CHAPTER V

THE RISE OF LINCOLN

1. _Lincoln's Return to Public Life_.

We possess a single familiar letter in which Lincoln opened his heart

about politics. It was written while old political ties were not yet

quite broken and new ties not quite knit, and it was written to an old

and a dear friend who was not his political associate. We may

fittingly place it here, as a record of the strong and conflicting

feelings out of which his consistent purpose in this crisis was formed.

"_24 August, 1855_.

"To JOSHUA SPEED.

"You know what a poor correspondent I am. Ever since I received your

very agreeable letter of the 22nd I have been intending to write you an

answer to it. You suggest that in political action, now, you and I

would differ. I suppose we would; not quite so much, however, as you

may think. You know I dislike slavery, and you fully admit the

abstract wrong of it. So far there is no cause of difference. But you

say that sooner than yield your legal right to the slave, especially at

the bidding of those who are not themselves interested, you would see

the Union dissolved. I am not aware that any one is bidding you yield

that right; very certainly I am not. I leave that matter entirely to

yourself. I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the

Constitution in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the

poor creatures hunted down and caught and carried back to their stripes

and unrequited toil; but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841 you

and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from

Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from

Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen

slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual

torment to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio

or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to assume that I

have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the

power to make me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much

the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in

order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. I

do oppose the extension of slavery because my judgment and feelings so

prompt me, and I am under no obligations to the contrary. If for this

you and I must differ, differ we must. . . .

"You say that if Kansas fairly votes herself a free State, as a

Christian you will rejoice at it. All decent slave holders talk that

way and I do not doubt their candour. But they never vote that way.

Although in a private letter or conversation you will express your

preference that Kansas shall be free, you will vote for no man for

Congress who would say the same thing publicly. No such man could be

elected from any district in a slave State. . . . The slave breeders

and slave traders are a small, odious and detested class among you; and

yet in politics they dictate the course of all of you, and are as

completely your masters as you are the masters of your own negroes.

"You inquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I

am a Whig; but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an

Abolitionist. When I was at Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso

as good as forty times; and I never heard of any one attempting to

un-Whig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of

slavery. I am not a Know-Nothing, that is certain. How could I be?

How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favour of

degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears

to me pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men

are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created

equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will

read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and

Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some

country where they make no pretence of loving liberty--to Russia, for

instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy

of hypocrisy.

"Mary will probably pass a day or two in Louisville in October. My

kindest regards to Mrs. Speed. On the leading subject of this letter I

have more of her sympathy than I have of yours; and yet let me say I am

"Your friend forever,

"A. LINCOLN."

The shade of doubt which this letter suggests related really to the

composition of political parties and the grouping of political forces,

not in the least to the principles by which Lincoln's own actions would

be guided. He has himself recorded that the repeal of the Missouri

Compromise meant for him the sudden revival in a far stronger form of

his interest in politics, and, we may add, of his political ambition.

The opinions which he cherished most deeply demanded no longer patience

but vehement action. The faculties of political organisation and of

popular debate, of which he enjoyed the exercise, could now be used for

a purpose which satisfied his understanding and his heart.

From 1854 onwards we find Lincoln almost incessantly occupied, at

conventions, at public meetings, in correspondence, in secret

consultation with those who looked to him for counsel, for the one

object of strengthening the new Republican movement in his own State of

Illinois, and, so far as opportunity offered, in the neighbouring

States. Some of the best of his reported and the most effective of his

unreported speeches were delivered between 1854 and 1858. Yet as large

a part of his work in these years was done quietly in the background,

and it continued to be his fate to be called upon to efface himself.

It is unnecessary to follow in any detail the labours by which he

became a great leader in Illinois. It may suffice to pick out two

instances that illustrate the ways of this astute, unselfish man. The

first is very trifling and shows him merely astute. A Springfield

newspaper called the _Conservative_ was acquiring too much influence as

the organ of moderate and decent opinion that acquiesced in the

extension of negro slavery. The Abolitionist, Mr. Herndon, was a

friend of the editor. One day he showed Lincoln an article in a

Southern paper which most boldly justified slavery whether the slaves

were black or white. Lincoln observed what a good thing it would be if

the pro-slavery papers of Illinois could be led to go this length.

Herndon ingeniously used his acquaintance with the editor to procure

that he should reprint this article with approval. Of course that

promising journalistic venture, the _Conservative_, was at once ruined

by so gross an indiscretion. This was hard on its confiding editor,

and it is not to Lincoln's credit that he suggested or connived at this

trick. But this trumpery tale happens to be a fair illustration of two

things. In the first place a large part of Lincoln's activity went in

the industrious and watchful performance of services to his cause, very

seldom as questionable but constantly as minute as this, and in making

himself as in this case confidant and adviser to a number of less

notable workers. In the second place a biographer must set forth if he

can the materials for the severest judgment on his subject, and in the

case of a man whose fame was built on his honesty, but who certainly

had an aptitude for ingenious tricks and took a humorous delight in

them, this duty might involve a tedious examination of many unimportant

incidents. It may save such discussion hereafter to say, as can safely

be said upon a study of all the transactions in his life of which the

circumstances are known, that this trick on the editor of the

_Conservative_ marks the limit of Lincoln's deviation from the straight

path. Most of us might be very glad if we had really never done

anything much more dishonest.

Our second tale of this period is much more memorable. In 1856 the

term of office of one of the Senators for Illinois came to an end; and

there was a chance of electing an opponent of Douglas. Those of the

Republicans of Illinois who were former Whigs desired the election of

Lincoln, but could only secure it by the adhesion of a sufficient

number of former Democrats and waverers. United States Senators were

elected by the Legislatures of their own States through a procedure

similar to that of the Conclave of Cardinals which elects a Pope; if

there were several candidates and no one of them had an absolute

majority of the votes first cast, the candidate with most votes was not

elected; the voting was repeated, perhaps many times, till some one had

an absolute majority; the final result was brought about by a transfer

of votes from one candidate to another in which the prompt and cunning

wire-puller had sometimes a magnificent opportunity for his skill. In

this particular contest there were many ballots, and Lincoln at first

led. His supporters were full of eager hope. Lincoln, looking on,

discerned before any of them the setting in of an under-current likely

to result in the election of a supporter of Douglas. He discerned,

too, that the surest way to prevent this was for the whole of his

friends immediately to go over to the Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, who was

a sound opponent of slavery. He sacrificed his own chance instantly by

persuading his supporters to do this. They were very reluctant, but he

overbore them; one, a very old friend, records that he never saw him

more earnest and decided. The same friend records, what is necessary

to the appreciation of Lincoln's conduct, that his personal

disappointment and mortification at his failure were great. Lincoln,

it will be remembered, had acted just in this way when he sought

election to the House of Representatives; he was to repeat this line of

conduct in a manner at least as striking in the following year. Minute

criticism of his action in many matters becomes pointless when we

observe that his managing shrewdness was never more signally displayed

than it was three times over in the sacrifice of his own personal

chances.

For four years, it is to be remembered, the activity and influence of

which we are speaking were of little importance beyond the boundaries

of Illinois. It is true that at the Republican Convention in 1856

which chose Frémont as its candidate for the Presidency, Lincoln was

exposed for a moment to the risk (for so it was to be regarded) of

being nominated for the Vice-Presidency; but even his greatest speech

was not noticed outside Illinois, and in the greater part of the

Northern States his name was known to comparatively few and to them

only as a local notability of the West. But in the course of 1858 he

challenged the attention of the whole country. There was again a

vacancy for a Senator for Illinois. Douglas was the sole and obvious

candidate of the Democrats. Lincoln came forward as his opponent. The

elections then pending of the State Legislature, which in its turn

would elect a Senator, became a contest between Lincoln and Douglas.

In the autumn of that year these rival champions held seven joint

debates before mass meetings in the open air at important towns of

Illinois, taking turns in the right of opening the debate and replying

at its close; in addition each was speaking at meetings of his own at

least once a day for three months. At the end of it all Douglas had

won his seat in the Senate, and Lincoln had not yet gained recognition

among the Republican leaders as one of themselves. Nevertheless the

contest between Lincoln and Douglas was one of the decisive events in

American history, partly from the mere fact that at that particular

moment any one opposed Douglas at all; partly from the manner in which,

in the hearing of all America, Lincoln formulated the issue between

them; partly from the singular stroke by which he deliberately ensured

his own defeat and certain further consequences.

2. _The Principles and the Oratory of Lincoln_.

We can best understand the causes which suddenly made him a man of

national consequence by a somewhat close examination of the principles

and the spirit which governed all his public activity from the moment

of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The new Republican party

which then began to form itself stood for what might seem a simple

creed; slavery must be tolerated where it existed because the

Constitution and the maintenance of the Union required it, but it must

not be allowed to extend beyond its present limits because it was

fundamentally wrong. This was what most Whigs and many Democrats in

the North had always held, but the formulation of it as the platform of

a party, and a party which must draw its members almost entirely from

the North, was bound to raise in an acute form questions on which very

few men had searched their hearts. Men who hated slavery were likely

to falter and find excuses for yielding when confronted with the danger

to the Union which would arise. Men who loved the Union might in the

last resort be ready to sacrifice it if they could thereby be rid of

complicity with slavery, or might be unwilling to maintain it at the

cost of fratricidal war. The stress of conflicting emotions and the

complications of the political situation were certain to try to the

uttermost the faith of any Republican who was not very sure just how

much he cared for the Union and how much for freedom, and what loyalty

to either principle involved. It was the distinction of Lincoln--a man

lacking in much of the knowledge which statesmen are supposed to

possess, and capable of blundering and hesitation about details--first,

that upon questions like these he was free from ambiguity of thought or

faltering of will, and further, that upon his difficult path, amid

bewildering and terrifying circumstances, he was able to take with him

the minds of very many very ordinary men.

In a slightly conventional memorial oration upon Clay, Lincoln had said

of him that "he loved his country, partly because it was his own

country, and mostly because it was a free country." He might truly

have said the like of himself. To him the national unity of America,

with the Constitution which symbolised it, was the subject of pride and

of devotion just in so far as it had embodied and could hereafter more

fully embody certain principles of permanent value to mankind. On this

he fully knew his own inner mind. For the preservation of an America

which he could value more, say, than men value the Argentine Republic,

he was to show himself better prepared than any other man to pay any

possible price. But he definitely refused to preserve the Union by

what in his estimation would have been the real surrender of the

principles which had made Americans a distinct and self-respecting

nation.

Those principles he found in the Declaration of Independence. Its

rhetorical inexactitude gave him no trouble, and must not, now that its

language is out of fashion, blind us to the fact that the founders of

the United States did deliberately aspire to found a commonwealth in

which common men and women should count for more than elsewhere, and in

which, as we might now phrase it, all authority must defer somewhat to

the interests and to the sentiments of the under dog. "Public opinion

on any subject," he said, "always has a 'central idea' from which all

its minor thoughts radiate. The 'central idea' in our public opinion

at the beginning was, and till recently has continued to be, 'the

equality of man'; and, although it has always submitted patiently to

whatever inequality seemed to be a matter of actual necessity, its

constant working has been a steady and progressive effort towards the

practical equality of all men." The fathers, he said again, had never

intended any such obvious untruth as that equality actually existed, or

that any action of theirs could immediately create it; but they had set

up a standard to which continual approximation could be made.

So far as white men were concerned such approximation had actually

taken place; the audiences Lincoln addressed were fully conscious that

very many thousands had found in the United States a scope to lead

their own lives which the traditions and institutions no less than the

physical conditions of their former countries had denied them. There

was no need for him to enlarge on this fact; but there are repeated

indications of the distaste and alarm with which he witnessed a demand

that newcomers from Europe, or some classes of them, should be accorded

lesser privileges than they had enjoyed.

But notions of freedom and equality as applied to the negroes presented

a real difficulty. "There is," said Lincoln, "a natural disgust in the

minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate

amalgamation of the white and black men." (We might perhaps add that

as the inferior race becomes educated and rises in status it is likely

itself to share the same disgust.) Lincoln himself disliked the

thought of intermarriage between the races. He by no means took it for

granted that equality in political power must necessarily and properly

follow upon emancipation. Schemes for colonial settlement of the

negroes in Africa, or for gradual emancipation accompanied by

educational measures, appealed to his sympathy. It was not given him

to take a part in the settlement after the war, and it is impossible to

guess what he would have achieved as a constructive statesman; but it

is certain that he would have proceeded with caution and with the

patience of sure faith; and he had that human sympathy with the white

people of the South, and no less with the slaves themselves, which

taught him the difficulty of the problem. But difficult as the problem

was, one solution was certainly wrong, and that was the permanent

acquiescence in slavery. If we may judge from reiteration in his

speeches, no sophism angered him quite so much as the very popular

sophism which defended slavery by presenting a literal equality as the

real alternative to it. "I protest against the counterfeit logic which

says that since I do not want a negro woman for my slave I must

necessarily want her for my wife. I may want her for neither. I may

simply let her alone. In some respects she is certainly not my equal.

But in her natural right to eat the bread which she has earned by the

sweat of her brow, she is my equal and the equal of any man."

The men who had made the Union had, as Lincoln contended, and in regard

to most of them contended justly, been true to principle in their

dealing with slavery. "They yielded to slavery," he insists, "what the

necessity of the case required, and they yielded nothing more." It

was, as we know, impossible for them in federating America, however

much they might hope to inspire the new nation with just ideas, to take

the power of legislating as to slavery within each existing State out

of the hands of that State. Such power as they actually possessed of

striking at slavery they used, as we have seen and as Lincoln recounted

in detail, with all promptitude and almost to its fullest extent. They

reasonably believed, though wrongly, that the natural tendency of

opinion throughout the now freed Colonies with principles of freedom in

the air would work steadily towards emancipation. "The fathers,"

Lincoln could fairly say, "place slavery, where the public mind could

rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction."

The task for statesmen now was "to put slavery back where the fathers

placed it."

Now this by no means implied that slavery in the States which now

adhered to it should be exposed to attack from outside, or the slave

owner be denied any right which he could claim under the Constitution,

however odious and painful it might be, as in the case of the rendition

of fugitive slaves, to yield him his rights. "We allow," says Lincoln,

"slavery to exist in the slave States, not because it is right, but

from the necessities of the Union. We grant a fugitive slave law

because it is so 'nominated in the bond'; because our fathers so

stipulated--had to--and we are bound to carry out this agreement." And

the obligations to the slave owners and the slave States, which this

original agreement and the fundamental necessities of the Union

involved, must be fulfilled unswervingly, in spirit as well as in the

letter. Lincoln was ready to give the slave States any possible

guarantee that the Constitution should not be altered so as to take

away their existing right of self-government in the matter of slavery.

He had remained in the past coldly aloof from the Abolitionist

propaganda when Herndon and other friends tried to interest him in it,

feeling, it seems, that agitation in the free States against laws which

existed constitutionally in the slave States was not only futile but

improper. With all his power he dissuaded his more impulsive friends

from lending any aid to forcible and unlawful proceedings in defence of

freedom in Kansas. "The battle of freedom," he exclaims in a vehement

plea for what may be called moderate as against radical policy, "is to

be fought out on principle. Slavery is violation of eternal right. We

have temporised with it from the necessities of our condition; but as

sure as God reigns and school children read, that black foul lie can

never be consecrated into God's hallowed truth." In other words, the

sure way and the only way to combat slavery lay in the firm and the

scrupulous assertion of principles which would carry the reason and the

conscience of the people with them; the repeal of the prohibition of

slavery in the Territories was a defiance of such principles, but so

too in its way was the disregard by Abolitionists of the rights

covenanted to the slave States. This side of Lincoln's doctrine is apt

to jar upon us. We feel with a great American historian that the North

would have been depraved indeed if it had not bred Abolitionists, and

it requires an effort to sympathise with Lincoln's rigidly correct

feeling--sometimes harshly expressed and sometimes apparently cold. It

is not possible to us, as it was to him a little later, to look on John

Brown's adventure merely as a crime. Nor can we wonder that, when he

was President and Civil War was raging, many good men in the North

mistook him and thought him half-hearted, because he persisted in his

respect for the rights of the Slave States so long as there seemed to

be a chance of saving the Union in that way. It was his primary

business, he then said, to save the Union if he could; "if I could save

the Union by emancipating all the slaves I would do so; if I could save

it by emancipating none of them, I would do it; if I could save it by

emancipating some and not others, I would do that too." But, as in the

letter at the beginning of this chapter he called Speed to witness, his

forbearance with slavery cost him real pain, and we shall misread both

his policy as President and his character as a man if we fail to see

that in the bottom of his mind he felt this forbearance to be required

by the very same principles which roused him against the extension of

the evil. Years before, he had written to an Abolitionist

correspondent that respect for the rights of the slave States was due

not only to the Constitution but, "as it seems to me, in a sense to

freedom itself." Negro slavery was not the only important issue, nor

was it an isolated issue. What really was in issue was the continuance

of the nation "dedicated," as he said on a great occasion, "to the

proposition that all men are equal," a nation founded by the Union of

self-governing communities, some of which lagged far behind the others

in applying in their own midst the elementary principles of freedom,

but yet a nation actuated from its very foundation in some important

respects by the acknowledgment of human rights.

The practical policy, then, on which his whole efforts were

concentrated consisted in this single point--the express recognition of

the essential evil of slavery by the enactment that it should not

spread further in the Territories subject to the Union. If slavery

were thus shut up within a ring fence and marked as a wrong thing which

the Union as a whole might tolerate but would not be a party to,

emancipation in the slave States would follow in course of time. It

would come about, Lincoln certainly thought, in a way far better for

the slaves as well as for their masters, than any forced liberation.

He was content to wait for it. "I do not mean that when it takes a

turn towards ultimate extinction, it will be in a day, nor in a year,

nor in two years. I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way

ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least,

but that it will occur in the best way for both races in God's own good

time I have no doubt." If we wonder whether this policy, if soon

enough adopted by the Union as a whole, would really have brought on

emancipation in the South, the best answer is that, when the policy did

receive national sanction by the election of Lincoln, the principal

slave States themselves instinctively recognised it as fatal to slavery.

For the extinction of slavery he would wait; for a decision on the

principle of slavery he would not. It was idle to protest against

agitation of the question. If politicians would be silent that would

not get rid of "this same mighty deep-seated power that somehow

operates on the minds of men, exciting them and stirring them up in

every avenue of society--in politics, in religion, in literature, in

morals, in all the manifold relations of life." The stand, temperate

as it was, that he advocated against slavery should be taken at once

and finally. The difference, of which people grown accustomed to

slavery among their neighbours thought little, between letting it be in

Missouri, which they could not help, and letting it cross the border

into Kansas, which they could help, appeared to Lincoln the whole

tremendous gulf between right and wrong, between a wise people's

patience with ills they could not cure and a profligate people's

acceptance of evil as their good. And here there was a distinction

between Lincoln and many Republicans, which again may seem subtle, but

which was really far wider than that which separated him from the

Abolitionists. Slavery must be stopped from spreading into Kansas not

because, as it turned out, the immigrants into Kansas mostly did not

want it, but because it was wrong, and the United States, where they

were free to act, would not have it. The greatest evil in the repeal

of the Missouri Compromise was the laxity of public tone which had made

it possible. "Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the

grave, we have been giving up the old faith for the new faith."

Formerly some deference to the "central idea" of equality was general

and in some sort of abstract sense slavery was admitted to be wrong.

Now it was boldly claimed by the South that "slavery in the abstract

was right." All the most powerful influences in the country, "Mammon"

(for "the slave property is worth a billion dollars"), "fashion,

philosophy," and even "the theology of the day," were enlisted in

favour of this opinion. And it met with no resistance. "You yourself

may detest slavery; but your neighbour has five or six slaves, and he

is an excellent neighbour, or your son has married his daughter, and

they beg you to help save their property, and you vote against your

interests and principle to oblige a neighbour, hoping your vote will be

on the losing side." And again "the party lash and the fear of

ridicule will overawe justice and liberty; for it is a singular fact,

but none the less a fact and well known by the most common experience,

that men will do things under the terror of the party lash that they

would not on any account or for any consideration do otherwise; while

men, who will march up to the mouth of a loaded cannon without

shrinking, will run from the terrible name of 'Abolitionist,' even when

pronounced by a worthless creature whom they with good reason despise."

And so people in the North, who could hardly stomach the doctrine that

slavery was good, yet lapsed into the feeling that it was a thing

indifferent, a thing for which they might rightly shuffle off their

responsibility on to the immigrants into Kansas. This feeling that it

was indifferent Lincoln pursued and chastised with special scorn. But

the principle of freedom that they were surrendering was the principle

of freedom for themselves as well as for the negro. The sense of the

negro's rights had been allowed to go back till the prospect of

emancipation for him looked immeasurably worse than it had a generation

before. They must recognise that when, by their connivance, they had

barred and bolted the door upon the negro, the spirit of tyranny which

they had evoked would then "turn and rend them." The "central idea"

which had now established itself in the intellect of the Southern was

one which favoured the enslavement of man by man "apart from colour."

A definite choice had to be made between the principle of the fathers,

which asserted certain rights for all men, and that other principle

against which the fathers had rebelled and of which the "divine right

of kings" furnished Lincoln with his example. In what particular

manner the white people would be made to feel the principle of tyranny

when they had definitely "denied freedom to others" and ceased to

"deserve it for themselves" Lincoln did not attempt to say, and perhaps

only dimly imagined. But he was as convinced as any prophet that

America stood at the parting of the ways and must choose now the right

principle or the wrong with all its consequences.

The principle of tyranny presented itself for their choice in a

specious form in Douglas' "great patent, everlasting principle of

'popular sovereignty.'" This alleged principle was likely, so to say,

to take upon their blind side men who were sympathetic to the

impatience of control of any crowd resembling themselves but not

sympathetic to humanity of another race and colour. The claim to some

divine and indefeasible right of sovereignty overriding all other

considerations of the general good, on the part of a majority greater

or smaller at any given time in any given area, is one which can

generally be made to bear a liberal semblance, though it certainly has

no necessary validity. Americans had never before thought of granting

it in the case of their outlying and unsettled dominions; they would

never, for instance, as Lincoln remarked, have admitted the claim of

settlers like the Mormons to make polygamy lawful in the territory they

occupied. In the manner in which it was now employed the proposed

principle could, as Lincoln contended, be reduced to this simple form

"that, if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man shall have

the right to object."

It is impossible to estimate how far Lincoln foresaw the strain to

which a firm stand against slavery would subject the Union. It is

likely enough that those worst forebodings for the Union, which events

proved to be very true, were confined to timid men who made a practice

of yielding to threats. Lincoln appreciated better than many of his

fellows the sentiment of the South, but it is often hard for men, not

in immediate contact with a school of thought which seems to them

thoroughly perverse, to appreciate its pervasive power, and Lincoln was

inclined to stake much upon the hope that reason will prevail.

Moreover, he had a confidence in the strength of the Union which might

have been justified if his predecessor in office had been a man of

ordinary firmness. But it is not to be supposed that any undue

hopefulness, if he felt it, influenced his judgment. He was of a

temper which does not seek to forecast what the future has to show, and

his melancholy prepared him well for any evil that might come. Two

things we can say with certainty of his aim and purpose. On the one

hand, as has already been said, whatever view he had taken of the peril

to the Union he would never have sought to avoid the peril by what

appeared to him a surrender of the principle which gave the Union its

worth. On the other hand, he must always have been prepared to uphold

the Union at whatever the cost might prove to be. To a man of deep and

gentle nature war will always be hateful, but it can never, any more

than an individual death, appear the worst of evils. And the claim of

the Southern States to separate from a community which to him was

venerable and to form a new nation, based on slavery and bound to live

in discord with its neighbors, did not appeal to him at all, though in

a certain literal sense it was a claim to liberty. His attitude to any

possible movement for secession was defined four years at least before

secession came, in words such as it was not his habit to use without

full sense of their possible effect or without much previous thought.

They were quite simple: "We won't break up the Union, and you shan't."

Such were the main thoughts which would be found to animate the whole

of Lincoln's notable campaign, beginning with his first encounter with

Douglas in 1855 and culminating in his prolonged duel with him in the

autumn of 1858. It is unnecessary here to follow the complexities,

especially in regard to the Dred Scott judgments, through which the

discussion wandered. It is now worth few men's while to do more than

glance at two or three of his speeches at that period; his speeches in

the formal Lincoln-Douglas debates, except the first, are not the best

of them. A scientific student of rhetoric, as the art by which man do

actually persuade crowds, might indeed do well to watch closely the use

by Douglas and Lincoln of their respective weapons, but for most of us

it is an unprofitable business to read reiterated argument, even though

in beautiful language, upon points of doubt that no longer trouble us.

Lincoln does not always show to advantage; later readers have found him

inferior in urbanity to Douglas, of whom he disapproved, while Douglas

probably disapproved of no man; his speeches are, of course, not free

either from unsound arguments or from the rough and tumble of popular

debate; occasionally he uses hackneyed phrases; but it is remarkable

that a hackneyed or a falsely sentimental phrase in Lincoln comes

always as a lapse and a surprise. Passages abound in these speeches

which to almost any literate taste are arresting for the simple beauty

of their English, a beauty characteristic of one who had learned to

reason with Euclid and learned to feel and to speak with the authors of

the Bible. And in their own kind they were a classic and probably

unsurpassed achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single

issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that

the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of

public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare

profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind.

In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most

men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and

those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the

Presidential election of 1856 wrote to a supporter of Fillmore to

persuade him of a proposition which must seem paradoxical to anyone not

deeply versed in American institutions, namely, that it was actually

against Fillmore's interest to gain votes from Frémont in Illinois. He

demonstrated his point, but he was not always judicious in his way of

addressing solemn strangers, and in his rural manner he concludes his

letter, "the whole thing is as simple as figuring out the weight of

three small hogs," and this inelegant sentence conveys with little

exaggeration one especial merit of his often austerely graceful

language. Grave difficulties are handled in a style which could arouse

all the interest of a boy and penetrate the understanding of a

case-hardened party man.

But if in comparison with the acknowledged masterpieces of our prose we

rank many passages in these speeches very high--and in fact the men who

have appreciated them most highly have been fastidious scholars--we

shall not yet have measured Lincoln's effort and performance. For

these are not the compositions of a cloistered man of letters, they are

the outpourings of an agitator upon the stump. The men who think hard

are few; few of them can clothe their thought in apt and simple words;

very, very few are those who in doing this could hold the attention of

a miscellaneous and large crowd. Popular government owes that

comparative failure, of which in recent times we have taken perhaps

exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the

true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance

which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark

not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit.

Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the

outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It

was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite

overshadowed his; a person whose extraordinary and good-humoured

vitality armed him with an external charm even for people who, like

Mrs. Beecher Stowe, detested his principles; an orator whose mastery of

popular appeal and of resourceful and evasive debate was quite

unhampered by any weakness for the truth. The utterance had to be kept

up day after day and night after night for a quarter of a year, by a

man too poor to afford little comforts, travelling from one crowded inn

to another, by slow trains on a railway whose officials paid little

attention to him, while his more prosperous and distinguished rival

could travel in comfort and comparative magnificence. The physical

strain of electioneering, which is always considerable, its alternation

of feverish excitement with a lassitude that, after a while, becomes

prevailing and intense, were in this case far greater and more

prolonged than in any other instance recorded of English or probably of

American statesmen. If, upon his sudden elevation shortly afterwards,

Lincoln was in a sense an obscure man raised up by chance, he was

nevertheless a man who had accomplished a heroic labour.

On the whole the earthen vessel in which he carried his treasure of

clear thought and clean feelings appears to have enhanced its flavour.

There was at any rate nothing outward about him that aroused the

passion of envy. A few peculiarly observant men were immediately

impressed with his distinction, but there is no doubt that to the

ordinary stranger he appeared as a very odd fish. "No portraits that I

have ever seen," writes one, "do justice to the awkwardness and

ungainliness of his figure." Its movements when he began to speak

rather added to its ungainliness, and, though to a trained actor his

elocution seemed perfect, his voice when he first opened his mouth

surprised and jarred upon the hearers with a harsh note of curiously

high pitch. But it was the sort of oddity that arrests attention, and

people's attention once caught was apt to be held by the man's

transparent earnestness. Soon, as he lost thought of himself in his

subject, his voice and manner changed; deeper notes, of which friends

record the beauty, rang out, the sad eyes kindled, and the tall, gaunt

figure, with the strange gesture of the long, uplifted arms, acquired

even a certain majesty. Hearers recalled afterwards with evident

sincerity the deep and instantaneous impression of some appeal to

simple conscience, as when, "reaching his hands towards the stars of

that still night," he proclaimed, "in some things she is certainly not

my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread that she has earned

with the sweat of her brow, she is my equal, and the equal of Judge

Douglas, and the equal of any man." Indeed, upon a sympathetic

audience, already excited by the occasion, he could produce an effect

which the reader of his recorded speeches would hardly believe. Of his

speech at an early state convention of the Republican party there is no

report except that after a few sentences every reporter laid down his

pen for the opposite of the usual reason, and, as he proceeded, "the

audience arose from their chairs and with pale faces and quivering lips

pressed unconsciously towards him." And of his speech on another

similar occasion several witnesses seem to have left descriptions

hardly less incongruous with English experience of public meetings. If

we credit him with these occasional manifestations of electric

oratory--as to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at

times blaze out in a surprising fashion--it is not to be thought that

he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches

are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a

drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which

heard it gladly. But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess;

the personality behind the words was felt. "Beyond and above all

skill," says the editor of a great paper who heard him at Peoria, "was

the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker

himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to his

fellow men."

One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected. In

debate, at least, he had no use for perorations, and the reader who

looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few

minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to

explain only if there was time for it. We associate our older

Parliamentary oratory with an art which keeps the hearer pleasedly

expectant rather than dangerously attentive, through an argument which

if dwelt upon might prove unsubstantial, secure that it all leads in

the end to some great cadence of noble sound. But in Lincoln's

argumentative speeches the employment of beautiful words is least

sparing at the beginning or when he passes to a new subject. It seems

as if he deliberately used up his rhetorical effects at the outset to

put his audience in the temper in which they would earnestly follow him

and to challenge their full attention to reasoning which was to satisfy

their calmer judgment. He put himself in a position in which if his

argument were not sound nothing could save his speech from failure as a

speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight

on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved

not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method

by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous

reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare

distinction. It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to

be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse of

life. It is not, of course, pretended that he never used a fallacious

argument or made an unfair score--he was entirely human. But this is

the testimony of an Illinois political wire-puller to Lincoln: "He was

one of the shrewdest politicians in the State. Nobody had more

experience in that way. Nobody knew better what was passing in the

minds of the people. Nobody knew better how to turn things to

advantage politically." And then he goes on--and this is really the

sum of what is to be said of his oratory: "He could not cheat people

out of their votes any more than he could out of their money."

3. _Lincoln against Douglas_.

It has now to be told how the contest with Douglas which concluded

Lincoln's labours in Illinois affected the broad stream of political

events in America as a whole. Lincoln, as we know, was still only a

local personage; Illinois is a State bigger than Ireland, but it is

only a little part and was still a rather raw and provincial part of

the United States; but Douglas had for years been a national personage,

for a time the greatest man among the Democrats, and now, for a reason

which did him honour, he was in disgrace with many of his party and on

the point of becoming the hero of all moderate Republicans.

We need not follow in much detail the events of the great political

world. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw it into a ferment,

which the continuing disorders in Kansas were in themselves sufficient

to keep up. New great names were being made in debate in the Senate;

Seward, the most powerful opponent of the repeal of the Missouri

Compromise, kept his place as the foremost man in the Republican party

not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New

York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John

Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly

harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most

successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in

literature and the Press were heard upon the same side--the _New York

Tribune_, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so

large a country can, a national importance. Broadly it may be said

that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the

Republicans--it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a

visit to Europe to vote for Frémont as President, and we know the views

of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin's fellow labourer Asa Gray. But

fashion and that better and quite different influence, the tone of

opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the

Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more

felt than among Washington politicians. A strong and respectable group

of Southern Senators, of whom Jefferson Davis was the strongest, were

the real driving power of the administration. Convivial President

Pierce and doting President Buchanan after him were complaisant to

their least scrupulous suggestions in a degree hardly credible of

honourable men who were not themselves Southerners.

One famous incident of life in Congress must be told to explain the

temper of the times. In 1856, during one of the many debates that

arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech

conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to

madness. Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude

beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked

every minor quality of greatness. He would not call his opponent in

debate a skunk, but he would expend great verbal ingenuity in coupling

his name with repeated references to that animal's attributes. On this

occasion he used to the full both the finer and the most exquisitely

tasteless qualities of his eloquence. This sort of thing passed the

censorship of many excellent Northern men who would lament Lincoln's

lack of refinement; and though from first to last the serious

provocation in their disputes lay in the set policy of the Southern

leaders, it ought to be realised that they, men who for the most part

were quite kind to their slaves and had long ago argued themselves out

of any compunction about slavery, were often exposed to intense verbal

provocation. Nevertheless, what followed on Sumner's speech is

terribly significant of the depravation of Southern honour.

Congressman Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, had an uncle in the

Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been

specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner's speech. A

day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his

desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly

rise. Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his

uncle, and in the presence, it seems, of Southern Senators who could

have stopped him, beat Sumner on the head with a stick with all his

might. Sumner was incapacitated by injuries to his spine for nearly

five years. Brooks, with a virtuous air, explained in Congress that he

had caught Sumner in a helpless attitude because if Sumner had been

free to use his superior strength he, Brooks, would have had to shoot

him with his revolver. It seems to be hardly an exaggeration to say

that the whole South applauded Brooks and exulted. Exuberant

Southerners took to challenging Northern men, knowing well that their

principles compelled them to refuse duels, but that the refusal would

still be humiliating to the North. Brooks himself challenged

Burlingame, a distinguished Congressman afterwards sent by Lincoln as

Minister to China, who had denounced him. Burlingame accepted, and his

second arranged for a rifle duel at a wild spot across the frontier at

Niagara. Brooks then drew back; he alleged, perhaps sincerely, that he

would have been murdered on his way through the Northern States, but

Northern people were a little solaced. The whole disgusting story

contains only one pleasant incident. Preston Brooks, who, after

numbers of congratulations, testimonials, and presentations, died

within a year of his famous exploit, had first confessed himself tired

of being a hero to every vulgar bully in the South!

Now, though this dangerous temper burned steadily in the South, and

there were always sturdy Republicans ready to provoke it, and questions

arising out of slavery would constantly recur to disturb high political

circles, it is not to be imagined that opinion in the North, the

growing and bustling portion of the States, would remain for years

excited about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1857 men's

minds were agitated by a great commercial depression and collapse of

credit, and in 1858 there took place one of the most curious (for it

would seem to have deserved this cold description) of evanescent

religious revivals. Meanwhile, by 1857 the actual bloodshed in Kansas

had come to an end under the administration of an able Governor; the

enormous majority of settlers in Kansas were now known to be against

slavery and it was probably assumed that the legalisation of slavery

could not be forced upon them. Prohibition of slavery there by

Congress thus began to seem needless, and the Dred Scott judgments

raised at least a grave doubt as to whether it was possible. Thus

enthusiasm for the original platform of the Republicans was cooling

down, and to the further embarrassment of that party, when towards the

end of 1857 the Southern leaders attempted a legislative outrage, the

great champion of the Northern protest was not a Republican, but

Douglas himself.

A Convention had been elected in Kansas to frame a State Constitution.

It represented only a fraction of the people, since, for some reason

good or bad, the opponents of slavery did not vote in the election.

But it was understood that whatever Constitution was framed would be

submitted to the popular vote. The Convention framed a Constitution

legalising slavery, and its proposals came before Congress backed by

the influence of Buchanan. Under them the people of Kansas were to

vote whether they would have this Constitution as it stood, or have it

with the legalisation of slavery restricted to the slaves who had then

been brought into the territory. No opportunity was to be given them

of rejecting the Constitution altogether, though Governor Walker,

himself in favor of slavery, assured the President that they wished to

do so. Ultimately, by way of concession to vehement resistance, the

majority in Congress passed an Act under which the people in Kansas

were to vote simply for or against the slavery Constitution as it

stood, only--if they voted for it, they as a State were to be rewarded

with a large grant of public lands belonging to the Union in their

territory. Eventually the Kansas people, unmoved by this bribe,

rejected the Constitution by a majority of more than 11,000 to 1,800.

Now, the Southern leaders, three years before, had eagerly joined with

Douglas to claim a right of free choice for the Kansas people. The

shamelessness of this attempt to trick them out of it is more

significant even than the tale of Preston Brooks. There was no hot

blood there; the affair was quietly plotted by respected leaders of the

South. They were men in many ways of character and honour, understood

by weak men like Buchanan to represent the best traditions of American

public life. But, as they showed also in other instances that cannot

be related here, slavery had become for them a sacred cause which

hallowed almost any means. It is essential to remember this in trying

to understand the then political situation.

Douglas here behaved very honourably. He, with his cause of popular

sovereignty, could not have afforded to identify himself with the fraud

on Kansas, but he was a good enough trickster to have made his protest

safely if he had cared to do so. As it was he braved the hatred of

Buchanan and the fury of his Southern friends by instant, manly,

courageous, and continued opposition. It may therefore seem an

ungracious thing that, immediately after this, Lincoln should have

accepted the invitation of his friends to oppose Douglas' re-election.

To most of the leading Republicans out of Illinois it seemed altogether

unwise and undesirable that their party, which had seemed to be losing

ground, should do anything but welcome Douglas as an ally. Of these

Seward indeed went too far for his friends, and in his sanguine hope

that it would work for freedom was ready to submit to the doctrine of

"popular sovereignty"; but, except the austere Chase, now Governor of

Ohio, who this once, but unfortunately not again, was whole-heartedly

with Lincoln, the Republican leaders in the East, and great Republican

journals, like the Tribune, declared their wish that Douglas should be

re-elected. Why, then, did Lincoln stand against him?

It has often been suggested that his personal feelings towards Douglas

played some part in the matter, though no one thinks they played the

chief part. Probably they did play a part, and it is a relief to think

that Lincoln thoroughly gratified some minor feelings in this contest.

Lincoln no doubt enjoyed measuring himself against other men; and it

was galling to his ambition to have been so completely outstripped by a

man inferior to him in every power except that of rapid success. He

had also the deepest distrust for Douglas as a politician, thinking

that he had neither principle nor scruple, though Herndon, who knew,

declares he neither distrusted nor had cause to distrust Douglas in his

professional dealings as a lawyer. He had, by the way, one definite,

if trifling, score to wipe off. After their joint debate at Peoria in

1855 Douglas, finding him hard to tackle, suggested to Lincoln that

they should both undertake to make no more speeches for the present.

Lincoln oddly assented at once, perhaps for no better reason than a

ridiculous difficulty, to which he once confessed, in refusing any

request whatever. Lincoln of course had kept this agreement strictly,

while Douglas had availed himself of the first temptation to break it.

Thus on all grounds we may be sure that Lincoln took pleasure in now

opposing Douglas. But to go further and say that the two men cordially

hated each other is probably to misread both. There is no necessary

connection between a keen desire to beat a man and any sort of

malignity towards him. That much at least may be learned in English

schools, and the whole history of his dealing with men shows that in

some school or other Lincoln had learned it very thoroughly. Douglas,

too, though an unscrupulous, was not, we may guess, an ungenerous man.

But the main fact of the matter is that Lincoln would have turned

traitor to his rooted convictions if he had not stood up and fought

Douglas even at this moment when Douglas was deserving of some

sympathy. Douglas, it must be observed, had simply acted on his

principle that the question between slavery and freedom was to be

settled by local, popular choice; he claimed for the white men of

Kansas the fair opportunity of voting; given that, he persistently

declared, "I do not care whether slavery be voted up or voted down."

In Lincoln's settled opinion this moral attitude of indifference to the

wrongfulness of slavery, so long as respect was had to the liberties of

the privileged race, was, so to say, treason to the basic principle of

the American Commonwealth, a treason which had steadily been becoming

rife and upon which it was time to stamp.

There can be no doubt of his earnestness about this. But the

Republican leaders, honourably enough, regarded this as an unpractical

line to take, and indeed to the political historian this is the most

crucial question in American history. Nobody can say that civil war

would or would not have occurred if this or that had been done a little

differently, but Abraham Lincoln, at this crisis of his life, did, in

pursuance of his peculiarly cherished principle, forge at least a link

in the chain of events which actually precipitated the war. And he did

it knowing better than any other man that he was doing something of

great national importance, involving at least great national risk. Was

he pursuing his principles, moderate as they were in the original

conception, with fanaticism, or at the best preferring a solemn

consistency of theory to the conscientious handling of facts not

reducible to theory? As a question of practical statesmanship in the

largest sense, how did matters really stand in regard to slavery and to

the relations between South and North, and what was Lincoln's idea of

"putting slavery back where the fathers placed it" really worth?

Herndon in these days went East to try to enlist the support of the

great men for Lincoln. He found them friendly but immovable. Editor

Horace Greeley said to him: "The Republican standard is too high; we

want something practical." This, we may be pretty sure, stiffened

Lincoln's back, as a man with a cause that he cared for, and, for that

matter, as a really shrewd manager in a party which he thought stood

for something. It reveals the flabbiness which the Northerners were in

danger of making a governing tradition of policy. The wrongfulness of

any extension of slavery might be loudly asserted in 1854, but in 1858,

when it no longer looked as if so great an extension of it was really

imminent, there was no harm in shifting towards some less provocative

principle on which more people at the moment might agree. Confronted

with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a

united South whose leaders were by now accustomed to make the Union

Government go which way they chose and had no sort of disposition to

compromise their principle in the least. "What," as Lincoln put it in

an address given, not long after his contest with Douglas, at the

Cooper Institute in New York, "what do you think will content the

South?" "Nothing," he answered, "but an acknowledgment that slavery is

right." "Holding as they do that slavery is morally right and socially

elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of

it, as a legal right and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably

withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong."

That being so, there was no use, he said, in "groping about for some

middle ground between right and wrong," or in "a policy of 'don't care'

on a question about which all true men do care." And there is ample

evidence that he understood rightly the policy of the South. It is

very doubtful whether any large extension of cultivation by slave

labour was economically possible in Kansas or in regions yet further

North, but we have seen to what lengths the Southern leaders would go

in the attempt to secure even a limited recognition of slavery as

lawful in a new State. They were not succeeding in the business of the

Kansas Constitution. But they had a very good prospect of a far more

important success. The celebrated dicta of Chief Justice Taney and

other judges in the Dred Scott case had not amounted to an actual

decision, nor if they had would a single decision have been

irreversible. Whether the principle of them should become fixed in

American Constitutional law depended (though this could not be openly

said) on whether future appointments to the Supreme Court were to be

made by a President who shared Taney's views; whether the executive

action of the President was governed by the same views; and on the

subtle pressure which outside opinion does exercise, and in this case

had surely exercised, upon judicial minds. If the simple principle

that the right to a slave is just one form of the ordinary right to

property once became firmly fixed in American jurisprudence it is hard

to see how any laws prohibiting slavery could have continued to be held

constitutional except in States which were free States when the

Constitution was adopted. Of course, a State like New York where

slaves were industrially useless would not therefore have been filled

with slave plantations, but, among a loyally minded people, the

tradition which reprobated slavery would have been greatly weakened.

The South would have been freed from the sense that slavery was a

doomed institution. If attempts to plant slavery further in the West

with profit failed, there was Cuba and there was Central America, on

which filibustering raids already found favour in the South, and in

which the national Government might be led to adopt schemes of conquest

or annexation. Moreover, it was avowed by leaders like Jefferson Davis

that though it might be impracticable to hope for the repeal of the

prohibition of the slave trade, at least some relaxation of its

severity ought to be striven for, in the interest of Texas and New

Mexico and of possible future Territories where there might be room for

more slaves. Such were the views of the leaders whose influence

preponderated with the present President and in the main with the

present Congress. When Lincoln judged that a determined stand against

their policy was required, and further that no such stand could be

possible to a party which had embraced Douglas with his principle, "I

care not whether slavery be voted up or voted down," there is no doubt

now that he was right and the great body of Republican authority

opposed to him wrong.

When Lincoln and his friends in Illinois determined to fight Douglas,

it became impossible for the Republican party as a whole to fall far

behind them. This was in itself at that crisis an important thing.

Lincoln added greatly to its importance by the opening words in the

first speech of his campaign. They were the most carefully prepared

words that he had yet spoken, and the most momentous that he had spoken

till now or perhaps ever spoke. There is nothing in them for which

what has been said of the situation and of his views will not have

prepared us, and nothing which thousands of men might not have said to

one another in private for a year or two before. But the first public

avowal by a responsible man in trenchant phrase, that a grave issue has

been joined upon which one party or the other must accept entire

defeat, may be an event of great and perilous consequence.

He said: "If we could first know where we are and whither we are

tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now

far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed

object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.

Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not

ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease

until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided

against itself cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure

permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be

dissolved--I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect that it

will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the

other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread

of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that

it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it

forward till it shall become lawful alike in all the States, old as

well as new--North as well as South."

It may perhaps be said that American public opinion has in the past

been very timid in facing clear-cut issues. But, as has already been

observed, an apt phrase crystallising the unspoken thought of many is

even more readily caught up in America than anywhere else; so, though

but few people in States at a distance paid much attention to the rest

of the debates, or for a while again to Lincoln, the comparison of the

house divided against itself produced an effect in the country which

did not wear out. In this whole passage, moreover, Lincoln had

certainly formulated the question before the nation more boldly, more

clearly, more truly than any one before. It is impossible to estimate

such influences precisely, but this was among the speeches that rank as

important actions, and the story, most characteristic of the speaker,

which lay behind it, is worth relating in detail. Lincoln had actually

in a speech in 1856 declared that the United States could not long

endure half slave and half free. "What in God's name," said some

friend after the meeting, "could induce you to promulgate such an

opinion?" "Upon my soul," he said, "I think it is true," and he could

not be argued out of this opinion. Finally the friend protested that,

true or not, no good could come of spreading this opinion abroad, and

after grave reflection Lincoln promised not to utter it again for the

present. Now, in 1858, having prepared his speech he read it to

Herndon. Herndon questioned whether the passage on the divided house

was politic. Lincoln said: "I would rather be defeated with this

expression in my speech, and uphold and discuss it before the people,

than be victorious without it." Once more, just before he delivered

it, he read it over to a dozen or so of his closest supporters, for it

was his way to discuss his intentions fully with friends, sometimes

accepting their advice most submissively and sometimes disregarding it

wholly. One said it was "ahead of its time," another that it was a

"damned fool utterance." All more or less strongly condemned it,

except this time Herndon, who, according to his recollection, said, "It

will make you President." He listened to all and then addressed them,

we are told, substantially as follows: "Friends, this thing has been

retarded long enough. The time has come when these sentiments should

be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this

speech, then let me go down linked to the truth--let me die in the

advocacy of what is just and right." Rather a memorable pronouncement

of a candidate to his committee; and the man who records it is

insistent upon every little illustration he can find both of Lincoln's

cunning and of his ambition.

Lincoln did go down in this particular contest. Many friends wrote and

reproved him after this "damned fool utterance," but his defeat was

not, after all, attributed to that. All the same he did himself assure

his defeat, and he did it with extraordinary skill, for the purpose of

ensuring that the next President should be a Republican President,

though it is impossible he should at that time have counted upon being

himself that Republican. Each candidate had undertaken to answer set

questions which his opponent might propound to him. And great public

attention was paid to the answers to these interrogatories. The Dred

Scott judgments created a great difficulty for Douglas; he was bound to

treat them as right; but if they were right and Congress had no power

to prohibit slavery in a Territory, neither could a Territorial

Legislature with authority delegated by Congress have that power; and,

if this were made clear, it would seem there was an end of that free

choice of the people in the Territories of which Douglas had been the

great advocate. Douglas would use all his evasive skill in keeping

away from this difficult point. If, however, he could be forced to

face it Lincoln knew what he would say. He would say that slavery

would not be actually unlawful in a Territory, but would never actually

exist in it if the Territorial Legislature chose to abstain, as it

could, from passing any of the laws which would in practice be

necessary to protect slave property. By advocating this view Douglas

would fully reassure those of his former supporters in Illinois who

puzzled themselves on the Dred Scott case, but he would infuriate the

South. Lincoln determined to force Douglas into this position by the

questions which he challenged him to answer. When he told his friends

of his ambition, they all told him he would lose his election.

"Gentlemen," said Lincoln, "I am killing larger game; if Douglas

answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a

hundred of this." The South was already angry with Douglas for his

action over the Kansas Constitution, but he would have been an

invincible candidate for the South to support in 1860, and it must have

told in his favour that his offence then had been one of plain honesty.

But in this fresh offence the Southern leaders had some cause to accuse

him of double dealing, and they swore he should not be President.

A majority of the new Illinois Legislature returned Douglas to the

Senate. Lincoln, however, had an actual majority of the votes of the

whole State. Probably also he had gained a hold on Illinois for the

future out of all proportion to the actual number of votes then given

against the popular Douglas, and above all he had gathered to him a

band of supporters who had unbounded belief in him. But his fall for

the moment was little noticed or regretted outside Illinois, or at any

rate in the great Eastern States, to which Illinois was, so to speak,

the provinces and he a provincial attorney. His first words in the

campaign had made a stir, but the rest of his speeches in these long

debates could not be much noticed at a distance. Douglas had won, and

the presumption was that he had proved himself the better man. Lincoln

had performed what, apart from results, was a work of intellectual

merit beyond the compass of any American statesman since Hamilton;

moreover, as can now be seen, there had been great results; for, first,

the young Republican party had not capitulated and collapsed, and,

then, the great Democratic party, established in power, in

indifference, and in complicity with wrong, was split clean in two.

But these were not results that could be read yet awhile in election

figures. Meanwhile the exhausted Lincoln reconciled himself for the

moment to failure. As a private man he was thoroughly content that he

could soon work off his debt for his election expenses, could earn

about 500 pounds a year, and be secure in the possession of the little

house and the 2,000 pounds capital which was "as much as any man ought

to have." As a public man he was sadly proud that he had at least

"said some words which may bear fruit after I am forgotten."

Persistent melancholy and incurable elasticity can go together, and

they make a very strong combination. The tone of resignation had not

passed away from his comparatively intimate letters when he was writing

little notes to one political acquaintance and another inciting them to

look forward to the fun of the next fight.

4. _John Brown_.

For the next few months the excitements of the great political world

concern this biography little. There was strife between Davis and

Douglas in the Senate. At a meeting strong against slavery, Seward

regained courage from the occasion and roused the North with grave and

earnest words about the "irrepressible conflict." The "underground

railway," or chain of friendly houses by which fugitive slaves were

stealthily passed on to Canada, became famous. Methodist professors

riotously attempted to rescue an arrested fugitive at Oberlin. A

Southern grand jury threw out the bill of indictment against a

slave-trading crew caught red-handed. In California Democrats

belonging to what was nicknamed "the chivalry" forced upon Senator

Broderick, a literally democratic Irishman and the bravest of the

Democrats who stood out for fair treatment to Kansas, a duel in which

he might fairly be said to have been murdered. The one event which

demands more than allusion was the raid and the death of John Brown.

John Brown, in whom Puritan religion, as strict as that of his

ancestors on the _Mayflower_, put forth gentler beauties of character

than his sanguinary mission may suggest, had been somewhat of a failure

as a scientific farmer, but as a leader of fighting men in desperate

adventure only such men as Drake or Garibaldi seem to have excelled

him. More particularly in the commotions in Kansas he had led forays,

slain ruthlessly, witnesses dry-eyed the deaths of several of his tall,

strong sons, and as a rule earned success by cool judgment--all, as he

was absolutely sure, at the clear call of God. In October, 1859--how

and with whose help the stroke was prepared seems to be a question of

some mystery--John Brown, gathering a little band of Abolitionists and

negroes, invaded the slave States and seized the United States arsenal

at Harper's Ferry in Virginia. In the details, which do not matter, of

this tiny campaign, John Brown seems, for the first time in his life,

to have blundered badly. This was the only thing that lay upon his

conscience towards the last. What manner of success he can have

expected does not appear; most likely he had neither care nor definite

expectation as to the result. The United States troops under Robert

Lee, soon to be famous, of course overcame him quickly. One of his

prisoners describes how he held out to the last; a dead son beside him;

one hand on the pulse of a dying son, his rifle in the other. He was

captured, desperately wounded. Southerners could not believe the fact

that Brown had not contemplated some hideous uprising of slaves against

their wives and children, but he only wished to conquer them with the

sword of the Lord and of Gideon, quietly freeing slaves as he went. So

naturally there was talk of lynching, but the Virginian gentlemen

concerned would not have that. Governor Wise, of Virginia, had some

talk with him and justified his own high character rather than Brown's

by the estimate he gave of him in a speech at Richmond. Brown was

hanged. "Stonewall" Jackson, a brother fanatic, if that is the word,

felt the spectacle "awful," as he never felt slaughter in battle, and

"put up a prayer that if possible Brown might be saved." "So perish

all foes of the human race," said the officer commanding on the

occasion, and the South generally felt the like.

A little before his death Brown was asked: "How do you justify your

acts?" He said: "I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong

against God and humanity--I say it without wishing to be offensive--and

it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as

to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I think I did

right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time

and at all times." In a conversation still later, he is reported to

have concluded: "I wish to say furthermore that you had better--all you

people at the South--prepare yourselves for a settlement of this

question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared

for it. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of

now. But this question is still to be settled--this negro question I

mean. The end of that is not yet." To a friend he wrote that he

rejoiced like Paul because he knew like Paul that "if they killed him,

it would greatly advance the cause of Christ."

Lincoln, who regarded lawlessness and slavery as twin evils, could only

say of John Brown's raid: "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 a people

till 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." Seward, it must

be recorded, spoke far more sympathetically of him than Lincoln; and

far more justly, for there is a flaw somewhere in this example, as his

chief biographer regards it, of "Mr. Lincoln's common-sense judgment."

John Brown had at least left to every healthy-minded Northern boy a

memory worth much in the coming years of war and, one hopes, ever

after. He had well deserved to be the subject of a song which,

whatever may be its technical merits as literature, does stir. Emerson

took the same view of him as the song writer, and Victor Hugo suggested

as an epitaph for him: "Pro Christo sicut Christus." A calmer poet,

Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Friday, December 2, 1859, the day

when Brown was hanged: "This will be a great day in our history, the

date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one. Even

now, as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in

Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves. This is sowing the wind to

reap the whirlwind, which will soon come."

Any one who is interested in Lincoln is almost forced to linger over

the contrasting though slighter character who crossed the stage just

before he suddenly took the principal part upon it. Men like John

Brown may be fitly ranked with the equally rare men who, steering a

very different course, have consistently acted out the principles of

the Quakers, constraining no man whether by violence or by law, yet

going into the thick of life prepared at all times to risk all. All

such men are abnormal in the sense that most men literally could not

put life through on any similar plan and would be wrong and foolish to

try. The reason is that most men have a wider range of sympathy and of

intellect than they. But the common sense of most of us revolts from

any attitude of condemnation or condescension towards them; for they

are more disinterested than most of us, more single-minded, and in

their own field often more successful. With a very clear conscience we

refuse to take example from these men whose very defects have operated

in them as a special call; but undoubtedly most of us regard them with

a warmth of sympathy which we are slow to accord to safer guides. We

turn now from John Brown, who saw in slavery a great oppression, and

was very angry, and went ahead slaying the nearest oppressor and

liberating--for some days at least--the nearest slave, to a patient

being, who, long ago in his youth, had boiled with anger against

slavery, but whose whole soul now expressed itself in a policy of

deadly moderation towards it: "Let us put back slavery where the

fathers placed it, and there let it rest in peace." We are to study

how he acted when in power. In almost every department of policy we

shall see him watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending

judgment, temporising, making trial of this expedient and of that,

adopting in the end, quite unthanked, the measure of which most men

will say, when it succeeds, "That is what we always said should be

done." Above all, in that point of policy which most interests us, we

shall witness the long postponement of the blow that killed negro

slavery, the steady subordination of this particular issue to what will

not at once appeal to us as a larger and a higher issue. All this

provoked at the time in many excellent and clever men dissatisfaction

and deep suspicion; they longed for a leader whose heart visibly glowed

with a sacred passion; they attributed his patience, the one quality of

greatness which after a while everybody might have discerned in him,

not to a self-mastery which almost passed belief, but to a tepid

disposition and a mediocre if not a low level of desire. We who read

of him to-day shall not escape our moments of lively sympathy with

these grumblers of the time; we shall wish that this man could ever

plunge, that he could ever see red, ever commit some passionate

injustice; we shall suspect him of being, in the phrase of a great

philosopher, "a disgustingly well-regulated person," lacking that

indefinable quality akin to the honest passions of us ordinary men, but

deeper and stronger, which alone could compel and could reward any true

reverence for his memory. These moments will recur but they cannot

last. A thousand little things, apparent on the surface but deeply

significant; almost every trivial anecdote of his boyhood, his prime,

or his closing years; his few recorded confidences; his equally few

speeches made under strong emotion; the lineaments of his face

described by observers whom photography corroborated; all these

absolutely forbid any conception of Abraham Lincoln as a worthy

commonplace person fortunately fitted to the requirements of his office

at the moment, or as merely a "good man" in the negative and

disparaging sense to which that term is often wrested. It is really

evident that there were no frigid perfections about him at all; indeed

the weakness of some parts of his conduct is so unlike what seems to be

required of a successful ruler that it is certain some almost

unexampled quality of heart and mind went to the doing of what he did.

There is no need to define that quality. The general wisdom of his

statesmanship will perhaps appear greater and its not infrequent errors

less the more fully the circumstances are appreciated. As to the man,

perhaps the sense will grow upon us that this balanced and calculating

person, with his finger on the pulse of the electorate while he cracked

his uncensored jests with all comers, did of set purpose drink and

refill and drink again as full and fiery a cup of sacrifice as ever was

pressed to the lips of hero or of saint.

5. _The Election of Lincoln_.

Unlooked-for events were now raising Lincoln to the highest place which

his ambition could contemplate. His own action in the months that

followed his defeat by Douglas cannot have contributed much to his

surprising elevation, yet it illustrates well his strength and his

weakness, his real fitness, now and then startlingly revealed, for the

highest position, and the superficial unfitness which long hid his

capacity from many acute contemporaries.

In December, 1859, he made a number of speeches in Kansas and elsewhere

in the West, and in February, 1860, he gave a memorable address in the

Cooper Institute in New York before as consciously intellectual an

audience as could be collected in that city, proceeding afterwards to

speak in several cities of New England. His appearance at the Cooper

Institute, in particular, was a critical venture, and he knew it.

There was natural curiosity about this untutored man from the West. An

exaggerated report of his wit prepared the way for probable

disappointment. The surprise which awaited his hearers was of a

different kind; they were prepared for a florid Western eloquence

offensive to ears which were used to a less spontaneous turgidity; they

heard instead a speech with no ornament at all, whose only beauty was

that it was true and that the speaker felt it. The single flaw in the

Cooper Institute speech has already been cited, the narrow view of

Western respectability as to John Brown. For the rest, this speech,

dry enough in a sense, is an incomparably masterly statement of the

then political situation, reaching from its far back origin to the

precise and definite question requiring decision at that moment. Mr.

Choate, who as a young man was present, set down of late years his

vivid recollection of that evening. "He appeared in every sense of the

word like one of the plain people among whom he loved to be counted.

At first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing about him; his

clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame; his face was of a dark

pallor without the slightest tinge of colour; his seamed and rugged

features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set eyes

looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave little evidence

of the brilliant power which raised him from the lowest to the highest

station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before the meeting he

seemed ill at ease." We know, as a fact, that among his causes of

apprehension, he was for the first time painfully conscious of those

clothes. "When he spoke," proceeds Mr. Choate, "he was transformed;

his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up

the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held his audience in the

hollow of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery were

severely simple. What Lowell called 'the grand simplicities of the

Bible,' with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse.

. . . It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere

self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all

meretricious arts, and found his way to the grandeur and strength of

absolute simplicity."

The newspapers of the day after this speech confirm these reverent

reminiscences. On this, his first introduction to the cultivated world

of the East, Lincoln's audience were at the moment and for the moment

conscious of the power which he revealed. The Cooper Institute speech

takes the plain principle that slavery is wrong, and draws the plain

inference that it is idle to seek for common ground with men who say it

is right. Strange but tragically frequent examples show how rare it is

for statesmen in times of crisis to grasp the essential truth so

simply. It is creditable to the leading men of New York that they

recognised a speech which just at that time urged this plain thing in

sufficiently plain language as a very great speech, and had an inkling

of great and simple qualities in the man who made it. It is not

specially discreditable that very soon and for a long while part of

them, or of those who were influenced by their report, reverted to

their former prejudices in regard to Lincoln. When they saw him thrust

by election managers into the Presidency, very few indeed of what might

be called the better sort believed, or could easily learn, that his

great qualities were great enough to compensate easily for the many

things he lacked. This specially grotesque specimen of the wild West

was soon seen not to be of the charlatan type; as a natural alternative

he was assumed to be something of a simpleton. Many intelligent men

retained this view of him throughout the years of his trial, and, only

when his triumph and tragic death set going a sort of Lincoln myth,

began to recollect that "I came to love and trust him even before I

knew him," or the like. A single speech like this at the Cooper

Institute might be enough to show a later time that Lincoln was a man

of great intellect, but it could really do little to prepare men in the

East for what they next heard of him.

Already a movement was afoot among his friends in Illinois to secure

his nomination for the Presidency at the Convention of the Republican

party which was to be held in Chicago in May. Before that Convention

could assemble it had become fairly certain that whoever might be

chosen as the Republican candidate would be President of the United

States, and signs were not wanting that he would be faced with grave

peril to the Union. For the Democratic party, which had met in

Convention at Charleston in April, had proceeded to split into two

sections, Northern and Southern. This memorable Convention was a

dignified assembly gathered in a serious mood in a city of some

antiquity and social charm. From the first, however, a latent

antipathy between the Northern and the Southern delegates made itself

felt. The Northerners, predisposed to a certain deference towards the

South and prepared to appreciate its graceful hospitality, experienced

an uneasy sense that they were regarded as social inferiors. Worse

trouble than this appeared when the Convention met for its first

business, the framing of the party platform. Whether the position

which Lincoln had forced Douglas to take up had precipitated this

result or not, dissension between Northern and Southern Democrats on

the subject of slavery had already manifested itself in Congress, and

in the party Convention the division became irreparable. Douglas, it

will be remembered, had started with the principle that slavery in the

Territories formed a question for the people of each territory to

decide; he had felt bound to accept the doctrine underlying the Dred

Scott judgments, according to which slavery was by the Constitution

lawful in all territories; pressed by Lincoln, he had tried to

reconcile his original position with this doctrine by maintaining that

while slavery was by the Constitution lawful in every Territory it was

nevertheless lawful for a Territorial Legislature to make slave-owning

practically impossible. In framing a declaration of the party

principles as to slavery the Southern delegates in the Democratic

Convention aimed at meeting this evasion. With considerable show of

logic they asserted, in the party platform which they proposed, not

merely the abstract rightfulness and lawfulness of slavery, but the

duty of Congress itself to make any provision that might be necessary

to protect it in the Territories. To this the Northern majority of the

delegates could not consent; they carried an amendment declaring merely

that they would abide by any decision of the Supreme Court as to

slavery. Thereupon the delegates, not indeed of the whole South but of

all the cotton-growing States except Georgia, withdrew from the

Convention. The remaining delegates were, under the rules of the

Convention, too few to select a candidate for the Presidency, and the

Convention adjourned, to re-assemble at Baltimore in June. Eventually,

after attempts at reunion and further dissensions, two separate

Democratic Conventions at Baltimore, a Northern and a Southern,

nominated, as their respective candidates, Stephen Douglas, the obvious

choice with whom, if the Southerners had cared to temporise further, a

united Democratic party could have swept the polls, and John C.

Breckinridge of Kentucky, a gentleman not otherwise known than as the

standard bearer on this great occasion of the undisguised and

unmitigated claims of the slave owners.

Thus it was that the American Democratic party forfeited power for

twenty-four years, divided between the consistent maintenance of a

paradox and the adroit maintenance of inconsistency. Another party in

this election demands a moment's notice. A Convention of delegates,

claiming to represent the old Whigs, met also at Baltimore and declared

merely that it stood for "the Constitution of the country, the union of

the States, and the enforcement of the laws." They nominated for the

Presidency John Bell of Tennessee, and for the Vice-Presidency Edward

Everett. This latter gentleman was afterwards chosen as the orator of

the day at the ceremony on the battlefield of Gettysburg when Lincoln's

most famous speech was spoken. He was a travelled man and a scholar;

he was Secretary of State for a little while under Fillmore, and dealt

honestly and firmly with the then troublous question of Cuba. His

orations deserve to be looked at, for they are favourable examples of

the eloquence which American taste applauded, and as such they help to

show how original Lincoln was in the simpler beauty of his own simpler

diction. In justice to the Whigs, let it be noted that they declared

for the maintenance of the Union, committing themselves with decision

on the question of the morrow; but it was a singular platform that

resolutely and totally ignored the only issue of the day. Few

politicians can really afford to despise either this conspicuously

foolish attempt to overcome a difficulty by shutting one's eyes to it,

or the more plausible proposal of the Northern Democrats to continue

temporising with a movement for slavery in which they were neither bold

enough nor corrupted enough to join. The consequences, now known to

us, of a determined stand against the advance of slavery were

instinctively foreseen by these men, and they cannot be blamed for

shrinking from them. Yet the historian now, knowing that those

consequences exceeded in terror all that could have been foreseen, can

only agree with the judgment expressed by Lincoln in one of his Kansas

speeches: "We want and must have a national policy as to slavery which

deals with it as being a wrong. Whoever would prevent slavery becoming

national and perpetual yields all when he yields to a policy which

treats it either as being right, or as being a matter of indifference."

The Republican party had been founded upon just this opinion.

Electoral victory was now being prepared for it, not because a majority

was likely yet to take so resolute a view, but because its effective

opponents were divided between those who had gone the length of calling

slavery right and those who strove to treat it as indifferent. The

fate of America may be said to have depended in the early months of

1860 on whether the nominee of the Republican party was a man who would

maintain its principles with irresolution, or with obstinacy, or with

firm moderation.

When it had first been suggested to Lincoln in the course of 1859 that

he might be that nominee he said, "I do not think myself fit for the

Presidency." This was probably his sincere opinion at the moment,

though perhaps the moment was one of dejection. In any case his

opinion soon changed, and though it is not clear whether he encouraged

his friends to bring his name forward, we know in a general way that

when they decided to do so he used every effort of his own to help

them. We must accept without reserve Herndon's reiterated assertion

that Lincoln was intensely ambitious; and, if ambition means the eager

desire for great opportunities, the depreciation of it, which has long

been a commonplace of literature, and which may be traced back to the

Epicureans, is a piece of cant which ought to be withdrawn from

currency, and ambition, commensurate with the powers which each man can

discover in himself, should be frankly recognised as a part of

Christian duty. In judging him to be the best man for the Presidency,

Lincoln's Illinois friends and he himself formed a very sensible

judgment, but they did so in flagrant contradiction to many superficial

appearances. This candidate for the chief magistracy at a critical

time of one of the great nations of the world had never administered

any concern much larger than that post office that he once "carried

around in his hat." Of the several other gentlemen whose names were

before the party there was none who might not seem greatly to surpass

him in experience of affairs. To one of them, Seward, the nomination

seemed to belong almost of right. Chase and Seward both were known and

dignified figures in that great assembly the Senate. Chase was of

proved rectitude and courage, Seward of proved and very considerable

ability. Chase had been Governor of Ohio, Seward of New York State;

and the position of Governor in a State--a State it must be remembered

is independent in almost the whole of what we call domestic

politics--is strictly analogous to the position of President in the

Union, and, especially in a great State, is the best training ground

for the Presidency. But beyond this, Seward, between whom and Lincoln

the real contest lay, had for some time filled a recognised though

unofficial position as the leader of his party. He had failed, as has

been seen in his dealings with Douglas, in stern insistence upon

principle, but the failure was due rather to his sanguine and hopeful

temper than to lack of courage. On the whole from the time when he

first stood up against Webster in the discussions of 1850, when Lincoln

was both silent and obscure, he had earned his position well.

Hereafter, as Lincoln's subordinate, he was to do his country

first-rate service, and to earn a pure fame as the most generously

loyal subordinate to a chief whom he had thought himself fit to

command. We happen to have ample means of estimating now all Lincoln's

Republican competitors; we know that none of the rest were equal to

Seward; and we know that Seward himself, if he had had his way, would

have brought the common cause to ruin. Looking back now at the

comparison which Lincoln, when he entered into the contest, must have

drawn between himself and Seward--for of the rest we need not take

account--we can see that to himself at least and some few in Illinois

he had now proved his capacities, and that in Seward's public record,

more especially in his attitude towards Douglas, he had the means of

measuring Seward. In spite of the far greater experience of the latter

he may have thought himself to be his superior in that indefinable

thing--the sheer strength of a man. Not only may he have thought this;

he must have known it. He had shown his grasp of the essential facts

when he forced the Republican party to do battle with Douglas and the

party of indifference; he showed the same now when, after long years of

patience and self-discipline, he pushed himself into Seward's place as

the Republican leader.

All the same, what little we know of the methods by which he now helped

his own promotion suggests that the people who then and long after set

him down as a second-rate person may have had a good deal to go upon.

A kind friend has produced a letter which he wrote in March, 1860, to a

Kansas gentleman who desired to be a delegate to the Republican

Convention, and who offered, upon condition, to persuade his fellow

delegates from Kansas to support Lincoln. Here is the letter: "As to

your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I cannot enter the ring on

the money basis--first because in the main it is wrong; and secondly I

have not and cannot get the money. I say in the main the use of money

is wrong; but for certain objects in a political contest the use of

some is both right and indispensable. With me, as with yourself, this

long struggle has been one of great pecuniary loss. I now distinctly

say this: If you shall be appointed a delegate to Chicago I will

furnish one hundred dollars to bear the expenses of the trip." The

Kansas gentleman failed to obtain the support of the Kansas delegates

as a body for Lincoln. Lincoln none the less held to his promise of a

hundred dollars if the man came to Chicago; and, having, we are

assured, much confidence in him, took the earliest opportunity of

appointing him to a lucrative office, besides consulting him as to

other appointments in Kansas. This is all that we know of the affair,

but our informant presents it as one of a number of instances in which

Lincoln good-naturedly trusted a man too soon, and obstinately clung to

his mistake. As to the appointment, the man had evidently begun by

soliciting money in a way which would have marked him to most of us as

a somewhat unsuitable candidate for any important post; and the payment

of the hundred dollars plainly transgresses a code both of honour and

of prudence which most politicians will recognise and which should not

need definition. To say, as Lincoln probably said to himself, that

there is nothing intrinsically wrong in a moderate payment for expenses

to a fellow worker in a public cause, whom you believe to have

sacrificed much, is to ignore the point, indeed several points.

Lincoln, hungry now for some success in his own unrewarded career, was

tempted to a small manoeuvre by which he might pick up a little

support; he was at the same time tempted, no less, to act generously

(according to his means) towards a man who, he readily believed, had

made sacrifices like his own. He was not the man to stand against this

double temptation.

Petty lapses of this order, especially when the delinquent may be seen

to hesitate and excuse himself, are more irritating than many larger

and more brazen offences, for they give us the sense of not knowing

where we are. When they are committed by a man of seemingly strong and

high character, it is well to ask just what they signify. Some of the

shrewdest observers of Lincoln, friendly and unfriendly, concur in

their description of the weaknesses of which this incident may serve as

the example, weaknesses partly belonging to his temperament, but partly

such as a man risen from poverty, with little variety of experience and

with no background of home training, stands small chance of escaping.

For one thing his judgment of men and how to treat them was as bad in

some ways as it was good in others. His own sure grasp of the largest

and commonest things in life, and his sober and measured trust in human

nature as a whole, gave him a rare knowledge of the mind of the people

in the mass. So, too, when he had known a man long, or been with him

or against him in important transactions, he sometimes developed great

insight and sureness of touch; and, when the man was at bottom

trustworthy, his robust confidence in him was sometimes of great public

service. But he had no gift of rapid perception and no instinctive

tact or prudence in regard to the very numerous and very various men

with whom he had slight dealings on which he could bestow no thought.

This is common with men who have risen from poverty; if they have not

become hard and suspicious, they are generally obtuse to the minor

indications by which shrewd men of education know the impostor, and

they are perversely indulgent to little meannesses in their fellows

which they are incapable of committing themselves. In Lincoln this was

aggravated by an immense good-nature--as he confessed, he could hardly

say "no";--it was an obstinate good-nature, which found a naughty

pleasure in refusing to be corrected; and if it should happen that the

object of his weak benevolence had given him personal cause of offence,

the good-nature became more incorrigible than ever. Moreover,

Lincoln's strength was a slow strength, shown most in matters in which

elementary principles of right or the concentration of intense thought

guided him. Where minor and more subtle principles of conduct should

have come in, on questions which had not come within the range of his

reflection so far and to which, amidst his heavy duties, he could not

spare much cogitation, he would not always show acute perception, and,

which is far worse, he would often show weakness of will. The present

instance may be ever so trifling, yet it does relate to the indistinct

and dangerous borderland of political corruption. It need arouse no

very serious suspicions. Mr. Herndon, whose pertinacious researches

unearthed that Kansas gentleman's correspondence, and who is keenly

censorious of Lincoln's fault, in the upshot trusts and reveres

Lincoln. And the massive testimony of his keenest critics to his

honesty quite decides the matter. But Lincoln had lived in a simple

Western town, not in one of the already polluted great cities; he was a

poor man himself and took the fact that wealth was used against him as

a part of the inevitable drawbacks of his lot; and it is certain that

he did not clearly take account of the whole business of corruption and

jobbery as a hideous and growing peril to America. It is certain too

that he lacked the delicate perception of propriety in such matters, or

the strict resolution in adhering to it on small occasions, which might

have been possessed by a far less honest man. The severest criticisms

which Lincoln afterwards incurred were directed to the appointments

which he made; we shall see hereafter that he had very solid reasons

for his general conduct in such matters; but it cannot be said with

conviction that he had that horror of appointment on other grounds than

merit which enlightens, though it does not always govern, more educated

statesmen. His administration would have been more successful, and the

legacy he left to American public life more bountiful, if his

traditions, or the length of his day's work, had allowed him to be more

careful in these things. As it is he was not commended to the people

of America and must not be commended to us by the absence of defects as

a ruler or as a man, but by the qualities to which his defects

belonged. An acute literary man wrote of Lincoln, when he had been

three years in office, these remarkable words: "You can't help feeling

an interest in him, a sympathy and a kind of pity; feeling, too, that

he has some qualities of great value, yet fearing that his weak points

may wreck him or may wreck something. His life seems a series of wise,

sound conclusions, slowly reached, oddly worked out, on great questions

with constant failures in administration of detail and dealings with

individuals." It was evidently a clever man who wrote this; he would

have been a wise man if he had known that the praise he was bestowing

on Lincoln was immeasurably greater than the blame.

So the natural prejudice of those who welcomed Lincoln as a prophet in

the Cooper Institute but found his candidature for the Presidency

ridiculous, was not wholly without justification. His partisans,

however--also not unjustly--used his humble origin for all it was

worth. The Republicans of Illinois were assembled at Decatur in

preparation for the Chicago Convention, when, amid tumultuous cheers,

there marched in old John Hanks and another pioneer bearing on their

shoulders two long fence rails labelled: "Two rails from a lot made by

Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom in the year

1830." "Gentlemen," said Lincoln, in response to loud calls, "I

suppose you want to know something about those things. Well, the truth

is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom. I don't

know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don't think they

are a credit to the makers. But I do know this: I made rails then, and

I think I could make better ones than these now." It is unnecessary to

tell of the part those rails were to play in the coming campaign. It

is a contemptible trait in books like that able novel "Democracy," that

they treat the sentiment which attached to the "Rail-splitter" as

anything but honourable.

The Republican Convention met at Chicago in circumstances of far less

dignity than the Democratic Convention at Charleston. Processions and

brass bands, rough fellows collected by Lincoln's managers, rowdies

imported from New York by Seward's, filled the streets with noise; and

the saloon keepers did good business. Yet the actual Convention

consisted of grave men in an earnest mood. Besides Seward and Chase

and Lincoln, Messrs. Cameron of Pennsylvania and Bates of Missouri, of

whom we shall hear later, were proposed for the Presidency. So also

were Messrs. Dayton and Collamer, politicians of some repute; and

McLean, of the Supreme Court, had some supporters. The prevalent

expectation in the States was that Seward would easily secure the

nomination, but it very soon appeared in the Convention that his

opponents were too strong for that. Several ballots took place; there

were the usual conferences and bargainings, which probably affected the

result but little; Lincoln's managers, especially Judge David Davis,

afterwards of the Supreme Court, were shrewd people; Lincoln had

written to them expressly that they could make no bargain binding on

him, but when Cameron was clearly out of the running they did promise

Cameron's supporters a place in Lincoln's Cabinet, and a similar

promise was made for one Caleb Smith. The delegates from Pennsylvania

went on to Lincoln; then those of Ohio; and before long his victory was

assured. A Committee of the Convention, some of them sick at heart,

was sent to bear the invitation to Lincoln. He received them in his

little house with a simple dignity which one of them has recorded; and

as they came away one said, "Well, we might have chosen a handsomer

article, but I doubt whether a better."

On the whole, if we can put aside the illusion which besets us, who

read the preceding history if at all in the light of Lincoln's

speeches, and to whom his competitors are mere names, this was the most

surprising nomination ever made in America. Other Presidential

candidates have been born in poverty, but none ever wore the scars of

poverty so plainly; others have been intrinsically more obscure, but

these have usually been chosen as bearing the hall-mark of eminent

prosperity or gentility. Lincoln had indeed at this time displayed

brilliant ability in the debates with Douglas, and he had really shown

a statesman's grasp of the situation more than any other Republican

leader. The friends in Illinois who put him forward--men like David

Davis, who was a man of distinction himself--did so from a true

appreciation of his powers. But this does not seem to have been the

case with the bulk of the delegates from other States. The explanation

given us of their action is curious. The choice was not the result of

merit; on the other hand, it was not the work of the ordinary wicked

wire-puller, for what may be called the machine was working for Seward.

The choice was made by plain representative Americans who set to

themselves this question: "With what candidate can we beat Douglas?"

and who found the answer in the prevalence of a popular impression,

concerning Lincoln and Seward, which was in fact wholly mistaken.

There was, it happens, earnest opposition to Seward among some Eastern

Republicans on the good ground that he was a clean man but with

doubtful associates. This opposition could not by itself have defeated

him. What did defeat him was his reputation at the moment as a very

advanced Republican who would scare away the support of the weaker

brethren. He was, for instance, the author of the alarming phrase

about "irrepressible conflict," and he had spoken once, in a phrase

that was misinterpreted, about "a higher law than the Constitution."

Lincoln had in action taken a far stronger line than Seward; he was

also the author of the phrase about the house divided against itself;

but then, besides the fact that Lincoln was well regarded just where

Douglas was most popular, Lincoln was a less noted man than Seward and

his stronger words occasioned less wide alarm. So, to please those who

liked compromise, the Convention rejected a man who would certainly

have compromised, and chose one who would give all that moderation

demanded and die before he yielded one further inch. Many Americans

have been disposed to trace in the raising up of Lincoln the hand of a

Providence protecting their country in its worst need. It would be

affectation to set their idea altogether aside; it is, at any rate, a

memorable incident in the history of a democracy, permeated with

excellent intentions but often hopelessly subject to inferior

influences, that at this critical moment the fit man was chosen on the

very ground of his supposed unfitness.

The result of the contest between the four Presidential candidates was

rendered almost a foregone conclusion by the decision of the Democrats.

Lincoln in deference to the usual and seemly procedure took no part in

the campaign, nor do his doings in the next months concern us. Seward,

to his great honour, after privately expressing his bitter chagrin at

the bestowal of what was his due upon "a little Illinois attorney,"

threw himself whole-heartedly into the contest, and went about making

admirable speeches. On the night of November 6, Lincoln sat alone with

the operator in the telegraph box at Springfield, receiving as they

came in the results of the elections of Presidential electors in the

various States. Long before the returns were complete his knowledge of

such matters made him sure of his return, and before he left that box

he had solved in principle, as he afterwards declared, the first and by

no means least important problem of his Presidency, the choice of a

Cabinet.

The victory was in one aspect far from complete. If we look not at the

votes in the Electoral College with which the formal choice of

President lay, but at the popular votes by which the electors were

returned, we shall see that the new President was elected by a minority

of the American people. He had a large majority over Douglas, but if

Douglas had received the votes which were given for the Southern

Democrat, Breckinridge, he would have had a considerable majority over

Lincoln, though the odd machinery of the Electoral College would still

have kept him out of the Presidency. In another aspect it was a

fatally significant victory. Lincoln's votes were drawn only from the

Northern States; he carried almost all the free States and he carried

no others. For the first time in American history, the united North

had used its superior numbers to outvote the South. This would in any

case have caused great vexation, and the personality of the man chosen

by the North aggravated it. The election of Lincoln was greeted

throughout the South with a howl of derision.