I
SLAVERY AND AMERICAN NATIONALITY
Both the Whig and the Democratic parties betrayed the insufficiency of
their ideas by their behavior towards the problem of slavery. Hitherto I
have refrained from comment on the effect which the institution of
slavery was coming to have upon American politics because the increasing
importance of slavery, and of the resulting anti-slavery agitation,
demand for the purpose of this book special consideration. Such a
consideration must now be undertaken. The bitter personal and partisan
controversies of the Whigs and the Democrats were terminated by the
appearance of a radical and a perilous issue; and in the settlement of
this question the principles of both of these parties, in the manner in
which they had been applied, were of no vital assistance.
The issue was created by the legal existence in the United States of an
essentially undemocratic institution. The United States was a democracy,
and however much or little this phrase means, it certainly excludes any
ownership of one man by another. Yet this was just what the Constitution
sanctioned. Its makers had been confronted by the legal existence of
slavery in nearly all of the constituent states; and a refusal to
recognize the institution would have resulted in the failure of the
whole scheme of Constitutional legislation. Consequently they did not
seek to forbid negro servitude; and inasmuch as it seemed at that time
to be on the road to extinction through the action of natural causes,
the makers of the Constitution had a good excuse for refusing to
sacrifice their whole project to the abolition of slavery, and in
throwing thereby upon the future the burden of dealing with it in some
more radical and consistent way. Later, however, it came to pass that
slavery, instead of being gradually extinguished by economic causes, was
fastened thereby more firmly than ever upon one section of the country.
The whole agricultural, political, and social life of the South became
dominated by the existence of negro slavery; and the problem of
reconciling the expansion of such an institution with the logic of our
national idea was bound to become critical. Our country was committed by
every consideration of national honor and moral integrity to make its
institutions thoroughly democratic, and it could not continue to permit
the aggressive legal existence of human servitude without degenerating
into a glaring example of political and moral hypocrisy.
The two leading political parties deliberately and persistently sought
to evade the issue. The Western pioneers were so fascinated with the
vision of millions of pale-faced democrats, leading free and prosperous
lives as the reward for virtuously taking care of their own business,
that the Constitutional existence of negro slavery did not in the least
discommode them. Disunionism they detested and would fight to the end;
but to waste valuable time in bothering about a perplexing and an
apparently irremediable political problem was in their eyes the worst
kind of economy. They were too optimistic and too superficial to
anticipate any serious trouble in the Promised Land of America; and they
were so habituated to inconsistent and irresponsible political thinking,
that they attached no importance to the moral and intellectual turpitude
implied by the existence of slavery in a democratic nation. The
responsibility of the Whigs for evading the issue is more serious than
that of the Democrats. Their leaders were the trained political thinkers
of their generation. They were committed by the logic of their party
platform to protect the integrity of American national life and to
consolidate its organization. But the Whigs, almost as much as the
Democrats, refused to take seriously the legal existence of slavery.
They shirked the problem whenever they could and for as long as they
could; and they looked upon the men who persisted in raising it aloft as
perverse fomenters of discord and trouble. The truth is, of course, that
both of the dominant parties were merely representing the prevailing
attitude towards slavery of American public opinion. That attitude was
characterized chiefly by moral and intellectual cowardice. Throughout
the whole of the Middle Period the increasing importance of negro
servitude was the ghost in the house of the American democracy. The
good Americans of the day sought to exorcise the ghost by many amiable
devices. Sometimes they would try to lock him up in a cupboard;
sometimes they would offer him a soothing bribe; more often they would
be content with shutting their eyes and pretending that he was not
present. But in proportion as he was kindly treated he persisted in
intruding, until finally they were obliged to face the alternative,
either of giving him possession of the house or taking possession of it
themselves.
Foreign commentators on American history have declared that a peaceable
solution of the slavery question was not beyond the power of wise and
patriotic statesmanship. This may or may not be true. No solution of the
problem could have been at once final and peaceable, unless it provided
for the ultimate extinction of slavery without any violation of the
Constitutional rights of the Southern states; and it may well be that
the Southern planters could never have been argued or persuaded into
abolishing an institution which they eventually came to believe was a
righteous method of dealing with an inferior race. Nobody can assert
with any confidence that they could have been brought by candid,
courageous, and just negotiation and discussion into a reasonable frame
of mind; but what we do know and can assert is that during the three
decades from 1820 to 1850, the national political leaders made
absolutely no attempt to deal resolutely, courageously, or candidly with
the question. On those occasions when it _would_ come to the surface,
they contented themselves and public opinion with meaningless
compromises. It would have been well enough to frame compromises suited
to the immediate occasion, provided the problem of ultimately
extinguishing slavery without rending the Union had been kept
persistently on the surface of political discussion: but the object of
these compromises was not to cure the disease, but merely to allay its
symptoms. They would not admit that slavery was a disease; and in the
end this habit of systematic drifting and shirking on the part of
moderate and sensible men threw the national responsibility upon
Abolitionist extremists, in whose hands the issue took such a distorted
emphasis that gradually a peaceable preservation of American national
integrity became impossible.
The problem of slavery was admirably designed to bring out the confusion
of ideas and the inconsistency resident in the traditional American
political system. The groundwork of that system consisted, as we have
seen, in the alliance between democracy, as formulated in the
Jeffersonian creed, and American nationality, as embodied in the
Constitutional Union; and the two dominant political parties of the
Middle Period, the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats, both believed in
the necessity of such an alliance. But negro slavery, just in so far as
it became an issue, tended to make the alliance precarious. The national
organization embodied in the Constitution authorized not only the
existence of negro slavery, but its indefinite expansion. American
democracy, on the other hand, as embodied in the Declaration of
Independence and in the spirit and letter of the Jeffersonian creed, was
hostile from certain points of view to the institution of negro slavery.
Loyalty to the Constitution meant disloyalty to democracy, and an active
interest in the triumph of democracy seemed to bring with it the
condemnation of the Constitution. What, then, was a good American to do
who was at once a convinced democrat and a loyal Unionist?
The ordinary answer to this question was, of course, expressed in the
behavior of public opinion during the Middle Period. The thing to do was
to shut your eyes to the inconsistency, denounce anybody who insisted on
it as unpatriotic, and then hold on tight to both horns of the dilemma.
Men of high intelligence, who really loved their country, and believed
in the democratic idea, persisted in this attitude, whose ablest and
most distinguished representative was Daniel Webster. He is usually
considered as the most eloquent and effective expositor of American
nationalism who played an important part during the Middle Period; and
unquestionably he came nearer to thinking nationally than did any
American statesman of his generation. He defended the Union against the
Nullifiers as decisively in one way as Jackson did in another. Jackson
flourished his sword, while Webster taught American public opinion to
consider the Union as the core and the crown of the American political
system. His services in giving the Union a more impressive place in the
American political imagination can scarcely be over-estimated. Had the
other Whig leaders joined him in refusing to compromise with the
Nullifiers and in strengthening by legislation the Federal government
as an expression of an indestructible American national unity, a
precedent might have been established which would have increased the
difficulty of a subsequent secessionist outbreak. But Henry Clay
believed in compromises (particularly when his own name was attached to
them) as the very substance of a national American policy; and Webster
was too much of a Presidential candidate to travel very far on a lonely
path. Moreover, there was a fundamental weakness in Webster's own
position, which was gradually revealed as the slavery crisis became
acute. He could be bold and resolute, when defending a nationalistic
interpretation of the Constitution against the Nullifiers or the
Abolitionists; but when the slaveholders themselves became aggressive in
policy and separatist in spirit, the courage of his convictions deserted
him. If an indubitably Constitutional institution, such as slavery,
could be used as an ax with which to hew at the trunk of the
Constitutional tree, his whole theory of the American system was
undermined, and he could speak only halting and dubious words. He was as
much terrorized by the possible consequences of any candid and
courageous dealing with the question as were the prosperous business men
of the North; and his luminous intelligence shed no light upon a
question, which evaded his Constitutional theories, terrified his will,
and clouded the radiance of his patriotic visions.
The patriotic formula, of which Webster was the ablest and most eloquent
expositor, was fairly torn to pieces by the claws of the problem of
slavery. The formula triumphantly affirmed the inseparable relation
between individual liberty and the preservation of the Federal Union;
but obviously such a formula could have no validity from the point of
view of a Southerner. The liberties which men most cherish are those
which are guaranteed to them by law--among which one of the most
important from the Southerner's point of view was the right to own negro
bondsmen. As soon as it began to appear that the perpetuation of the
Union threatened this right, they were not to be placated with any
glowing proclamation about the inseparability of liberty in general from
an indestructible union. From the standpoint of their own most cherished
rights, they could put up a very strong argument on behalf of disunion;
and they had as much of the spirit of the Constitution on their side as
had their opponents. That instrument was intended not only to give legal
form to the Union of the American commonwealths and the American people,
but also to guarantee certain specified rights and liberties. If, on the
one hand, negro slavery undermined the moral unity and consequently the
political integrity of the American people, and if on the other, the
South stubbornly insisted upon its legal right to property in negroes,
the difficulty ran too deep to be solved by peaceable Constitutional
means. The legal structure of American nationality became a house
divided against itself, and either the national principle had to be
sacrificed to the Constitution or the Constitution to the national
principle.
The significance of the whole controversy does not become clear, until
we modify Webster's formula about the inseparability of liberty and
union, and affirm in its place the inseparability of American
nationality and American democracy. The Union had come to mean something
more to the Americans of the North than loyalty to the Constitution. It
had come to mean devotion to a common national idea,--the idea of
democracy; and while the wiser among them did not want to destroy the
Constitution for the benefit of democracy, they insisted that the
Constitution should be officially stigmatized as in this respect an
inadequate expression of the national idea. American democracy and
American nationality are inseparably related, precisely because
democracy means very much more than liberty or liberties, whether
natural or legal, and nationality very much more than an indestructible
legal association. Webster's formula counseled an evasion of the problem
of slavery. From his point of view it was plainly insoluble. But an
affirmation of an inseparable relationship between American nationality
and American democracy would just as manifestly have demanded its
candid, courageous, and persistent agitation.
The slavery question, when it could no longer be avoided, gradually
separated the American people into five different political parties or
factions--the Abolitionists, the Southern Democrats, the Northern
Democrats, the Constitutional Unionists, and the Republicans. Each of
these factions selected one of the several alternative methods of
solution or evasion, to which the problem of negro slavery could be
reduced, and each deserves its special consideration.
Of the five alternatives, the least substantial was that of the
Constitutional Unionists. These well-meaning gentlemen, composed for the
most part of former Whigs, persisted in asserting that the Constitution
was capable of solving every political problem generated under its
protection; and this assertion, in the teeth of the fact that the Union
had been torn asunder by means of a Constitutional controversy, had
become merely an absurdity. Up to 1850 the position of such
Constitutional Unionists as Webster and Clay could be plausibly
defended; but after the failure of that final compromise, it was plain
that a man of any intellectual substance must seek support for his
special interpretation of the Constitution by means of a special
interpretation of the national idea. That slavery was Constitutional
nobody could deny, any more than they could deny the Constitutionality
of anti-slavery agitation. The real question, to which the controversy
had been reduced, had become, Is slavery consistent with the principle
which constitutes the basis of American national integrity--the
principle of democracy?
Each of the four other factions answered this question in a different
way; and every one of these answers was derived from different aspects
of the system of traditional American ideas. The Abolitionists believed
that a democratic state, which ignored the natural rights proclaimed by
the Declaration of Independence, was a piece of organized political
hypocrisy,--worthy only of destruction. The Southerners believed that
democracy meant above all the preservation of recognized Constitutional
rights in property of all kinds, and freedom from interference in the
management of their local affairs. The Northern Democrats insisted just
as strenuously as the South on local self-government, and tried to erect
it into the constituent principle of democracy; but they were loyal to
the Union and would not admit either that slavery could be nationalized,
or that secession had any legal justification. Finally the Republicans
believed with the Abolitionists that slavery was wrong; while they
believed with the Northern Democrats that the Union must be preserved;
and it was their attempt to de-nationalize slavery as undemocratic and
at the same time to affirm the indestructibility of the Union, which
proved in the end to be salutary.
Surely never was there a more distressing example of confusion of
thought in relation to a "noble national theory." The traditional
democratic system of ideas provoked fanatical activity on the part of
the Abolitionists, as the defenders of "natural rights," a kindred
fanaticism in the Southerners as the defenders of legal rights, and
moral indifference and lethargy on the part of the Northern Democrat for
the benefit of his own local interests. The behavior of all three
factions was dictated by the worship of what was called liberty; and the
word was as confidently and glibly used by Calhoun and Davis as it was
by Garrison, Webster, and Douglas. The Western Democrat, and indeed the
average American, thought of democratic liberty chiefly as individual
freedom from legal discrimination and state interference in doing some
kind of a business. The Abolitionist was even more exclusively
preoccupied with the liberty which the Constitution denied to the negro.
The Southerners thought only of the Constitutional rights, which the
Abolitionists wished to abolish, and the Republicans to restrict. Each
of the contending parties had some justification in dwelling exclusively
upon the legal or natural rights, in which they were most interested,
because the system of traditional American ideas provided no positive
principle, in relation to which these conflicting liberties could be
classified and valued. It is in the nature of liberties and rights,
abstractly considered, to be insubordinate and to conflict both one with
another and, perhaps, with the common weal. If the chief purpose of a
democratic political system is merely the preservation of such rights,
democracy becomes an invitation to local, factional, and individual
ambitions and purposes. On the other hand, if these Constitutional and
natural rights are considered a temporary philosophical or legal
machinery, whereby a democratic society is to reach a higher moral and
social consummation, and if the national organization is considered
merely as an effective method of keeping the legal and moral machinery
adjusted to the higher democratic purpose, then no individual or faction
or section could claim the benefit of a democratic halo for its
distracting purposes and ambitions. Instead of subordinating these
conflicting rights and liberties to the national idea, and erecting the
national organization into an effective instrument thereof, the national
idea and organization was subordinated to individual local and factional
ideas and interests. No one could or would recognize the constructive
relation between the democratic purpose and the process of national
organization and development. The men who would rend the national body
in order to protect their property in negro slaves could pretend to be
as good democrats as the men who would rend in order to give the negro
his liberty. And if either of these hostile factions had obtained its
way, the same disastrous result would have been accomplished. American
national integrity would have been destroyed, and slavery on American
soil, in a form necessarily hostile to democracy, would have been
perpetuated.
II
SLAVERY AS A DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION
I have already suggested that it was the irresponsibility and the
evasions of the party politicians, which threw upon the Abolitionists
the duty of fighting slavery as an undemocratic institution. They took
up the cause of the negro in a spirit of religious self-consecration.
The prevalence of irresolution and timidity in relation to slavery among
the leaders of public opinion incited the Abolitionists to a high degree
of courage and exclusive devotion; and unfortunately, also, the
conciliating attitude of the official leaders encouraged on the part of
the Abolitionists an outburst of fanaticism. In their devotion to their
adopted cause they lost all sense of proportion, all balance of
judgment, and all justice of perception; and their narrowness and want
of balance is in itself a sufficient indication that they were possessed
of a half, instead of a whole, truth.
The fact that the Abolitionists were disinterested and for a while
persecuted men should not prevent the present generation from putting a
just estimate on their work. While they redeemed the honor of their
country by assuming a grave and hard national responsibility, they
sought to meet that responsibility in a way that would have destroyed
their country. The Abolitionists, no less than the Southerners, were
tearing at the fabric of American nationality. They did it, no doubt, in
the name of democracy; but of all perverted conceptions of democracy,
one of the most perverted and dangerous is that which identifies it
exclusively with a system of natural rights. Such a conception of
democracy is in its effect inevitably revolutionary, and merely loosens
the social and national bond. In the present instance they were betrayed
into one of the worst possible sins against the national bond--into the
sin of doing a gross personal injustice to a large group of their
fellow-countrymen. Inasmuch as the Southerners were willfully violating
a Divine law, they became in the eyes of the Abolitionists, not merely
mis-guided, but wicked, men; and the Abolitionists did not scruple to
speak of them as unclean beasts, who were fattening on the fruits of an
iniquitous institution. But such an inference was palpably false. The
Southern slave owners were not unclean beasts; and any theory which
justified such an inference must be erroneous. They were, for the most
part, estimable if somewhat quick-tempered and irascible gentlemen, who
did much to mitigate the evils of negro servitude, and who were on the
whole liked rather than disliked by their bondsmen. They were right,
moreover, in believing that the negroes were a race possessed of moral
and intellectual qualities inferior to those of the white men; and,
however much they overworked their conviction of negro inferiority, they
could clearly see that the Abolitionists were applying a narrow and
perverted political theory to a complicated and delicate set of economic
and social conditions. It is no wonder, consequently, that they did not
submit tamely to the abuse of the Abolitionists; and that they in their
turn lost their heads. Unfortunately, however, the consequence of their
wrong-headedness was more disastrous than it was in the case of the
Abolitionists, because they were powerful and domineering, as well as
angry and unreasonable. They were in a position, if they so willed, to
tear the Union to pieces, whereas the Abolitionists could only talk and
behave as if any legal association with such sinners ought to be
destroyed.
The Southern slaveholders, then, undoubtedly had a grievance. They were
being abused by a faction of their fellow-countrymen, because they
insisted on enjoying a strictly legal right; and it is no wonder that
they began to think of the Abolitionists very much as the Abolitionists
thought of them. Moreover, their anger was probably increased by the
fact that the Abolitionists could make out some kind of a case against
them. Property in slaves was contrary to the Declaration of
Independence, and had been denounced in theory by the earlier American
democrats. So long as a conception of democracy, which placed natural
above legal rights was permitted to obtain, their property in slaves
would be imperiled: and it was necessary, consequently, for the
Southerners to advance a conception of democracy, which would stand as a
fortress around their "peculiar" institution. During the earlier days of
the Republic no such necessity had existed. The Southerners had merely
endeavored to protect their negro property by insisting on an equal
division of the domain out of which future states were to be carved, and
upon the admission into the Union of a slave state to balance every new
free commonwealth. But the attempt of the Abolitionists to identify the
American national idea with a system of natural rights, coupled with the
plain fact that the national domain contained more material for free
than it did for slave states, provoked the Southerners into taking more
aggressive ground. They began to identify the national idea exclusively
with a system of legal rights; and it became from their point of view a
violation of national good faith even to criticise any rights enjoyed
under the Constitution. They advanced a conception of American
democracy, which defied the Constitution in its most rigid
interpretation,--which made Congress incompetent to meddle with any
rights enjoyed under the Constitution, which converted any protest
against such rights into national disloyalty, and which in the end
converted secession into a species of higher Constitutional action.
Calhoun's theory of Constitutional interpretation was ingeniously
wrought and powerfully argued. From an exclusively legal standpoint, it
was plausible, if not convincing; but it was opposed by something deeper
than counter-theories of Constitutional law. It was opposed to the
increasingly national outlook of a large majority of the American
people. They would not submit to a conception of the American political
system, designed exclusively to give legal protection to property in
negroes, and resulting substantially in the nationalization of slavery.
They insisted upon a conception of the Constitution, which made the
national organization the expression of a democratic idea, more
comprehensive and dignified than that of existing legal rights; and in
so doing the Northerners undoubtedly had behind them, not merely the
sound political idea, but also a fair share of the living American
tradition. The Southerners had pushed the traditional worship of
Constitutional rights to a point which subordinated the whole American
legal system to the needs of one peculiar and incongruous institution,
and such an innovation was bound to be revolutionary. But when the North
proposed to put its nationalistic interpretation of the Constitution
into effect, and to prevent the South by force from seceding, the South
could claim for its resistance a larger share of the American tradition
than could the North for its coercion. To insist that the Southern
states remain in the Union was assuredly an attempt to govern a whole
society without its consent; and the fact that the Southerners rather
than the Northerners were technically violators of the law, did not
prevent the former from going into battle profoundly possessed with the
conviction that they were fighting for an essentially democratic cause.
The aggressive theories and policy of the Southerners made the moderate
opponents of slavery realize that the beneficiaries of that institution
would, unless checked, succeed eventually in nationalizing slavery by
appropriating on its behalf the national domain. A body of public
opinion was gradually formed, which looked in the direction merely of
de-nationalizing slavery by restricting its expansion. This body of
public opinion was finally organized into the Republican party; and this
party has certain claims to be considered the first genuinely national
party which has appeared in American politics. The character of being
national has been denied to it, because it was, compared to the old Whig
and Democratic parties, a sectional organization; but a party becomes
national, not by the locus of its support, but by the national import of
its idea and its policy. The Republican party was not entirely national,
because it had originated partly in embittered sectional feeling, but it
proclaimed a national idea and a national policy. It insisted on the
responsibility of the national government in relation to the institution
of slavery, and it insisted also that the Union should be preserved. But
before the Republicanism could be recognized as national even in the
North, it was obliged to meet and vanquish one more proposed treatment
of the problem of slavery--founded on an inadequate conception of
democracy. In this case, moreover, the inadequate conception of
democracy was much more traditionally American than was an exclusive
preoccupation either with natural or legal rights; and according to its
chief advocate it would have the magical result of permitting the
expansion of slavery, and of preserving the Constitutional Union,
without doing any harm to democracy.
This was the theory of Popular Sovereignty, whose ablest exponent was
Stephen Douglas. About 1850, he became the official leader of the
Western Democracy. This section of the party no longer controlled the
organization as it did in the days of Jackson; but it was still powerful
and influential. It persisted in its loyalty to the Union coupled with
its dislike of nationalizing organization; and it persisted, also, in
its dislike of any interference with the individual so long as he was
making lawful money. The legal right to own slaves was from their point
of view a right like another; and not only could it not be taken away
from the Southern states, but no individual should be deprived of it by
the national government. When a state came to be organized, such a right
might be denied by the state constitution; but the nation should do
nothing to prejudice the decision. The inhabitants of the national
domain should be allowed to own slaves or not to own them, just as they
pleased, until the time came for the adoption of a state constitution;
and any interference with this right violated democratic principles by
an unjustifiable restriction upon individual and local action. Thus was
another kind of liberty invoked in order to meet the new phase of the
crisis; and if it had prevailed, the United States would have become a
legal union without national cohesion, and a democracy which issued, not
illogically, in human servitude.
Douglas was sincere in his belief that the principle of local or Popular
Sovereignty supplied a strictly democratic solution of the slavery
problem, and it was natural that he should seek to use this principle
for the purpose of reaching a permanent settlement. When with the
assistance of the South he effected the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, he honestly thought that he was replacing an arbitrary and
unstable territorial division of the country into slave and free
states, by a settlement which would be stable, because it was the
logical product of the American democratic idea. The interpretation of
democracy which dictated the proposed solution was sufficiently
perverted; but it was nevertheless a faithful reflection of the
traditional point of view of the Jacksonian Democratic party, and it
deserves more respectful historical treatment than it sometimes
receives. It was, after all, the first attempt which had been made to
legislate in relation to slavery on the basis of a principle, and the
application of any honest idea to the subject-matter of the controversy
served to clear an atmosphere which for thirty years had been clouded by
unprincipled compromises. The methods and the objects of the several
different parties were made suddenly definite and unmistakable; and
their representatives found it necessary for the first time to stand
firmly upon their convictions instead of sacrificing them in order to
maintain an appearance of peace. It soon became apparent that not even
this erection of national irresponsibility into a principle would be
sufficient to satisfy the South, because the interests of the South had
come to demand the propagation of slavery as a Constitutional right, and
if necessary in defiance of local public opinion. Unionists were
consequently given to understand that the South was offering them a
choice between a divided Union and the nationalization of slavery; and
they naturally drew the conclusion that they must de-nationalize slavery
in order to perpetuate the Union. The repeal, consequently, hastened the
formation of the Republican party, whose object it was to prevent the
expansion of slavery and to preserve the Union, without violating the
Constitutional rights of the South. Such a policy could no longer
prevail without a war. The Southerners had no faith in the fair
intentions of their opponents. They worked themselves into the belief
that The whole anti-slavery party was Abolitionist, and the whole
anti-slavery agitation national disloyalty. But the issue had been so
shaped that the war could be fought for the purpose of preserving
American national integrity; and that was the only issue on which a
righteous war could be fought.
Thus the really decisive debates which preceded the Civil War were not
those which took place in Congress over states-rights, but rather the
discussion in Illinois between Lincoln and Douglas as to whether
slavery was a local or a national issue. The Congressional debates were
on both sides merely a matter of legal special pleading for the purpose
of justifying a preconceived decision. What it was necessary for
patriotic American citizens and particularly for Western Democrats to
understand was, not whether the South possessed a dubious right of
secession, because that dispute, in case it came to a head, could only
be settled by war; but whether a democratic nation could on democratic
principles continue to shirk the problem of slavery by shifting the
responsibility for it to individuals and localities. As soon as Lincoln
made it plain that a democratic nation could not make local and
individual rights an excuse for national irresponsibility, then the
Unionist party could count upon the support of the American conscience.
The former followers of Douglas finally rallied to the man and to the
party which stood for a nationalized rather than a merely localized
democracy; and the triumph of the North in the war, not only put an end
to the legal right of secession, but it began to emancipate the American
national idea from an obscurantist individualism and provincialism. Our
current interpretation of democracy still contains much dubious matter
derived from the Jacksonian epoch; but no American statesmen can
hereafter follow Douglas in making the democratic principle equivalent
to utter national incoherence and irresponsibility.
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt in his addresses to the veterans of the Civil War
has been heard to assert that the crisis teaches us a much-needed lesson
as to the supreme value of moral energy. It would have been much
pleasanter and cheaper to let the South secede, but the people of the
North preferred to pay the cost of justifiable coercion in blood and
treasure than to submit to the danger and humiliation of peaceable
rebellion. Doubtless the foregoing is sometimes a wholesome lesson on
which to insist, but it is by no means the only lesson suggested by the
event. The Abolitionists had not shirked their duty as they understood
it. They had given their property and their lives to the anti-slavery
agitation. But they were as willing as the worst Copperheads to permit
the secession of the South, because of the erroneous and limited
character of their political ideas. While the crisis had undoubtedly
been, in a large measure, brought about by moral lethargy, and it could
only be properly faced by a great expenditure of moral energy, it had
also been brought about quite as much by political unintelligence; and
the salvation of the Union depended primarily and emphatically upon a
better understanding on the part of Northern public opinion of the
issues involved. Confused as was the counsel offered to them, and
distracting as were their habits of political thought, the people of the
North finally disentangled the essential question, and then supported
loyally the man who, more than any other single political leader, had
properly defined the issue.
That man was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's peculiar service to his
countrymen before the war was that of seeing straighter and thinking
harder than did his contemporaries. No doubt he must needs have courage,
also, for in the beginning he acted against the advice of his Republican
associates. But in 1858 there were plenty of men who had the courage,
whereas there were very few who had Lincoln's disciplined intelligence
and his just and penetrating insight. Lincoln's vision placed every
aspect of the situation in its proper relations; and he was as fully
competent to detect the logical weakness of his opponent's position as
he was to explain his own lucidly, candidly, and persuasively. It so
happened that the body of public opinion which he particularly addressed
was that very part of the American democracy most likely to be deluded
into allowing the Southern leaders to have their will, yet whose
adhesion to the national cause was necessary to the preservation of the
Union. It was into this mass of public opinion, after the announcement
of his senatorial candidacy, that he hammered a new and a hard truth. He
was the first responsible politician to draw the logical inference from
the policy of the Republican party. The Constitution was inadequate to
cure the ills it generated. By its authorization of slavery it
established an institution whose legality did not prevent it from being
anti-national. That institution must either be gradually reduced to
insignificance, or else it must transform and take possession of the
American national idea. The Union had become a house divided against
itself; and this deep-lying division could not be bridged merely by
loyal Constitutionalism or by an anti-national interpretation of
democracy. The legal Union was being threatened precisely because
American national integrity was being gutted by an undemocratic
institution. The house must either fall or else cease to be divided.
Thus for the first time it was clearly proclaimed by a responsible
politician that American nationality was a living principle rather than
a legal bond; and Lincoln's service to his country in making the Western
Democracy understand that living Americans were responsible for their
national integrity can scarcely be over-valued. The ground was cut from
under the traditional point of view of the pioneer--which had been to
feel patriotic and national, but to plan and to agitate only for the
fulfillment of local and individual ends.
The virtue of Lincoln's attitude may seem to be as much a matter of
character as of intelligence; and such, indeed, is undoubtedly the case.
My point is, not that Lincoln's greatness was more a matter of intellect
than of will, but that he rendered to his country a peculiar service,
because his luminous and disciplined intelligence and his national
outlook enabled him to give each aspect of a complicated and confused
situation its proper relative emphasis. At a later date, when he had
become President and was obliged to take decisive action in order to
prevent the House from utterly collapsing, he showed an inflexibility of
purpose no less remarkable than his previous intellectual insight. For
as long as he had not made up his mind, he hesitated firmly and
patiently; but when he had made up his mind, he was not to be confused
or turned aside. Indeed, during the weeks of perplexity which preceded
the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Lincoln sometimes seems to be the one
wise and resolute man among a group of leaders who were either resolute
and foolish or wise (after a fashion) and irresolute. The amount of bad
advice which was offered to the American people at this moment is
appalling, and is to be explained only by the bad moral and intellectual
habits fastened upon our country during forty years of national
turpitude. But Lincoln never for an instant allowed his course to be
diverted. If the Union was attacked, he was prepared actively to defend
it. If it was let alone, he was prepared to do what little he could
towards the de-nationalization of slavery. But he refused absolutely to
throw away the fruits of Republican victory by renewing the policy of
futile and unprincipled compromises. Back of all his opinions there was
an ultimate stability of purpose which was the result both of sound
mental discipline and of a firm will. His was a mind, unlike that of
Clay, Seward, or even Webster, which had never been cheapened by its own
exercise. During his mature years he rarely, if ever, proclaimed an idea
which he had not mastered, and he never abandoned a truth which he had
once thoroughly achieved.
III
LINCOLN AS MORE THAN AN AMERICAN
Lincoln's services to his country have been rewarded with such abundant
appreciation that it may seem superfluous to insist upon them once
again; but I believe that from the point of view of this book an even
higher value may be placed, if not upon his patriotic service, at least
upon his personal worth. The Union might well have been saved and
slavery extinguished without his assistance; but the life of no other
American has revealed with anything like the same completeness the
peculiar moral promise of genuine democracy. He shows us by the full but
unconscious integrity of his example the kind of human excellence which
a political and social democracy may and should fashion; and its most
grateful and hopeful aspect is, not merely that there is something
partially American about the manner of his excellence, but that it can
be fairly compared with the classic types of consummate personal
distinction.
To all appearance nobody could have been more than Abraham Lincoln a man
of his own time and place. Until 1858 his outer life ran much in the
same groove as that of hundreds of other Western politicians and
lawyers. Beginning as a poor and ignorant boy, even less provided with
props and stepping-stones than were his associates, he had worked his
way to a position of ordinary professional and political distinction. He
was not, like Douglas, a brilliant success. He was not, like Grant, an
apparently hopeless failure. He had achieved as much and as little as
hundreds of others had achieved. He was respected by his neighbors as
an honest man and as a competent lawyer. They credited him with
ability, but not to any extraordinary extent. No one would have pointed
him out as a remarkable and distinguished man. He had shown himself to
be desirous of recognition and influence; but ambition had not been the
compelling motive in his life. In most respects his ideas, interests,
and standards were precisely the same as those of his associates. He
accepted with them the fabric of traditional American political thought
and the ordinary standards of contemporary political morality. He had
none of the moral strenuousness of the reformer, none of the
exclusiveness of a man, whose purposes and ideas were consciously
perched higher than those of his neighbors. Probably the majority of his
more successful associates classed him as a good and able man who was
somewhat lacking in ambition and had too much of a disposition to loaf.
He was most at home, not in his own house, but in the corner grocery
store, where he could sit with his feet on the stove swapping stories
with his friends; and if an English traveler of 1850 had happened in on
the group, he would most assuredly have discovered another instance of
the distressing vulgarity to which the absence of an hereditary
aristocracy and an established church condemned the American democracy.
Thus no man could apparently have been more the average product of his
day and generation. Nevertheless, at bottom, Abraham Lincoln differed as
essentially from the ordinary Western American of the Middle Period as
St. Francis of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the
thirteenth century.
The average Western American of Lincoln's generation was fundamentally a
man who subordinated his intelligence to certain dominant practical
interests and purposes. He was far from being a stupid or slow-witted
man. On the contrary, his wits had been sharpened by the traffic of
American politics and business, and his mind was shrewd, flexible, and
alert. But he was wholly incapable either of disinterested or of
concentrated intellectual exertion. His energies were bent in the
conquest of certain stubborn external forces, and he used his
intelligence almost exclusively to this end. The struggles, the
hardships, and the necessary self-denial of pioneer life constituted an
admirable training of the will. It developed a body of men with great
resolution of purpose and with great ingenuity and fertility in
adapting their insufficient means to the realization of their important
business affairs. But their almost exclusive preoccupation with
practical tasks and their failure to grant their intelligence any room
for independent exercise bent them into exceedingly warped and one-sided
human beings.
Lincoln, on the contrary, much as he was a man of his own time and
people, was precisely an example of high and disinterested intellectual
culture. During all the formative years in which his life did not
superficially differ from that of his associates, he was in point of
fact using every chance which the material of Western life afforded to
discipline and inform his mind. These materials were not very abundant;
and in the use which he proceeded to make of them Lincoln had no
assistance, either from a sound tradition or from a better educated
master. On the contrary, as the history of the times shows, there was
every temptation for a man with a strong intellectual bent to be
betrayed into mere extravagance and aberration. But with the sound
instinct of a well-balanced intelligence Lincoln seized upon the three
available books, the earnest study of which might best help to develop
harmoniously a strong and many-sided intelligence. He seized, that is,
upon the Bible, Shakespeare, and Euclid. To his contemporaries the Bible
was for the most part a fountain of fanatic revivalism, and Shakespeare,
if anything, a mine of quotations. But in the case of Lincoln,
Shakespeare and the Bible served, not merely to awaken his taste and
fashion his style, but also to liberate his literary and moral
imagination. At the same time he was training his powers of thought by
an assiduous study of algebra and geometry. The absorbing hours he spent
over his Euclid were apparently of no use to him in his profession; but
Lincoln was in his way an intellectual gymnast and enjoyed the exertion
for its own sake. Such a use of his leisure must have seemed a sheer
waste of time to his more practical friends, and they might well have
accounted for his comparative lack of success by his indulgence in such
secret and useless pastimes. Neither would this criticism have been
beside the mark, for if Lincoln's great energy and powers of work had
been devoted exclusively to practical ends, he might well have become in
the early days a more prominent lawyer and politician than he actually
was. But he preferred the satisfaction of his own intellectual and
social instincts, and so qualified himself for achievements beyond the
power of a Douglas.
In addition, however, to these private gymnastics Lincoln shared with
his neighbors a public and popular source of intellectual and human
insight. The Western pioneers, for all their exclusive devotion to
practical purposes, wasted a good deal of time on apparently useless
social intercourse. In the Middle Western towns of that day there was,
as we have seen, an extraordinary amount of good-fellowship, which was
quite the most wholesome and humanizing thing which entered into the
lines of these hard-working and hard-featured men. The whole male
countryside was in its way a club; and when the presence of women did
not make them awkward and sentimental, the men let themselves loose in
an amount of rough pleasantry and free conversation, which added the one
genial and liberating touch to their lives. This club life of his own
people Lincoln enjoyed and shared much more than did his average
neighbor. He passed the greater part of what he would have called his
leisure time in swapping with his friends stories, in which the genial
and humorous side of Western life was embodied. Doubtless his domestic
unhappiness had much to do with his vagrancy; but his native instinct
for the wholesome and illuminating aspect of the life around him brought
him more frequently than any other cause to the club of loafers in the
general store. And whatever the promiscuous conversation and the racy
yarns meant to his associates, they meant vastly more to Lincoln. His
hours of social vagrancy really completed the process of his
intellectual training. It relieved his culture from the taint of
bookishness. It gave substance to his humor. It humanized his wisdom and
enabled him to express it in a familiar and dramatic form. It placed at
his disposal, that is, the great classic vehicle of popular expression,
which is the parable and the spoken word.
Of course, it was just because he shared so completely the amusements
and the occupations of his neighbors that his private personal culture
had no embarrassing effects. Neither he nor his neighbors were in the
least aware that he had been placed thereby in a different intellectual
class. No doubt this loneliness and sadness of his personal life may be
partly explained by a dumb sense of difference from his fellows; and no
doubt this very loneliness and sadness intensified the mental
preoccupation which was both the sign and the result of his personal
culture. But his unconsciousness of his own distinction, as well as his
regular participation in political and professional practice, kept his
will as firm and vigorous as if he were really no more than a man of
action. His natural steadiness of purpose had been toughened in the
beginning by the hardships and struggles which he shared with his
neighbors; and his self-imposed intellectual discipline in no way
impaired the stability of his character, because his personal culture
never alienated him from his neighbors and threw him into a consciously
critical frame of mind. The time which he spent in intellectual
diversion may have diminished to some extent his practical efficiency
previous to the gathering crisis. It certainly made him less inclined to
the aggressive self-assertion which a successful political career
demanded. But when the crisis came, when the minds of Northern patriots
were stirred by the ugly alternative offered to them by the South, and
when Lincoln was by the course of events restored to active
participation in politics, he soon showed that he had reached the
highest of all objects of personal culture. While still remaining one of
a body of men who, all unconsciously, impoverished their minds in order
to increase the momentum of their practical energy, he none the less
achieved for himself a mutually helpful relation between a firm will and
a luminous intelligence. The training of his mind, the awakening of his
imagination, the formation of his taste and style, the humorous
dramatizing of his experience,--all this discipline had failed to
pervert his character, narrow his sympathies, or undermine his purposes.
His intelligence served to enlighten his will, and his will, to
establish the mature decisions of his intelligence. Late in life the two
faculties became in their exercise almost indistinguishable. His
judgments, in so far as they were decisive, were charged with momentum,
and his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding.
Just because his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding,
Lincoln was certainly the most humane statesman who ever guided a
nation through a great crisis. He always regarded other men and acted
towards them, not merely as the embodiment of an erroneous or harmful
idea, but as human beings, capable of better things; and consequently
all of his thoughts and actions looked in the direction of a higher
level of human association. It is this characteristic which makes him a
better and, be it hoped, a more prophetic democrat than any other
national American leader. His peculiar distinction does not consist in
the fact that he was a "Man of the People" who passed from the condition
of splitting rails to the condition of being President. No doubt he was
in this respect as good a democrat as you please, and no doubt it was
desirable that he should be this kind of a democrat. But many other
Americans could be named who were also men of the people, and who passed
from the most insignificant to the most honored positions in American
life. Lincoln's peculiar and permanent distinction as a democrat will
depend rather upon the fact that his thoughts and his actions looked
towards the realization of the highest and most edifying democratic
ideal. Whatever his theories were, he showed by his general outlook and
behavior that democracy meant to him more than anything else the spirit
and principle of brotherhood. He was the foremost to deny liberty to the
South, and he had his sensible doubts about the equality between the
negro and the white man; but he actually treated everybody--the Southern
rebel, the negro slave, the Northern deserter, the personal enemy--in a
just and kindly spirit. Neither was this kindliness merely an instance
of ordinary American amiability and good nature. It was the result, not
of superficial feeling which could be easily ruffled, but of his
personal, moral, and intellectual discipline. He had made for himself a
second nature, compact of insight and loving-kindness.
It must be remembered, also, that this higher humanity resided in a man
who was the human instrument partly responsible for an awful amount of
slaughter and human anguish. He was not only the commander-in-chief of a
great army which fought a long and bloody war, but he was the statesman
who had insisted that, if necessary, the war should be fought. His
mental attitude was dictated by a mixture of practical common sense with
genuine human insight, and it is just this mixture which makes him so
rare a man and, be it hoped, so prophetic a democrat. He could at one
and the same moment order his countrymen to be killed for seeking to
destroy the American nation and forgive them for their error. His
kindliness and his brotherly feeling did not lead him, after the manner
of Jefferson, to shirk the necessity and duty of national defense.
Neither did it lead him, after the manner of William Lloyd Garrison, to
advocate non-resistance, while at the same time arousing in his
fellow-countrymen a spirit of fratricidal warfare. In the midst of that
hideous civil contest which was provoked, perhaps unnecessarily, by
hatred, irresponsibility, passion, and disloyalty, and which has been
the fruitful cause of national disloyalty down to the present day,
Lincoln did not for a moment cherish a bitter or unjust feeling against
the national enemies. The Southerners, filled as they were with a
passionate democratic devotion to their own interests and liberties,
abused Lincoln until they really came to believe that he was a military
tyrant, yet he never failed to treat them in a fair and forgiving
spirit. When he was assassinated, it was the South, as well as the
American nation, which had lost its best friend, because he alone among
the Republican leaders had the wisdom to see that the divided House
could only be restored by justice and kindness; and if there are any
defects in its restoration to-day, they are chiefly due to the baleful
spirit of injustice and hatred which the Republicans took over from the
Abolitionists.
His superiority to his political associates in constructive
statesmanship is measured by his superiority in personal character.
There are many men who are able to forgive the enemies of their country,
but there are few who can forgive their personal enemies. I need not
rehearse the well-known instances of Lincoln's magnanimity. He not only
cherished no resentment against men who had intentionally and even
maliciously injured him, but he seems at times to have gone out of his
way to do them a service. This is, perhaps, his greatest distinction.
Lincoln's magnanimity is the final proof of the completeness of his
self-discipline. The quality of being magnanimous is both the consummate
virtue and the one which is least natural. It was certainly far from
being natural among Lincoln's own people. Americans of his time were
generally of the opinion that it was dishonorable to overlook a
personal injury. They considered it weak and unmanly not to quarrel
with another man a little harder than he quarreled with you. The pioneer
was good-natured and kindly; but he was aggressive, quick-tempered,
unreasonable, and utterly devoid of personal discipline. A slight or an
insult to his personality became in his eyes a moral wrong which must be
cherished and avenged, and which relieved him of any obligation to be
just or kind to his enemy. Many conspicuous illustrations of this
quarrelsome spirit are to be found in the political life of the Middle
Period, which, indeed, cannot be understood without constantly falling
back upon the influence of lively personal resentments. Every prominent
politician cordially disliked or hated a certain number of his political
adversaries and associates; and his public actions were often dictated
by a purpose either to injure these men or to get ahead of them. After
the retirement of Jackson these enmities and resentments came to have a
smaller influence; but a man's right and duty to quarrel with anybody
who, in his opinion, had done him an injury was unchallenged, and was
generally considered to be the necessary accompaniment of American
democratic virility.
As I have intimated above, Andrew Jackson was the most conspicuous
example of this quarrelsome spirit, and for this reason he is wholly
inferior to Lincoln as a type of democratic manhood. Jackson had many
admirable qualities, and on the whole he served his country well. He
also was a "Man of the People" who understood and represented the mass
of his fellow-countrymen, and who played the part, according to his
lights, of a courageous and independent political leader. He also loved
and defended the Union. But with all his excellence he should never be
held up as a model to American youth. The world was divided into his
personal friends and followers and his personal enemies, and he was as
eager to do the latter an injury as he was to do the former a service.
His quarrels were not petty, because Jackson was, on the whole, a big
rather than a little man, but they were fierce and they were for the
most part irreconcilable. They bulk so large in his life that they
cannot be overlooked. They stamp him a type of the vindictive man
without personal discipline, just as Lincoln's behavior towards Stanton,
Chase, and others stamps him a type of the man who has achieved
magnanimity. He is the kind of national hero the admiring imitation of
whom can do nothing but good.
Lincoln had abandoned the illusion of his own peculiar personal
importance. He had become profoundly and sincerely humble, and his
humility was as far as possible from being either a conventional pose or
a matter of nervous self-distrust. It did not impair the firmness of his
will. It did not betray him into shirking responsibilities. Although
only a country lawyer without executive experience, he did not flinch
from assuming the leadership of a great nation in one of the gravest
crises of its national history, from becoming commander-in-chief of an
army of a million men, and from spending $3,000,000,000 in the
prosecution of a war. His humility, that is, was precisely an example of
moral vitality and insight rather than of moral awkwardness and
enfeeblement. It was the fruit of reflection on his own personal
experience--the supreme instance of his ability to attain moral truth
both in discipline and in idea; and in its aspect of a moral truth it
obtained a more explicit expression than did some other of his finer
personal attributes. His practice of cherishing and repeating the
plaintive little verses which inquire monotonously whether the spirit of
mortal has any right to be proud indicates the depth and the highly
conscious character of this fundamental moral conviction. He is not only
humble himself, but he feels and declares that men have no right to be
anything but humble; and he thereby enters into possession of the most
fruitful and the most universal of all religious ideas.
Lincoln's humility, no less than his liberal intelligence and his
magnanimous disposition, is more democratic than it is American; but in
this, as in so many other cases, his personal moral dignity and his
peculiar moral insight did not separate him from his associates. Like
them, he wanted professional success, public office, and the ordinary
rewards of American life; and like them, he bears no trace of political
or moral purism. But, unlike them, he was not the intellectual and moral
victim of his own purposes and ambitions; and unlike them, his life is a
tribute to the sincerity and depth of his moral insight. He could never
have become a national leader by the ordinary road of insistent and
clamorous self-assertion. Had he not been restored to public life by
the crisis, he would have remained in all probability a comparatively
obscure and a wholly under-valued man. But the political ferment of 1856
and the threat of ruin overhanging the American Union pushed him again
on to the political highway; and once there, his years of intellectual
discipline enabled him to play a leading and a decisive part. His
personality obtained momentum, direction, and increasing dignity from
its identification with great issues and events. He became the
individual instrument whereby an essential and salutary national purpose
was fulfilled; and the instrument was admirably effective, precisely
because it had been silently and unconsciously tempered and formed for
high achievement. Issue as he was of a society in which the cheap tool,
whether mechanical or personal, was the immediately successful tool, he
had none the less labored long in the making of a consummate individual
instrument.
Some of my readers may protest that I have over-emphasized the
difference between Lincoln and his contemporary fellow-countrymen. In
order to exalt the leader have I not too much disparaged the followers?
Well, a comparison of this kind always involves the risk of unfairness;
but if there is much truth in the foregoing estimate of Lincoln, the
lessons of the comparison are worth its inevitable risk. The ordinary
interpretation of Lincoln as a consummate democrat and a "Man of the
People" has implied that he was, like Jackson, simply a bigger and a
better version of the plain American citizen; and it is just this
interpretation which I have sought to deny and to expose. In many
respects he was, of course, very much like his neighbors and associates.
He accepted everything wholesome and useful in their life and behavior.
He shared their good-fellowship, their strength of will, their excellent
faith, and above all their innocence; and he could never have served his
country so well, or reached as high a level of personal dignity, in case
he had not been good-natured and strong and innocent. But, as all
commentators have noted, he was not only good-natured, strong and
innocent; he had made himself intellectually candid, concentrated, and
disinterested, and morally humane, magnanimous, and humble. All these
qualities, which were the very flower of his personal life, were not
possessed either by the average or the exceptional American of his day;
and not only were they not possessed, but they were either wholly
ignored or consciously under-valued. Yet these very qualities of high
intelligence, humanity, magnanimity and humility are precisely the
qualities which Americans, in order to become better democrats, should
add to their strength, their homogeneity, and their innocence; while at
the same time they are just the qualities which Americans are prevented
by their individualistic practice and tradition from attaining or
properly valuing. Their deepest convictions make the average
unintelligent man the representative democrat, and the aggressive
successful individual, the admirable national type; and in conformity
with these convictions their uppermost ideas in respect to Lincoln are
that he was a "Man of the People" and an example of strong will. He was
both of these things, but his great distinction is that he was also
something vastly more and better. He cannot be fully understood and
properly valued as a national hero without an implicit criticism of
those traditional convictions. Such a criticism he himself did not and
could not make. In case he had made it, he could never have achieved his
great political task and his great personal triumph. But other times
bring other needs. It is as desirable to-day that the criticism should
be made explicit as it was that Lincoln himself in his day should
preserve the innocence and integrity of a unique unconscious example.