LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT
1. _The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress_.
Lincoln had ceased before his marriage to sit in the Illinois
Legislature. He had won sufficient standing for his ambition to aim
higher; a former law partner of his was now in Congress, and he wished
to follow. But he had to submit to a few years' delay of which the
story is curious and honourable. His rivals for the representation of
his own constituency were two fellow Whigs, Baker and Hardin, both of
whom afterwards bore distinguished parts in the Mexican war and with
both of whom he was friendly. Somewhat to his disgust at a party
gathering in his own county in 1843, Baker was preferred to him. A
letter of his gives a shrewd account of the manoeuvres among members of
various Churches which brought this about; it is curiously careful not
to overstate the effect of these influences and characteristically
denies that Baker had part in them. To make the thing harder, he was
sent from this meeting to a convention, for the whole constituency,
with which the nomination lay, and his duty, of course, was to work for
Baker. Here it became obvious that Hardin would be chosen; nothing
could be done for Baker at that time, but Lincoln, being against his
will there in Baker's interests, took an opportunity in the bargaining
that took place to advance Baker's claim, to the detriment of his own,
to be Hardin's successor two years later.
By some perverse accident notes about details of party management fill
a disproportionate space among those letters of Lincoln's which have
been preserved, but these reveal that, with all his business-like
attention to the affairs of his very proper ambition, he was able
throughout to illuminate dull matters of this order with action of
singular disinterestedness. After being a second time postponed, no
doubt to the advantage of his law business, he took his seat in the
House of Representatives at Washington for two years in the spring of
1847. Two short sessions can hardly suffice for mastering the very
complicated business of that body. He made hardly any mark. He
probably learned much and was able to study at leisure the characters
of his brother politicians. He earned the valuable esteem of some, and
seems to have passed as a very pleasant, honest, plain specimen of the
rough West. Like others of the younger Congressmen, he had the
privilege of breakfasting with Webster. His brief career in the House
seems to have disappointed him, and it certainly dissatisfied his
constituents. The part that he played may impress us more favourably
than it did them, but, slight as it was, it requires a historical
explanation.
Mexico had detached itself from Spain in 1826, and in 1833 the province
of Texas detached itself from Mexico. Texas was largely peopled by
immigrants from the States, and these had grievances. One of them was
that Mexico abolished slavery, but there was real misgovernment as
well, and, among other cruel incidents of the rebellion which followed,
the massacre of rebels at the Alamo stamped itself on American memory.
The Republic of Texas began to seek annexation to the United States in
1839, but there was opposition in the States and there were
difficulties with Mexico and other Governments. At last in 1845, at
the very close of his term of office, President Tyler got the
annexation pushed through in defiance of the Whigs who made him
President. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations, but peace could no
doubt have been preserved if peace had been any object with the new
President Polk or with the Southern leaders whose views he represented.
They had set their eyes upon a further acquisition, larger even than
Texas--California, and the whole of the territories, still belonging to
Mexico, to the east of it. It is not contested, and would not have
been contested then, that the motive of their policy was the Southern
desire to win further soil for cultivation by slaves. But there was no
great difficulty in gaining some popularity for their designs in the
North. Talk about "our manifest destiny" to reach the Pacific may have
been justly described by Parson Wilbur as "half on it ign'ance and
t'other half rum," but it is easy to see how readily it might be taken
up, and indeed many Northerners at that moment had a fancy of their own
for expansion in the North-West and were not over-well pleased with
Polk when, in 1846, he set the final seal upon the settlement with
Great Britain of the Oregon frontier.
When he did this Polk had already brought about his own war. The
judgment on that war expressed at the time in the first "Biglow Papers"
has seldom been questioned since, and there seldom can have been a war
so sternly condemned by soldiers--Grant amongst others--who fought in
it gallantly. The facts seem to have been just as Lincoln afterwards
recited them in Congress. The Rio Grande, which looks a reasonable
frontier on a map, was claimed by the United States as the frontier of
Texas. The territory occupied by the American settlers of Texas
reached admittedly up to and beyond the River Nueces, east of the Rio
Grande. But in a sparsely settled country, where water is not
abundant, the actual border line, if there be any clear line, between
settlement from one side and settlement from the other will not for the
convenience of treaty-makers run along a river, but rather for the
convenience of the settlers along the water-parting between two rivers.
So Mexico claimed both banks of the Rio Grande and Spanish settlers
inhabited both sides. Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor, who was
allowed no discretion in the matter, to march troops right up to the
Rio Grande and occupy a position commanding the encampment of the
Mexican soldiers there. The Mexican commander, thus threatened,
attacked. The Mexicans had thus begun the war. Polk could thus allege
his duty to prosecute it. When the whole transaction was afterwards
assailed his critics might be tempted to go, or represented as going,
upon the false ground that only Congress can constitutionally declare
war--that is, of course, sanction purely offensive operations. Long,
however, before the dispute could come to a head, the brilliant
successes of General Taylor and still more of General Scott, with a few
trained troops against large undisciplined numbers, put all criticism
at a disadvantage. The City of Mexico was occupied by Scott in
September, 1847, and peace, with the cession of the vast domain that
had been coveted, was concluded in May, 1848.
War having begun, the line of the Whig opposition was to vote supplies
and protest as best they might against the language endorsing Polk's
policy which, in the pettiest spirit of political manoeuvre, was
sometimes incorporated in the votes. In this Lincoln steadily
supported them. One of his only two speeches of any length in Congress
was made on the occasion of a vote of this kind in 1848. The subject
was by that time so stale that his speech could hardly make much
impression, but it appears to-day an extraordinarily clear, strong,
upright presentment of the complex and unpopular case against the war.
His other long speech is elevated above buffoonery by a brief, cogent,
and earnest passage on the same theme, but it was a frank piece of
clowning on a licensed occasion. It was the fashion for the House when
its own dissolution and a Presidential election were both imminent to
have a sort of rhetorical scrimmage in which members on both sides
spoke for the edification of their own constituencies and that of
Buncombe. The Whigs were now happy in having "diverted the war-thunder
against the Democrats" by running for the Presidency General Taylor, a
good soldier who did not know whether he was a Whig or a Democrat, but
who, besides being a hero of the war, was inoffensive to the South, for
he lived in Louisiana and had slaves of his own. It is characteristic
of the time that the Democrats, in whose counsels the Southern men
prevailed, now began a practice of choosing Northern candidates, and
nominated General Cass of Michigan, whose distinction had not been won
in war. The Democratic Congressmen in this debate made game of the
Whigs, with their war-hero, and seem to have carried a crude manner of
pleasantry pretty far when Lincoln determined to show them that they
could be beaten at that game. He seems to have succeeded admirably,
with a burlesque comparison, too long to quote, of General Cass's
martial exploits with his own, and other such-like matter enhanced by
the most extravagant Western manner and delivery.
Anyone who reads much of the always grave and sometimes most moving
orations of Lincoln's later years may do well to turn back to this
agreeable piece of debating-society horse-play. But he should then
turn a few pages further back to Lincoln's little Bill for the gradual
and compensated extinction of slavery in the District of Columbia,
where Washington stands. He introduced this of his own motion, without
encouragement from Abolitionist or Non-Abolitionist, accompanying it
with a brief statement that he had carefully ascertained that the
representative people of the district privately approved of it, but had
no right to commit them to public support of it. It perished, of
course. With the views which he had long formed and continued to hold
about slavery, very few opportunities could in these years come to him
of proper and useful action against it. He seized upon these
opportunities not less because in doing so he had to stand alone.
His career as a Congressman was soon over. There was no movement to
re-elect him, and the Whigs now lost his constituency. His speeches
and his votes against the Mexican war offended his friends. Even his
partner, the Abolitionist, Mr. Herndon, whose further acquaintance we
have to make, was too much infected with the popularity of a successful
war to understand Lincoln's plain position or to approve of his giving
votes which might seem unpatriotic. Lincoln wrote back to him firmly
but sadly. Persuaded as he was that political action in advance of
public sentiment was idle, resigned and hardened as we might easily
think him to many of the necessities of party discipline, it evidently
caused him naïve surprise that, when he was called upon for a definite
opinion, anybody should expect him, as he candidly puts it, to "tell a
lie."
As a retiring Congressman he was invited to speak in several places in
the East on behalf of Taylor's candidature; and after Taylor's election
claimed his right as the proper person to be consulted, with certain
others, about Government appointments in Illinois. Taylor carried out
the "spoils system" with conscientious thoroughness; as he touchingly
said, he had thought over the question from a soldier's point of view,
and could not bear the thought that, while he as their chief enjoyed
the Presidency, the private soldiers in the Whig ranks should not get
whatever was going. Lincoln's attitude in the matter may be of
interest. To take an example, he writes to the President, about the
postmastership in some place, that he does not know whether the
President desires to change the tenure of such offices on party
grounds, and offers no advice; that A is a Whig whose appointment is
much desired by the local Whigs, and a most respectable man; that B,
also a Whig, would in Lincoln's judgment be a somewhat better but not
so popular subject for appointment; that C, the present postmaster, is
a Democrat, but is on every ground, save his political party, a proper
person for the office. There was an office which he himself desired,
it was that of "Commissioner of the General Land Office," a new office
in Washington dealing with settlement on Government lands in the West.
He was probably well suited to it; but his application was delayed by
the fact that friends in Illinois wanted the post too; a certain Mr.
Butterfield (a lawyer renowned for his jokes, which showed, it is said,
"at least a well-marked humorous intention") got it; and then it fell
to the lot of the disappointed Lincoln to have to defend Butterfield
against some unfair attack. But a tempting offer was made him, that of
the Governorship of Oregon Territory, and he wavered before refusing to
take work which would, as it happened, have kept him far away when the
opportunity of his life came. It was Mrs. Lincoln who would not let
him cut himself off so completely from politics. As for himself, it is
hard to resist the impression that he was at this time a tired man,
disappointed as to the progress of his career and probably also
disappointed and somewhat despondent about politics and the
possibilities of good service that lay open to politicians. It may be
that this was partly the reason why he was not at all aroused by the
crisis in American politics which must now be related.
2. _California and the Compromise of 1850_.
It has been said that the motive for the conquests from Mexico was the
desire for slave territory. The attractive part of the new dominion
was of course California. Arizona and New Mexico are arid regions, and
the mineral wealth of Nevada was unknown. The peacefully acquired
region of Oregon, far north, need not concern us, but Oregon became a
free State in 1859. Early in the war a struggle began between
Northerners and Southerners (to a large extent independent of party) in
the Senate and the House as to whether slavery should be allowed in the
conquered land or not. David Wilmot, a Northern Democratic
Congressman, proposed a proviso to the very first money grant connected
with the war, that slavery should be forbidden in any territory to be
annexed. The "Wilmot Proviso" was proposed again on every possible
occasion; Lincoln, by the way, sturdily supported it while in Congress;
it was always voted down. Cass proposed as a solution of all
difficulties that the question of slavery should be left to the people
of the new Territories or States themselves. The American public, apt
as condensing an argument into a phrase, dismissed Cass's principle for
the time being with the epithet "squatter sovereignty." Calhoun and
his friends said it was contrary to the Constitution that an American
citizen should not be free to move with his property, including his
slaves, into territory won by the Union. The annexation was carried
out, and the question of slavery was unsettled. Then events took a
surprising turn.
In the winter of 1848 gold was discovered in California. Throughout
1849 gold-seekers came pouring in from every part of the world. This
miscellaneous new people, whose rough ways have been more celebrated in
literature than those of any similar crowd, lived at first in
considerable anarchy, but they determined without delay to set up some
regular system of government. In the course of 1849 they elected a
Convention to draw up a State Constitution, and to the astonishment of
all the States the Convention unanimously made the prohibition of
slavery part of that Constitution. There was no likelihood that, with
a further influx of settlers of the same sort, this decision of
California would alter. Was California to be admitted as a State with
this Constitution of its own choice, which the bulk of the people of
America approved?
To politicians of the school now fully developed in the South there
seemed nothing outrageous in saying that it should be refused
admission. To them Calhoun's argument, which regarded a citizen's
slave as his chattel in the same sense as his hat or walking-stick,
seemed the ripe fruit of logic. It did not shock them in the least
that they were forcing the slave system on an unwilling community, for
were not the Northerners prepared to force the free system? A
prominent Southern Senator, talking with a Northern colleague a little
later, said triumphantly: "I see how it is. You may force freedom as
much as you like, but we are to beware how we force slavery," and was
surprised that the Northerner cheerfully accepted this position. It is
necessary to remember throughout the following years that, whatever
ordinary Southerners thought in private, their whole political action
was now based on the assumption that slavery, as it was, was an
institution which no reasonable man could think wrong.
Zachary Taylor, unlike Harrison, the previous hero of the Whigs,
survived his inauguration by sixteen months. He was no politician at
all, but placed in the position of President, for which fairness and
firmness were really the greatest qualifications, he was man enough to
rely on his own good sense. He had come to Washington under the
impression that the disputes which raged there were due to the
aggressiveness of the North; a very little time there convinced him of
the contrary. Slave-owner as he was, the claim of the South to force
slavery on California struck him as an arrogant pretension, and so far
as matters rested with him, he was simply not to be moved by it. He
sent a message to Congress advising the admission of California with
the constitution of its own choice. When, as we shall shortly see, the
great men of the Senate thought the case demanded conciliation and a
great scheme of compromise, he resolutely disagreed; he used the whole
of his influence against their compromise, and it is believed with good
reason that he would have put his veto as President on the chief
measure in which the compromise issued. If he had lived to carry out
his policy, it seems possible that there would have been an attempt to
execute the threats of secession which were muttered--this time in
Virginia. But it is almost certain that at that time, and with the
position which he occupied, he would have been able to quell the
movement at once. There is nothing to suggest that Taylor was a man of
any unusual gifts of intellect, but he had what we may call character,
and it was the one thing wanting in political life at the time. The
greatest minds in American politics, as we shall see, viewed the
occasion otherwise, but, in the light of what followed, it seems a
signal and irreparable error that, when the spirit of aggression rising
in the South had taken definite shape in a demand which was manifestly
wrongful, it was bought off and not met with a straightforward refusal.
Taylor died in the course of 1850 and Vice-President Millard Fillmore,
of New York, succeeded him. Fillmore had an appearance of grave and
benign wisdom which led a Frenchman to describe him as the ideal ruler
of a Republic, but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet
nerveless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to
America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple.
The actual issue of the crisis was that the admission of California was
bought from the South by large concessions in other directions. This
was the proposal of Henry Clay, who was now an old man anxious for the
Union, but had been a lover of such compromises ever since he promoted
the Missouri Compromise thirty years ago; but, to the savage
indignation of some of his Boston admirers, Webster used the whole
force of his influence and debating power in support of Clay. The
chief concessions made to the South were two. In the first place
Territorial Governments were set up in New Mexico and Utah (since then
the home of the Mormons) without any restriction on slavery. This
concession was defended in the North on the ground that it was a sham,
because the physical character of those regions made successful slave
plantations impossible there. But it was, of course, a surrender of
the principle which had been struggled for in the Wilmot Proviso during
the last four years; and the Southern leaders showed the clearness of
their limited vision by valuing it just upon that ground. There had
been reason for the territorial concessions to slavery in the past
generation because it was established in the territories concerned; but
there was no such reason now. The second concession was that of a new
Federal law to ensure the return of fugitive slaves from the free
States. The demand for this was partly factitious, for the States in
the far South, which were not exposed to loss of slaves, were the most
insistent on it, and it would appear that the Southern leaders felt it
politic to force the acceptance of the measure in a form which would
humiliate their opponents. There is no escape from the contention,
which Lincoln especially admitted without reserve, that the enactment
of an effective Act of this sort was, if demanded, due under the
provisions of the Constitution; but the measure actually passed was
manifestly defiant of all principles of justice. It was so framed as
almost to destroy the chance which a lawfully free negro might have of
proving his freedom, if arrested by the professional slave-hunters as a
runaway. It was the sort of Act which a President should have vetoed
as a fraud upon the Constitution. Thus over and above the objection,
now plain, to any compromise, the actual compromise proposed was marked
by flagrant wrong. But it was put through by the weight of Webster and
Clay.
This event marks the close of a period. It was the last achievement of
Webster and Clay, both of whom passed away in 1852 in the hope that
they had permanently pacified the Union. Calhoun, their great
contemporary, had already died in 1850, gloomily presaging and
lamenting the coming danger to the Union which was so largely his own
creation. For a while the cheerful view of Webster and Clay seemed
better justified. There had been angry protest in the North against
the Fugitive Slave Law; there was some forcible resistance to arrests
of negroes; and some States passed Protection of Liberty Acts of their
own to impede the Federal law in its working. But the excitement,
which had flared up suddenly, died down as suddenly. In the
Presidential election of 1852 Northerners generally reflected that they
wanted quiet and had an instinct, curiously falsified, that the
Democratic party was the more likely to give it them. The Whigs again
proposed a hero, General Scott, a greater soldier than Taylor, but a
vainer man, who mistakenly broke with all precedent and went upon the
stump for himself. The President who was elected, Franklin Pierce of
New Hampshire, a friend of Hawthorne, might perhaps claim the palm
among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious
insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon
him was that he was a gentleman, but his convivial nature made the
social attractiveness of Southern circles in Washington overpowering to
any brain or character that he may have possessed. A new generation of
political personages now came to the front. Jefferson Davis of
Mississippi, a man of force and considerable dignity, began to take the
leading part in the powerful group of Southern Senators; Stephen
Douglas, of Illinois, rapidly became the foremost man of the Democratic
party generally; William Seward, late Governor of New York, and Salmon
Chase, a Democrat, late Governor of Ohio, had played a manful part in
the Senate in opposition to Webster and Clay and their compromise.
From this time on we must look on these two, joined a little later by
Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, as the obvious leaders in the
struggle against slavery which was shortly to be renewed, and in which
Lincoln's part seemed likely to remain a humble one.
3. _Lincoln in Retirement_.
Whether Seward and Chase and the other opponents of the Compromise were
right, as it now seems they were, or not, Lincoln was not the man who
in the unlooked-for crisis of 1850 would have been likely to make an
insurrectionary stand against his old party-leader Clay, and the
revered constitutional authority of Webster. He had indeed little
opportunity to do so in Illinois, but his one recorded speech of this
period, an oration to a meeting of both parties on the death of Clay in
1852, expresses approval of the Compromise. This speech, which is
significant of the trend of his thoughts at this time, does not lend
itself to brief extracts because it is wanting in the frankness of his
speeches before and after. A harsh reference to Abolitionists serves
to disguise the fact that the whole speech is animated by antagonism to
slavery. The occasion and the subject are used with rather
disagreeable subtlety to insinuate opposition to slavery into the minds
of a cautious audience. The speaker himself seems satisfied with the
mood of mere compromise which had governed Clay in this matter, or
rather perhaps he is twisting Clay's attitude into one of more
consistent opposition to slavery than he really showed. In any case we
can be quite sure that the moderate and subtle but intensely firm
opinion with which a little later Lincoln returned to political strife
was the product of long and deep and anxious thought during the years
from 1849 to 1854. On the surface it did not go far beyond the
condemnation of slavery and acceptance of the Constitution which had
guided him earlier, nor did it seem to differ from the wide-spread
public opinion which in 1854 created a new party; but there was this
difference that Lincoln had by then looked at the matter in all its
bearings, and prepared his mind for all eventualities. We shall find,
and need not be surprised to find, that he who now hung back a little,
and who later moved when public opinion moved, later still continued to
move when public opinion had receded.
What we know of these years of private life is mainly due to Mr.
William Herndon, the young lawyer already quoted, whom he took into
partnership in 1845, and who kept on the business of the firm in
Springfield till Lincoln's death. This gentleman was, like Boswell, of
opinion that a great man is not best portrayed as a figure in a
stained-glass window. He had lived with Lincoln, groaned under his odd
ways, and loved them, for sixteen years before his Presidency, and
after his death he devoted much research, in his own memory and those
of many others, to the task of substituting for Lincoln's aureole the
battered tall hat, with valuable papers stuck in its lining, which he
had long contemplated with reverent irritation. Mr. Herndon was not
endowed with Boswell's artistic gift for putting his materials
together, perhaps because he lacked that delicacy and sureness of moral
perception which more than redeemed Boswell's absurdities. He
succeeded on the whole in his aim, for the figure that more or less
distinctly emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in
spite of all Lincoln's melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting
with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at
Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns
with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr.
Herndon's presentation. And Herndon overdid his part. He ferreted out
petty incidents which he thought might display the acute Lincoln as
slightly too acute, when for all that can be seen Lincoln acted just as
any sensible man would have acted. But the result is that, in this
part of his life especially, Lincoln's way of living was subjected to
so close a scrutiny as few men have undergone.
Herndon's scrutiny does not reveal the current of his thoughts either
on life generally or on the political problem which hereafter was to
absorb him. It shows on the contrary, and the recollections of his
Presidency confirm it, that his thought on any important topic though
it might flash out without disguise in rare moments of intimacy,
usually remained long unexpressed. His great sociability had perhaps
even then a rather formidable side to it. He was not merely amusing
himself and other people, when he chatted and exchanged anecdotes far
into the night; there was an element, not ungenial, of purposeful study
in it all. He was building up his knowledge of ordinary human nature,
his insight into popular feeling, his rather slow but sure
comprehension of the individual men whom he did know. It astonished
the self-improving young Herndon that the serious books he read were
few and that he seldom seemed to read the whole of them--though with
the Bible, Shakespeare, and to a less extent Burns, he saturated his
mind. The few books and the great many men were part of one study. In
so far as his thought and study turned upon politics it seems to have
led him soon to the conclusion that he had for the present no part to
play that was worth playing. By 1854, as he said himself, "his
profession as a lawyer had almost superseded the thought of politics in
his mind." But it does not seem that the melancholy sense of some
great purpose unachieved or some great destiny awaiting him ever quite
left him. He must have felt that his chance of political fame was in
all appearance gone, and would have liked to win himself a considerable
position and a little (very little) money as a lawyer; but the study,
in the broadest sense, of which these years were full, evidently
contemplated a larger education of himself as a man than professional
keenness, or any such interest as he had in law, will explain.
Middle-aged and from his own point of view a failure, he was set upon
making himself a bigger man.
In some respects he let himself be. His exterior oddities never seem
to have toned down much; he could not be taught to introduce tidiness
or method into his office; nor did he make himself an exact lawyer; a
rough and ready familiarity with practice and a firm grasp of larger
principles of law contented him without any great apparatus of
learning. His method of study was as odd as anything else about him;
he could read hard and commit things to memory in the midst of bustle
and noise; on the other hand, since reading aloud was his chosen way of
impressing what he read on his own mind, he would do it at all sorts of
times to the sore distraction of his partner. When his studies are
spoken of, observation and thought on some plan concealed in his own
mind must be taken to have formed the largest element in these studies.
There was, however, one methodic discipline, highly commended of old
but seldom perhaps seriously pursued with the like object by men of
forty, even self-taught men, which he did pursue. Some time during
these years he mastered the first six Books of Euclid. It would
probably be no mere fancy if we were to trace certain definite effects
of this discipline upon his mind and character. The faculty which he
had before shown of reducing his thought on any subject to the simplest
and plainest terms possible, now grew so strong that few men can be
compared with him in this. He was gaining, too, from some source, what
the ancient geometers would themselves have claimed as partly the
product of their study: the plain fact and its plain consequences were
not only clear in calm hours of thought, but remained present to him,
felt and instinctive, through seasons of confusion, passion, and
dismay. His life in one sense was very full of companionship, but it
is probable that in his real intellectual interests he was lonely. To
Herndon, intelligently interested in many things, his master's mind,
much as he held it in awe, seemed chillingly unpoetic--which is a
curious view of a mind steeped in Shakespeare and Burns. The two
partners had been separately to Niagara. Herndon was anxious to know
what had been Lincoln's chief impression, and was pained by the reply,
"I wondered where all that water came from," which he felt showed
materialism and insensibility. Lincoln's thought had, very obviously,
a sort of poetry of its own, but of a vast and rather awful kind. He
had occasionally written verses of his own a little before this time;
sad verses about a friend who had become a lunatic, wondering that he
should be allowed to outlive his mind while happy young lives passed
away, and sad verses about a visit to old familiar fields in Indiana,
where he wandered brooding, as he says,
"Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave."
They are not great poetry; but they show a correct ear for verse, and
they are not the verses of a man to whom any of the familiar forms of
poetic association were unusual. They are those of a man in whom the
habitual undercurrent of thought was melancholy.
Apart from these signs and the deep, humorous delight which he
evidently took in his children, there may be something slightly
forbidding in this figure of a gaunt man, disappointed in ambition and
not even happy at home, rubbing along through a rather rough crowd,
with uniform rough geniality and perpetual jest; all the while in
secret forging his own mind into an instrument for some vaguely
foreshadowed end. But there are two or three facts which stand out
certain and have to be taken account of in any image we may be tempted
to form of him. In the first place, his was no forbidding figure at
the time to those who knew him; a queer and a comic figure evidently,
but liked, trusted, and by some loved; reputed for honest dealing and
for kindly and gentle dealing; remarked too by some at that time, as
before and ever after, for the melancholy of his face in repose; known
by us beyond doubt to have gone through great pain; known lastly among
his fellows in his profession for a fire of anger that flashed out only
in the presence of cruelty and wrong.
His law practice, which he pursued with energy, and on which he was
now, it seems, prepared to look as his sole business in life, fitted in
none the less well with his deliberately adopted schemes of
self-education. A great American lawyer, Mr. Choate, assures us that
at the Illinois bar in those days Lincoln had to measure himself
against very considerable men in suits of a class that required some
intellect and training. And in his own way he held his own among these
men. A layman may humbly conjecture that the combination in one person
of the advocate and the solicitor must give opportunities of far truer
intellectual training than the mere advocate can easily enjoy. The
Illinois advocate was not all the time pleading the cause which he was
employed to plead, and which if it was once offered to him it was his
duty to accept; he was the personal adviser of the client whose cause
he pleaded, and within certain limits he could determine whether the
cause was brought at all, and if so whether he should take it up
himself or leave it to another man. The rule in such matters was
elastic and practice varied. Lincoln's practice went to the very limit
of what is permissible in refusing legal aid to a cause he disapproved.
Coming into court he discovered suddenly some fact about his case which
was new to him but which would probably not have justified an English
barrister in throwing up his brief. The case was called; he was
absent; the judge sent to his hotel and got back a message: "Tell the
judge I'm washing my hands." One client received advice much to this
effect: "I can win your case; I can get you $600. I can also make an
honest family miserable. But I shall not take your case, and I shall
not take your fee. One piece of advice I will give you gratis: Go home
and think seriously whether you cannot make $600 in some honest way."
And this habit of mind was beyond his control. Colleagues whom he was
engaged to assist in cases agreed that if a case lost his sympathy he
became helpless and useless in it. This, of course, was not the way to
make money; but he got along and won a considerable local position at
the bar, for his perfect honesty in argument and in statement of fact
was known to have won the confidence of the judges, and a difficult
case which he thought was right elicited the full and curious powers of
his mind. His invective upon occasion was by all accounts terrific.
An advocate glanced at Lincoln's notes for his speech, when he was
appearing against a very heartless swindler and saw that they concluded
with the ominous words, "Skin Defendant." The vitriolic outburst which
occurred at the point thus indicated seems to have been long remembered
by the Illinois bar. To a young man who wished to be a lawyer yet
shrunk from the profession lest it should necessarily involve some
dishonesty Lincoln wrote earnestly and wisely, showing him how false
his impression of the law was, but concluding with earnest entreaty
that he would not enter the profession if he still had any fear of
being led by it to become a knave.
One of his cases is interesting for its own sake, not for his part in
it. He defended without fee the son of his old foe and friend Jack
Armstrong, and of Hannah, who mended his breeches, on a charge of
murder. Six witnesses swore that they had seen him do the deed about
11 P.M. on such and such a night. Cross-examined: They saw it all
quite clearly; they saw it so clearly because of the moonlight. The
only evidence for the defence was an almanac. There had been no moon
that night. Another case is interesting for his sake. Two young men
set up in a farm together, bought a waggon and team from a poor old
farmer, Lincoln's client, did not pay him, and were sued. They had
both been just under twenty-one when they contracted the debt, and they
were advised to plead infancy. A stranger who was present in Court
described afterwards his own indignation as the rascally tale was
unfolded, and his greater indignation as he watched the locally famous
Mr. Lincoln, lying back in his seat, nodding complacently and saying,
"I reckon that's so," as each of the relevant facts was produced, and
the relevant Statute read and expounded. At last, as the onlooker
proceeded to relate, the time came for Lincoln to address the jury,
with whom, by Illinois law, the issue still rested. Slowly he
disengaged his long, lean form from his seat, and before he had got it
drawn out to its height he had fixed a gaze of extraordinary
benevolence on the two disgraceful young defendants and begun in this
strain: "Gentlemen of the Jury, are you prepared that these two young
men shall enter upon life and go through life with the stain of a
dishonourable transaction for ever affixed to them," and so forth at
just sufficient length and with just enough of Shakespearean padding
about honour. The result with that emotional and probably irregular
Western court is obvious, and the story concludes with the quite
credible assertion that the defendants themselves were relieved. Any
good jury would, of course, have been steeled against the appeal, which
might have been expected, to their compassion for a poor and honest old
man. A kind of innocent and benign cunning has been the most engaging
quality in not a few great characters. It is tempting, though at the
risk of undue solemnity, to look for the secret of Lincoln's cunning in
this instance. We know from copybooks and other sources that these two
young men, starting on the down grade with the help of their
blackguardly legal adviser, were objects for pity, more so than the man
who was about to lose a certain number of dollars. Lincoln, as few
other men would have done, felt a certain actual regret for them then
and there; he felt it so naturally that he knew the same sympathy could
be aroused, at least in twelve honest men who already wished they could
find for the plaintiff. It has often been remarked that the cause of
his later power was a knowledge of the people's mind which was
curiously but vitally bound up with his own rectitude.
Any attempt that we may make to analyse a subtle character and in some
respects to trace its growth is certain to miss the exact mark. But it
is in any case plain that Abraham Lincoln left political life in 1849,
a praiseworthy self-made man with good sound views but with nothing
much to distinguish him above many other such, and at a sudden call
returned to political life in 1854 with a touch of something quite
uncommon added to those good sound views.
4. _The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise_.
The South had become captive to politicians, personally reputable and
of some executive capacity, who had converted its natural prejudice
into a definite doctrine which was paradoxical and almost inconceivably
narrow, and who, as is common in such instances of perversion and
fanaticism, knew hardly any scruple in the practical enforcement of
their doctrine. In the North, on the other hand, though there were
some few politicians who were clever and well-intentioned, public
opinion had no very definite character, and public men generally
speaking were flabby. At such a time the sheer adventurer has an
excellent field before him and perhaps has his appointed use.
Stephen Douglas, who was four years younger than Lincoln, had come to
Illinois from the Eastern States just about the time when Lincoln
entered the Legislature. He had neither money nor friends to start
with, but almost immediately secured, by his extraordinary address in
pushing himself, a clerkship in the Assembly. He soon became, like
Lincoln, a lawyer and a legislator, but was on the Democratic side. He
rapidly soared into regions beyond the reach of Lincoln, and in 1847
became a Senator for Illinois, where he later became Chairman of the
Committee on Territories, and as such had to consider the question of
providing for the government of the districts called Kansas and
Nebraska, which lay west and north-west of Missouri, and from which
slavery was excluded by the Missouri Compromise. He was what in
England is called a "Jingo," and was at one time eager to fight this
country for the possession of what is now British Columbia. His short
figure gave an impression of abounding strength and energy which
obtained him the nickname of "the little Giant." With no assignable
higher quality, and with the blustering, declamatory, shamelessly
fallacious and evasive oratory of a common demagogue, he was
nevertheless an accomplished Parliamentarian, and imposed himself as
effectively upon the Senate as he did upon the people of Illinois and
the North generally. He was, no doubt, a remarkable man, with the gift
of attracting many people. A political opponent has described vividly
how at first sight he was instantly repelled by the sinister and
dangerous air of Douglas' scowl; a still stronger opponent, but a
woman, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, seems on the contrary to have found it
impossible to hate him. What he now did displayed at any rate a
sporting quality.
In the course of 1854 Stephen Douglas while in charge of an inoffensive
Bill dealing with the government of Kansas and Nebraska converted it
into a form in which it empowered the people of Kansas at any time to
decide for themselves whether they would permit slavery or not, and in
express terms repealed the Missouri Compromise. With the easy
connivance of President Pierce and the enthusiastic support of the
Southerners, and by some extraordinary exercise of his art as demagogue
and Parliamentarian, he triumphantly ran this measure through.
Just how it came about seems to be rather obscure, but it is easy to
conjecture his motives. Trained in a school in which scruple or
principle were unknown and the man who arrives is the great man,
Douglas, like other such adventurers, was accessible to visions of a
sort. He cared nothing whether negroes were slaves or not, and
doubtless despised Northern and Southern sentiment on that subject
equally; as he frankly said once, on any question between white men and
negroes he was on the side of the white men, and on any question
between negroes and crocodiles he would be on the side of the negroes.
But he did care for the development of the great national heritage in
the West, that subject of an easy but perfectly wholesome patriotic
pride with which we are familiar. It must have been a satisfaction to
him to feel that North and South would now have an equal chance in that
heritage, and also that the white settlers in the West would be
relieved of any restriction on their freedom. None the less his action
was to the last degree reckless. The North had shown itself ready in
1850 to put up with a great deal of quiet invasion of its former
principle, but to lay hands upon the sacred letter of the Act in which
that principle was enshrined was to invite exciting consequences.
The immediate consequences were two-fold. In the first place Southern
settlers came pouring into Kansas and Northern settlers in still larger
numbers (rendered larger still by the help of an emigration society
formed in the North-East for that purpose) came pouring in too. It was
at first a race to win Kansas for slavery or for freedom. When it
became apparent that freedom was winning easily, the race turned into a
civil war between these two classes of immigrants for the possession of
the Territorial government, and this kept on its scandalous and bloody
course for three or four years.
In the second place there was a revolution in the party system. The
old Whig party, which, whatever its tendencies, had avoided having any
principle in regard to slavery, now abruptly and opportunely expired.
There had been an attempt once before, and that time mainly among the
Democrats, to create a new "Free-soil Party," but it had come to very
little. This time a permanent fusion was accomplished between the
majority of the former Whigs in the North and a numerous secession from
among the Northern Democrats. They created the great Republican party,
of which the name and organisation have continued to this day, but of
which the original principle was simply and solely that there should be
no further extension of slavery upon territory present or future of the
United States. It naturally consisted of Northerners only. This was
of course an ominous fact, and caused people, who were too timid either
to join the Republicans or turn Democrat, to take refuge in another
strange party, formed about this time, which had no views about
slavery. This was the "American" party, commonly called the
"Know-Nothing" party from its ridiculous and objectionable secret
organisation. Its principle was dislike of foreign immigrants,
especially such as were Roman Catholics. To them ex-President
Fillmore, protesting against "the madness of the times" when men
ventured to say yes or no on a question relating to slavery, fled for
comfort, and became their candidate for the Presidency at the next
election.
It was in 1854 that Lincoln returned to political life as one of the
founders of the Republican party. But it will be better at once to
deal with one or two later events with which he was not specially
concerned. The Republicans chose as their Presidential candidate in
1856 an attractive figure, John Frémont, a Southerner of French origin,
who had conducted daring and successful explorations in Oregon, had
some hand (perhaps a very important hand) in conquering California from
Mexico, and played a prominent part in securing California for freedom.
The Southern Democrats again secured a Northern instrument in James
Buchanan of Pennsylvania, an elderly and very respectable man, who was
understood to be well versed in diplomatic and official life. He was a
more memorable personage than Pierce. A great chorus of friendly
witnesses to his character has united in ascribing all his actions to
weakness.
Buchanan was elected; but for a brand-new party the Republicans had put
up a very good fight, and they were in the highest of spirits when,
shortly after Buchanan's Inauguration in 1857, a staggering blow fell
upon them from an unexpected quarter. This was nothing less than a
pronouncement by the Chief Justice and a majority of Justices in the
Supreme Court of the United States, that the exclusion of slavery from
any portion of the Territories, and therefore, of course, the whole aim
and object of the Republicans, was, as Calhoun had contended eight or
ten years before, unconstitutional.
Dred Scott was a Missouri slave whose misfortunes it is needless to
compassionate, since, after giving his name to one of the most famous
law cases in history, he was emancipated with his family by a new
master into whose hands he had passed. Some time before the Missouri
Compromise was repealed he had been taken by his master into Minnesota,
as a result of which he claimed that he became, by virtue of the
Missouri Compromise, a free man. His right to sue his master in a
Federal Court rested on the allegation that he was now a citizen of
Missouri, while his master was a citizen of another State. There was
thus a preliminary question to be decided, Was he really a citizen,
before the question, Was he a freeman, could arise at all. If the
Supreme Court followed its established practice, and if it decided
against his citizenship, it would not consider the question which
interested the public, that of his freedom.
Chief Justice Roger Taney may be seen from the refined features of his
portrait and the clear-cut literary style of his famous judgment to
have been a remarkable man. He was now eighty-three, but in unimpaired
intellectual vigour. In a judgment, with which five of his colleagues
entirely concurred and from which only two dissented, he decided that
Dred Scott was not a citizen, and went on, contrary to practice, to
pronounce, in what was probably to be considered as a mere _obiter
dictum_, that Dred Scott was not free, because the Missouri Compromise
had all along been unconstitutional and void. Justices McLean and
Curtis, especially the latter, answered Taney's arguments in cogent
judgments, which it seems generally to be thought were right. Many
lawyers thought so then, and so did the prudent Fillmore. This is one
of the rare cases where a layman may have an opinion on a point of law,
for the argument of Taney was entirely historical and rested upon the
opinion as to negroes and slavery which he ascribed to the makers of
the Constitution and the authors of the Declaration of Independence.
On the question of Scott's citizenship he laid down that these men had
hardly counted Africans as human at all, and used words such as "men,"
"persons," "citizens" in a sense which necessarily excluded the negro.
We have seen already that he was wrong--the Southern politician who
called the words of the Declaration of Independence "a self-evident
lie" was a sounder historian than Taney; but an amazing fact is to be
added: the Constitution, whose authors, according to Taney, could not
conceive of a negro as a citizen, was actually the act of a number of
States in several of which negroes were exercising the full rights of
citizens at the time. It would be easy to bring almost equally plain
considerations to bear against the more elaborate argument of Taney
that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, but it is enough to
say this much: the first four Presidents--that is, all the Presidents
who were in public life when the Constitution was made--had all acted
unhesitatingly upon the belief that Congress had the power to allow or
forbid slavery in the Territories. The fifth, John Quincy Adams, when
he set his hand to Acts involving this principle, had consulted before
doing so the whole of his Cabinet on this constitutional point and had
signed such legislation with the full concurrence of them all. Even
Polk had acted later upon the same view. The Dred Scott judgment would
thus appear to show the penetrating power at that time of an altogether
fantastic opinion.
The hope, which Taney is known to have entertained, that his judgment
would compose excited public opinion, was by no means fulfilled. It
raised fierce excitement. What practical effect would hereafter be
given to the opinion of six out of the nine judges in that Court might
depend on many things. But to the Republicans, who appealed much to
antiquity, it was maddening to be thus assured that their whole
"platform" was unconstitutional. In the long run, there seems to be no
doubt that Taney helped the cause of freedom. He had tried to make
evident the personal sense of compassion for "these unfortunate people"
with which he contemplated the opinion that he ascribed to a past
generation; but he failed to do this, and instead he succeeded in
imparting to the supposed Constitutional view of the slave, as nothing
but a chattel, a horror which went home to many thousands of the
warm-hearted men and women of his country.
For the time, however, the Republicans were deeply depressed, and a
further perplexity shortly befell them. An attempt, to which we must
shortly return, was made to impose the slave system on Kansas against
the now unmistakable will of the majority there. Against this attempt
Douglas, in opposition to whom the Republican party had been formed,
revolted to his lasting honour, and he now stood out for the occasion
as the champion of freedom. It was at this late period of bewilderment
and confusion that the life-story of Abraham Lincoln became one with
the life-story of the American people.