mind. A
gentleman of the place, whose education had been defective, was in the
habit of calling two or three times a day at the post-office, and
ostentatiously inquiring for letters. At last he received a letter,
which, being unable to read himself, he got the postmaster to read for
him before a large circle of friends. It proved to be from a negro lady
engaged in domestic service in the South, recalling the memory of a
mutual attachment, with a number of incidents more delectable than
sublime. It is needless to say that the postmaster, by a slight
extension of the sphere of his office, had written the letter as well as
delivered it.
In a second candidature the aspirant was more successful, and he became
one of nine representatives of Sangamon County, in the State Legislature
of Illinois, who, being all more than six feet high, were called "The
Long Nine." With his Brobdingnagian colleagues Abraham plunged at once
into the "internal improvement system," and distinguished himself above
his fellows by the unscrupulous energy and strategy with which he urged
through the Legislature a series of bubble schemes and jobs. Railroads
and other improvements, especially improvements of river navigation,
were voted out of all proportion to the means or credit of the then
thinly-peopled State. To set these little matters in motion, a loan of
eight millions of dollars was authorized, and to complete the canal from
Chicago to Peru, another loan of four millions of dollars was voted at
the same session, two hundred thousand dollars being given as a gratuity
to those counties which seemed to have no special interest in any of the
foregoing projects. Work on all these roads was to commence, not only at
the same time, but at both ends of each road and at all the river-
crossings. There were as yet no surveys of any route, no estimates, no
reports of engineers, or even unprofessional viewers. "Progress was not
to wait on trifles; capitalists were supposed to be lying in wait to
catch these precious bonds; the money would be raised in a twinkling,
and being applied with all the skill of a hundred De Witt Clintons--a
class of gentlemen at that time extremely numerous and obtrusive--the
loan would build railroads, the railroads would build cities, cities
would create farms, foreign capital would rush in to so inviting a
field, the lands would be taken up with marvellous celerity, and the
land tax going into a sinking fund, that, with some tolls and certain
sly speculations to be made by the State, would pay principal and
interest of debt without even a cent of taxation upon the people. In
short, everybody was to be enriched, while the munificence of the State
in selling its credit and spending the proceeds, would make its empty
coffers overflow with ready money. It was a dark stroke of
statesmanship, a mysterious device in finance, which, whether from being
misunderstood or mismanaged, bore from the beginning fruits the very
reverse of those it had promised." We seem here to be reading the
history of more than one great railway enterprise undertaken by
politicians without the red tape preliminaries of surveying or framing
estimates, progress not deigning to wait upon trifles. This system of
policy gave fine scope for the talents of the "log-roller," here defined
as an especially wily and persuasive person, who could depict the merits
of his scheme with roseate but delusive eloquence, and who was said to
carry a gourd of "possum fat"--wherewith he "greased and swallowed" his
prey. One of the largest of these gourds was carried by "honest Abe,"
who was especially active in "log-rolling" a bill for the removal of the
seat of government from Vandalia to Springfield, at a virtual cost to
the State of about six millions of dollars, which we were told would
have purchased all the real estate in the town three times over. "Thus
by log-rolling on the loud measure, by multiplying railroads, by
terminating these roads at Alton, that Alton might become a great city
in opposition to St. Louis; by distributing money to some of the
counties to be wasted by the County Commissioners, and by giving the
seat of government to Springfield--was the whole State bought up and
bribed to approve the most senseless and disastrous policy which ever
crippled the energies of a young country." We are told, and do not
doubt, that Mr. Lincoln shared the popular delusion; but we are also
told, and are equally sure, that "even if he had been unhappily
afflicted with individual scruples of his own he would have deemed it
but simple duty to obey the almost unanimous voice of his constituency."
In other words, he would have deemed it his duty to pander to the
popular madness by taking a part in financial swindling. Yet he and his
principal confederates obtained afterwards high places of honour and
trust. A historian of Illinois calls them "spared monuments of popular
wrath, evincing how safe it is to be a politician, but how disastrous it
may be to the country to keep along with the present fervour of the
people." It is instructive as well as just to remember that all this
time the man was strictly, nay sensitively, honourable in his private
dealings, that he was regarded by his fellows as a paragon of probity,
that his word was never questioned, that of personal corruption calumny
itself, so far as we are aware, never dared to accuse him. Politics, it
seems, may be a game apart, with rules of its own which supersede
morality.
Considering that, as we said before, this man was destined to preside
over the most tremendous operations in the whole history of finance, it
is especially instructive to see what was the state of his mind on
economical subjects. He actually proposed to pass a usury law, having
arrived, it appears, at the sage conviction that while to pay the
current rent for the use of a house or the current fee for the services
of a lawyer is perfectly proper, to pay the current price for money is
to "allow a few individuals to levy a direct tax on the community." But
this is an ordinary illusion. Abraham Lincoln's illusions went far
beyond it. He actually proposed so to legislate that in cases of extreme
necessity there might "always be found means to cheat the law, while in
all other cases it would have its intended effect." He proposed in fact
absurdity qualified by fraud, the established practice of which would,
no doubt, have had a most excellent effect in teaching the citizens to
reverence and the Courts to uphold the law. As President, when told that
the finances were low, he asked whether the printing machine had given
out, and he suggested, as a special temptation to capitalists, the issue
of a class of bonds which should be exempt from seizure for debt. It may
safely be said that the burden of the United States debt was ultimately
increased fifty per cent through sheer ignorance of the simplest
principles of economy and finance on the part of those by whom it was
contracted.
Lincoln's style, both as a speaker and a writer, ultimately became
plain, terse, and with occasional faults of taste, caused by imperfect
education, pure as well as effective. His Gettysburg address and some of
his State Papers are admirable in their way. Saving one very flat
expression, the address has no superior in literature. But it was
impossible that the oratory of a rising politician, especially in the
West, should be free from spread-eagleism. Scattered through these pages
we find such gems as the following:--
"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the
treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a
Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the
Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years!"
... "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of
the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana;
they are neither peculiar to the eternal (?) snows of the former, nor to
the burning sun of the latter." ... "That we improve to the last, that
we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted
no hostile foot to pass or desecrate his resting-place, shall be that
which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington." Washington's
mind, when he rises from his grave at the Last Day, will be immediately
relieved by the information that no Britisher has ever trodden on his
bones.
In debate he was neither bitter nor personal in the bad sense, though he
had a good deal of caustic humour and knew how to make an effective use
of it.
Passing from State politics to those of the Union, and elected to
Congress as a Whig, a party to which he had gradually found his way from
his original position as a "nominal Jackson man," Mr. Lincoln stood
forth in vigorous though discreet and temperate opposition to the
Mexican War.
Some extra charges made by General Cass upon the Treasury for expenses
in a public mission, afforded an opportunity for a hit at the great
Democratic "war-horse." "I have introduced," said Lincoln, "General
Cass's name here chiefly to show the wonderful physical capacity of the
man. They show that he not only did the labour of several men at the
same _time_, but that he often did it at several _places_,
many hundred miles apart _at the same time_. And in eating, too,
his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful. From October, 1821,
to May, 1822, he ate ten rations a day in Michigan, ten rations a day
here in Washington, and nearly five dollars' worth a day besides, partly
on the road between the two places. And then there is an important
discovery in his example, the art of being paid for what one eats,
instead of having to pay for it. Hereafter if any nice young man should
owe a bill which he cannot pay in any other way, he can just board it
out. Mr. Speaker, we have all heard of the animal standing in doubt
between two stacks of hay, and starving to death. The like of that could
never happen to General Cass. Place the stacks a thousand miles apart,
he would stand stock still midway between them, and eat them both at
once; and the green grass along the line would be apt to suffer some at
the same time. By all means make him President, gentlemen. He will feed
you bounteously, if--if there is any left after he has helped himself."
Great events were by this time beginning to loom on the political
horizon. The Missouri Compromise was broken. Parties commenced slowly
but surely to divide themselves into Pro-slavery and Anti-slavery. The
"irrepressible conflict" was coming on, though none of the American
politicians--not even the author of that famous phrase--distinctly
recognised its advent. Lincoln seems to have been sincerely opposed to
slavery, though he was not an Abolitionist. But he was evidently led
more and more to take anti-slavery ground by his antagonism to Douglas,
who occupied a middle position, and tried to gain at once the support of
the South and that of the waverers at the North, by theoretically
supporting the extension of slavery, yet practically excluding it from
the territories by the doctrine of squatters' sovereignty. Lincoln had
to be very wary in angling for the vote of the Abolitionists, who had
recently been the objects of universal obloquy, and were still offensive
to a large section of the Republican party. On one occasion, the
opinions which he propounded by no means suited the Abolitionists, and
"they required him to change them forthwith. _He thought it would be
wise to do so considering the peculiar circumstances of his case_;
but, before committing himself finally, he sought an understanding with
Judge Logan. He told the judge what he was disposed to do, and said he
would act upon the inclination if the judge would not regard it as
treading on his toes. The judge said he was opposed to the doctrine
proposed, but for the sake of the cause on hand he would cheerfully risk
his toes. _And so the Abolitionists were accommodated._ Mr. Lincoln
quietly made the pledge, and they voted for him." He came out, however,
square enough, and in the very nick of time with his "house divided
against itself" speech, which took the wind out of the sails of Seward
with his "irrepressible conflict." Douglas, whom Lincoln regarded with
intense personal rivalry, was tripped up by a string of astute
interrogations, the answers to which hopelessly embroiled him with the
South. Lincoln's campaign against Douglas for the Senatorship greatly
and deservedly enhanced his reputation as a debater, and he became
marked out as the Western candidate for the Republican nomination to the
Presidency. A committee favourable to his claims sent to him to make a
speech at New York. He arrived "in a sleek and shining suit of new
black, covered with very apparent creases and wrinkles acquired by being
packed too closely and too long in his little valise." Some of his
supporters must have moralized on the strange apparition which their
summons had raised. His speech, however, made before an immense audience
at the Cooper Institute, was most successful. And as a display of
constitutional logic it is a very good speech. It fails, as the speeches
of these practical men one and all did fail, their "common sense" and
"shrewdness" notwithstanding, in clear perception of the great facts
that two totally different systems of society had been formed, one in
the Slave States and the other in the Free, and that political
institutions necessarily conform themselves to the social character of
the people. Whether the Civil War could, by any men or means, have been
arrested, it would be hard to say; but assuredly stump orators, even the
very best of them, were not the men to avert it. At that great crisis no
saviour appeared. On May 10th, in the eventful year 1860, the Republican
State Convention of Illinois, by acclamation, and amidst great
enthusiasm, nominated Lincoln for the Presidency. One who saw him
receive the nomination says, "I then thought him one of the most
diffident and most plagued of men I ever saw." We may depend upon it,
however, that his diffidence of manner was accompanied by no reluctance
of heart. The splendid prize which he had won had been the object of his
passionate desire. In the midst of the proceedings the door of the
wigwam opened, and Lincoln's kinsman, John Hanks, entered, with "two
small triangular 'heart-rails,' surmounted by a banner with the
inscription, 'Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John
Hanks in the Sangamon bottom, in the year 1830'." The bearer of the
rails, we are told, was met "with wild and tumultuous cheers," and "the
whole scene was simply tempestuous and bewildering."
The Democrats, of course, did not share the delight. An old man, out of
Egypt, (the southern end of Illinois) came up to Mr. Lincoln, and said.
"So you're Abe Lincoln?" "That's my name, sir." "They say you're a self-
made man." "Well, yes what there is of me is self-made." "Well, all I
have got to say," observed the old Egyptian, after a careful survey of
the statesman, "is, that it was a d--n bad job." This seems to be the
germ of the smart reply to the remark that Andrew Johnson was a self-
made man, "that relieves the Almighty of a very heavy responsibility."
The nomination of the State Convention of Illinois was accepted after a
very close and exciting contest between Lincoln and Seward by the
convention of the Republican party assembled at Chicago. The proceedings
seem to have been disgraceful. A large delegation of roughs, we are
told, headed by Tom Shyer, the pugilist, attended for Seward. The
Lincoln party, on the other side, spent the whole night in mustering
their "loose fellows," and at daylight the next morning packed the
wigwam, so that the Seward men were unable to get in.
Another politician was there nominally as a candidate, but really only
to sell himself for a seat in the Cabinet. When he claimed the
fulfilment of the bond, Lincoln's conscience, or at least his regard for
his own reputation, struggled hard. "All that I am in the world--the
Presidency and all else--I owe to that opinion of me which the people
express when they call me 'honest old Abe.' Now, what will they think of
their honest Abe when he appoints this man to be his familiar adviser?"
What they might have said with truth was that Abe was still honest but
politics were not.
Widely different was the training undergone for the leadership of the
people by the Pericles of the American Republic from that undergone by
the Pericles of Athens, or by any group of statesmen before him, Greek,
Roman, or European. In this point of view, Mr. Lamon's book is a most
valuable addition to the library of political science. The advantages
and the disadvantages of Lincoln's political education are manifest at a
glance. He was sure to produce something strong, genuine, practical, and
entirely in unison with the thoughts and feelings of a people which,
like the Athenians in the days of Pericles, was to be led, not governed.
On the other hand, it necessarily left the statesman without the special
knowledge necessary for certain portions of his work, such as finance,
which was detestably managed during Lincoln's Presidency, without the
wisdom which flows from a knowledge of the political world and of the
past, without elevation, and comprehensiveness of view. It was fortunate
for Lincoln that the questions with which he had to deal, and with which
his country and the world proclaim him to have dealt, on the whole,
admirably well, though not in their magnitude and importance, were
completely within his ken, and had been always present to his mind.
Reconstruction would have made a heavier demand on the political science
of Clary's Grove. But that task was reserved for other hands.
ALFREDUS REX FUNDATOR
A few weeks ago an Oxford College celebrated the thousandth anniversary
of its foundation by King Alfred. [Footnote: We keep the common
spelling, though AElfred is more correct. It is impossible, in deference
to antiquarian preciseness, to change the spelling of all these names,
which are now imbedded in the English classics.]