carrying water on both shoulders caught the popular fancy; Douglas was
reelected to the Senate. As Lincoln had foreseen, it killed him as a
Democratic leader; it prevented the reunion of the Democratic party. The
result appeared in 1860 when the Republicans, though still a minority
party, carried the day because of the bitter divisions among the
Democrats. That was what Lincoln foresaw when he said to his fearful
friends while they argued in vain to prevent his asking the question at
Free-port. "I am killing larger game; the great battle of 1860 is worth
a thousand of this senatorial race."(6)
X. THE DARK HORSE
One of the most curious things in Lincoln is the way his confidence
in himself came and went. He had none of Douglas's unwavering
self-reliance. Before the end, to be sure, he attained a type of
self-reliance, higher and more imperturbable. But this was not the
fruit of a steadfast unfolding. Rather, he was like a tree with its
alternating periods of growth and pause, now richly in leaf, now
dormant. Equally applicable is the other familiar image of the
successive waves.
The clue seems to have been, in part at least, a matter of vitality.
Just as Douglas emanated vitality--so much so that his aura filled the
whole Senate chamber and forced an unwilling response in the gifted but
hostile woman who watched him from the gallery--Lincoln, conversely,
made no such overpowering impression. His observers, however much they
have to say about his humor, his seasons of Shakespearian mirth, never
forget their impression that at heart he is sad. His fondness for poetry
in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line "Oh, why
should the spirit of mortal be proud."
It is impossible to discover any law governing the succession of his
lapses in self-reliance. But they may be related very plausibly to his
sense of failure or at least to his sense of futility. He was one of
those intensely sensitive natures to whom the futilities of this world
are its most discouraging feature. Whenever such ideas were brought home
to him his energy flagged; his vitality, never high, sank. He was prone
to turn away from the outward life to lose himself in the inner. All
this is part of the phenomena which Herndon perceived more clearly than
he comprehended it, which led him to call Lincoln a fatalist.
A humbler but perhaps more accurate explanation is the reminder that he
was son to Thomas the unstable. What happened in Lincoln's mind when
he returned defeated from Washington, that ghost-like rising of the
impulses of old Thomas, recurred more than once thereafter. In fact
there is a period well-defined, a span of thirteen years terminating
suddenly on a day in 1862, during which the ghost of old Thomas is a
thing to be reckoned with in his son's life. It came and went, most of
the time fortunately far on the horizon. But now and then it drew near.
Always it was lurking somewhere, waiting to seize upon him in those
moments when his vitality sank, when his energies were in the ebb, when
his thoughts were possessed by a sense of futility.
The year 1859 was one of his ebb tides. In the previous year the rising
tide, which had mounted high during his success on the circuit, reached
its crest The memory of his failure at Washington was effaced. At
Freeport he was a more powerful genius, a more dominant personality,
than he had ever been. Gradually, in the months following, the high wave
subsided. During 1859 he gave most of his attention to his practice.
Though political speech-making continued, and though he did not impair
his reputation, he did nothing of a remarkable sort. The one literary
fragment of any value is a letter to a Boston committee that had invited
him to attend a "festival" in Boston on Jefferson's birthday. He
avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the
principles of Jefferson "the definitions and axioms of free society."
Without conditions he identified his own cause with the cause of
Jefferson, "the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for
national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and
capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract
truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it
there that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and
a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and
oppression."(1)
While the Boston committee were turning their eyes toward this great new
phrase-maker of the West, several politicians in Illinois had formed a
bold resolve. They would try to make him President. The movement had two
sources--the personal loyalty of his devoted friends of the circuit, the
shrewdness of the political managers who saw that his duel with Douglas
had made him a national figure. As one of them said to him, "Douglas
being so widely known, you are getting a national reputation through
him." Lincoln replied that he did not lack the ambition but lacked
altogether the confidence in the possibility of success.(2)
This was his attitude during most of 1859. The glow, the enthusiasm, of
the previous year was gone. "I must in candor say that I do not think
myself fit for the Presidency," he wrote to a newspaper editor in April.
He used the same words to another correspondent in July. As late as
November first, he wrote, "For my single self, I have enlisted for the
permanent success of the Republican cause, and for this object I shall
labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the
judgment of the party shall assign me a different position."(3)
Meanwhile, both groups of supporters had labored unceasingly, regardless
of his approval. In his personal following, the companionableness of
twenty years had deepened into an almost romantic loyalty. The leaders
of this enthusiastic attachment, most of them lawyers, had no superiors
for influence in Illinois. The man who had such a following was a power
in politics whether he would or no. This the mere politicians saw. They
also saw that the next Republican nomination would rest on a delicate
calculation of probabilities. There were other Republicans more
conspicuous than Lincoln--Seward in New York, Sumner in Massachusetts,
Chase in Ohio--but all these had inveterate enemies. Despite their
importance would it be safe to nominate them? Would not the party be
compelled to take some relatively minor figure, some essentially new
man? In a word, what we know as a "dark horse." Believing that this
would happen, they built hopefully on their faith in Lincoln.
Toward the end of the year he was at last persuaded to take his
candidacy seriously. The local campaign for his nomination had gone so
far that a failure to go further would have the look of being discarded
as the local Republican leader. This argument decided him. Before the
year's end he had agreed to become a candidate before the convention. In
his own words, "I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me
to not be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt
some for me to not get the Illinois delegates."(4)
It was shortly after this momentous decision that he went to New York by
invitation and made his most celebrated, though not in any respect his
greatest, oration.(5) A large audience filled Cooper Union, February
27, 1860. William Cullen Bryant presided. David Dudley Field escorted
Lincoln to the platform. Horace Greeley was in the audience. Again,
the performance was purely literary. No formulation of new policies,
no appeal for any new departure. It was a masterly restatement of his
position; of the essence of the debates with Douglas. It cleansed the
Republican platform of all accidental accretions, as if a ship's hull
were being scraped of barnacles preparatory to a voyage; it gave the
underlying issues such inflexible definition that they could not be
juggled with. Again he showed a power of lucid statement not possessed
by any of his rivals. An incident of the speech was his unsparing
condemnation of John Brown whose raid and death were on every tongue.
"You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves," said he,
apostrophizing the slave-holders. "We deny it, and what is your proof?
'Harper's Ferry; John Brown!' John Brown was no Republican; and you
have failed to implicate a single Republican in this Harper's Ferry
enterprise. . .
"John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It
was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which
the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the
slaves with all their ignorance saw plainly enough that it could
not succeed. That affair in its philosophy corresponds with the many
attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors.
An enthusiast broods over the oppression of the people until he fancies
himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt
which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on
Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in
their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on
old England in the one case and on New England in the other, does not
disprove the sameness of the two things."
The Cooper Union speech received extravagant praise from all the
Republican newspapers. Lincoln's ardent partisans assert that it took
New York "by storm." Rather too violent a way of putting it! But there
can be no doubt that the speech made a deep impression. Thereafter, many
of the Eastern managers were willing to consider Lincoln as a candidate,
should factional jealousies prove uncompromising. Any port in a storm,
you know. Obviously, there could be ports far more dangerous than this
"favorite son" of Illinois.
Many national conventions in the United States have decided upon a
compromise candidate, "a dark horse," through just such reasoning.
The most noted instance is the Republican Convention of 1860. When
it assembled at Chicago in June, the most imposing candidate was the
brilliant leader of the New York Republicans, Seward. But no man in the
country had more bitter enemies. Horace Greeley whose paper The Tribune
was by far the most influential Republican organ, went to Chicago
obsessed by one purpose: because of irreconcilable personal quarrels
he would have revenge upon Seward. Others who did not hate Seward were
afraid of what Greeley symbolized. And all of them knew that whatever
else happened, the West must be secured.
The Lincoln managers played upon the Eastern jealousies and the Eastern
fears with great skill. There was little sleep among the delegates the
night previous to the balloting. At just the right moment, the Lincoln
managers, though their chief had forbidden them to do so, offered
promises with regard to Cabinet appointments.(6) And they succeeded in
packing the galleries of the Convention Hall with a perfectly organized
claque-"rooters," the modern American would say.
The result on the third ballot was a rush to Lincoln of all the enemies
of Seward, and Lincoln's nomination amid a roaring frenzy of applause.
XI. SECESSION
After twenty-three years of successive defeats, Lincoln, almost
fortuitously, was at the center of the political maelstrom. The clue
to what follows is in the way he had developed during that long
discouraging apprenticeship to greatness. Mentally, he had always been
in isolation. Socially, he had lived in a near horizon. The real tragedy
of his failure at Washington was in the closing against him of the
opportunity to know his country as a whole. Had it been Lincoln instead
of Douglas to whom destiny had given a residence at Washington during
the 'fifties, it is conceivable that things might have been different
in the 'sixties. On the other hand, America would have lost its greatest
example of the artist in politics.
And without that artist, without his extraordinary literary gift, his
party might not have consolidated in 1860. A very curious party it was.
It had sprung to life as a denial, as a device for halting Douglas.
Lincoln's doctrine of the golden mean, became for once a political
power. Men of the most diverse views on other issues accepted in their
need the axiom: "Stand with anybody so long as he stands right." And
standing right, for that moment in the minds of them all, meant keeping
slavery and the money power from devouring the territories.
The artist of the movement expressed them all in his declaration that
the nation needed the Territories to give home and opportunity to free
white people. Even the Abolitionists, who hitherto had refused to make
common cause with any other faction, entered the negative coalition
of the new party. So did Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats, as well as
other factions then obscure which we should now label Socialists and
Labormen.
However, this coalition, which in origin was purely negative, revealed,
the moment it coalesced, two positive features. To the man of the near
horizon in 1860 neither of these features seemed of first importance. To
the man outside that horizon, seeing them in perspective as related
to the sum total of American life, they had a significance he did not
entirely appreciate.
The first of these was the temper of the Abolitionists. Lincoln ignored
it. He was content with his ringing assertion of the golden mean. But
there spoke the man of letters rather than the statesman. Of temper
in politics as an abstract idea, he had been keenly conscious from the
first; but his lack of familiarity with political organizations kept him
from assigning full value to the temper of any one factor as affecting
the joint temper of the whole group. It was appointed for him to learn
this in a supremely hard way and to apply the lesson with wonderful
audacity. But in 1860 that stern experience still slept in the future.
He had no suspicion as yet that he might find it difficult to carry out
his own promise to stand with the Abolitionists in excluding slavery
from the Territories, and to stand against them in enforcing the
Fugitive Slave Law. He did not yet see why any one should doubt the
validity of this promise; why any one should be afraid to go along
with him, afraid that the temper of one element would infect the whole
coalition.
But this fear that Lincoln did not allow for, possessed already a great
many minds. Thousands of Southerners, of the sort whom Lincoln credited
with good intentions about slavery, feared the Abolitionists Not because
the Abolitionists wanted to destroy slavery, but because they wanted
to do so fiercely, cruelly. Like Lincoln, these Southerners who were
liberals in thought and moderates in action, did not know what to do
about slavery. Like Lincoln, they had but one fixed idea with regard to
it,--slavery must not be terminated violently. Lincoln, despite his
near horizon, sensed them correctly as not being at one with the great
plutocrats who wished to exploit slavery. But when the Abolitionist
poured out the same fury of vituperation on every sort of slave-holder;
when he promised his soul that it should yet have the joy of exulting in
the ruin of all such, the moderate Southerners became as flint. When the
Abolitionists proclaimed their affiliation with the new party, the
first step was taken toward a general Southern coalition to stop the
Republican advance.
There was another positive element blended into the negative coalition.
In 1857, the Republicans overruling the traditions of those members who
had once been Democrats, set their faces toward protection. To most
of the Northerners the fatefulness of the step was not obvious. Twenty
years had passed since a serious tariff controversy had shaken the
North. Financial difficulties in the 'fifties were more prevalent in the
North than in the South. Business was in a quandary. Labor was demanding
better opportunities. Protection as a solution, or at least as a
palliative, seemed to the mass of the Republican coalition, even to the
former Democrats for all their free trade traditions, not outrageous.
To the Southerners it was an alarm bell. The Southern world was
agricultural; its staple was cotton; the bulk of its market was in
England. Ever since 1828, the Southern mind had been constantly on guard
with regard to tariff, unceasingly fearful that protection would be
imposed on it by Northern and Western votes. To have to sell its cotton
in England at free trade values, but at the same time to have to buy its
commodities at protected values fixed by Northern manufacturers--what
did that mean but the despotism of one section over another? When
the Republicans took up protection as part of their creed, a general
Southern coalition was rendered almost inevitable.
This, Lincoln {Missing text}. Again it is to be accounted for in part
by his near horizon. Had he lived at Washington, had he met, frequently,
Southern men; had he passed those crucial years of the 'fifties in
debates with political leaders rather than in story-telling tournaments
on the circuit; perhaps all this would have been otherwise. But one can
not be quite sure. Finance never appealed to him. A wide application may
be given to Herndon's remark that "he had no money sense." All the rest
of the Republican doctrine finds its best statement in Lincoln. On the
one subject of its economic policy he is silent. Apparently it is to be
classified with the routine side of the law. To neither was he ever able
to give more than a perfunctory attention. As an artist in politics he
had the defect of his qualities.
What his qualities showed him were two things: the alliance of the
plutocratic slave power with the plutocratic money power, and the
essential rightness in impulse of the bulk of the Southern people. Hence
his conclusion which became his party's conclusion: that, in the South,
a political-financial ring was dominating a leaderless people, This
was not the truth. Lincoln's defects in 1860 limited his vision.
Nevertheless, to the solitary distant thinker, shut in by the near
horizon of political Springfield, there was every excuse for the error.
The palpable evidence all confirmed it. What might have contradicted it
was a cloud of witnesses, floating, incidental, casual, tacit. Just
what a nature like Lincoln's, if only he could have met them, would have
perceived and comprehended; what a nature like Douglas's, no matter
how plainly they were presented to him, could neither perceive nor
comprehend. It was the irony of fate that an opportunity to fathom
his time was squandered upon the unseeing Douglas, while to the seeing
Lincoln it was denied. In a word, the Southern reaction against the
Republicans, like the Republican movement itself, had both a positive
and a negative side. It was the positive side that could be seen and
judged at long range. And this was what Lincoln saw, which appeared to
him to have created the dominant issue in 1860.
The negative side of the Southern movement he did not see. He was too
far away to make out the details of the picture. Though he may have
known from the census of 1850 that only one-third of the Southern whites
were members of slave-holding families, he could scarcely have known
that only a small minority of the Southern families owned as many
as five slaves; that those who had fortunes in slaves were a mere
handful--just as today those who have fortunes in steel or beef are mere
handfuls. But still less did he know how entirely this vast majority
which had so little, if any, interest in slavery, had grown to fear and
distrust the North. They, like him, were suffering from a near horizon.
They, too, were applying the principle "Stand with anybody so long as
he stands right" But for them, standing right meant preventing a violent
revolution in Southern life. Indifferent as they were to slavery, they
were willing to go along with the "slave-barons" in the attempt to
consolidate the South in a movement of denial--a denial of the right of
the North, either through Abolitionism or through tariff, to dominate
the South.
If only Lincoln with his subtle mind could have come into touch with
the negative side of the Southern agitation! It was the other side, the
positive side, that was vocal. With immense shrewdness the profiteers of
slavery saw and developed their opportunity. They organized the South.
They preached on all occasions, in all connections, the need of all
Southerners to stand together, no matter how great their disagreements,
in order to prevent the impoverishment of the South by hostile
economic legislation. During the late 'fifties their propaganda for an
all-Southern policy, made slow but constant headway. But even in 1859
these ideas were still far from controlling the South.
And then came John Brown. The dread of slave insurrection was laid deep
in Southern recollection. Thirty years before, the Nat Turner Rebellion
had filled a portion of Virginia with burned plantation houses amid
whose ruins lay the dead bodies of white women. A little earlier, a
negro conspiracy at Charleston planned the murder of white men and the
parceling out of white women among the conspirators. And John Brown had
come into Virginia at the head of a band of strangers calling upon the
slaves to rise and arm.
Here was a supreme opportunity. The positive Southern force, the slave
profiteers, seized at once the attitude of champions of the South. It
was easy enough to enlist the negative force in a shocked and outraged
denunciation of everything Northern. And the Northern extremists did all
that was in their power to add fuel to the flame. Emerson called Brown
"this new saint who had made the gallows glorious as the cross." The
Southerners, hearing that, thought of the conspiracy to parcel out the
white women of Charleston. Early in 1860 it seemed as if the whole South
had but one idea-to part company with the North.
No wonder Lincoln threw all his influence into the scale to discredit
the memory of Brown. No wonder the Republicans in their platform
carefully repudiated him. They could not undo the impression made on the
Southern mind by two facts: the men who lauded Brown as a new saint were
voting the Republican ticket; the Republicans had committed themselves
to the anti-Southern policy of protection.
And yet, in spite of all the labors of pro-slavery extremists, the
movement for a breach with the North lost ground during 1860. When the
election came, the vote for President revealed a singular and unforeseen
situation. Four candidates were in the field. The Democrats, split into
two by the issue of slavery expansion, formed two parties. The
slave profiteers secured the nomination by one faction of John C.
Breckinridge. The moderate Democrats who would neither fight nor favor
slavery, nominated Douglas. The most peculiar group was the fourth. They
included all those who would not join the Republicans for fear of the
temper of the Abolition-members, but who were not promoters of slavery,
and who distrusted Douglas. They had no program but to restore the
condition of things that existed before the Nebraska Bill. About four
million five hundred thousand votes were cast. Lincoln had less than
two million, and all but about twenty-four thousand of these were in
the Free States. However, the disposition of Lincoln's vote gave him the
electoral college. He was chosen President by the votes of a minority of
the nation. But there was another minority vote which as events turned
out, proved equally significant. Breckinridge, the symbol of the slave
profiteers, and of all those whom they had persuaded to follow them,
had not been able to carry the popular vote of the South. They were
definitely in the minority in their own section. The majority of the
Southerners had so far reacted from the wild alarms of the beginning
of the year that they refused to go along with the candidates of the
extremists. They were for giving the Union another trial. The South
itself had repudiated the slave profiteers.