1864.
There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South
Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured
retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation they had
wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not control, when
no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading to find
that he had no longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the result
of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there
would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that
ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and
tradition, which swells every man’s heart and shapes his thought, though
perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be gone from it,
leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops
from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would be
reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up messages of courage and
security from every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We
should be irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice the
ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new conditions chance might leave
dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of our
people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions of
national peril We felt an only too natural distrust of immense public
meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which the war
was entered-on, that it should follow soon, and that the slackening of
public spirit should be proportionate to the previous over-tension,
might well be foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history.
Men acting gregariously are always in extremes; as they are one moment
capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser
depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall
multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more
surely to distrust of men, than self-deception to suspicion of
principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all
weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp
mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but
the statesman needs something more durable to work in,--must be able to
rely on the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people,
without which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral
than of material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment. Would
this fervor of the Free States hold out? Was it kindled by a just
feeling of the value of constitutional liberty? Had it body enough to
withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our
population intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was between
order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government by law and
the tussle of misrule by _pronunciamiento_? Could a war be maintained
without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and with the
impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious questions, and with
no precedent to aid in answering them.
At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for the most
anxious apprehension. A President known to be infected with the
political heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the
Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not say
of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the representative
of a party whose leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in
the conduct of affairs; an empty treasury was called on to supply
resources beyond precedent in the history of finance; the trees were yet
growing and the iron unmined with which a navy was to be built and
armored; officers without discipline were to make a mob into an army;
and, above all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced with
every vague hint and every specious argument of despondency by a
powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or
actively hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this
latter element of disintegration and discouragement among a people where
every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a reader of
newspapers. The pedlers of rumor in the North were the most effective
allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no more insidious
treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its electric thrill
of panic along the remotest nerves of the community, till the excited
imagination makes every real danger loom heightened with its unreal
double.
And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem to
be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate relations
and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution were so
intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable
contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were, from
their novelty, incapable of arrangement under any of the categories of
historical precedent, that there were moments of crisis when the
firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the democratic
theory of government might well hold his breath in vague apprehension of
disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy, solemnly arguing from
the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose
long periods of aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward
parentheses of mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable
of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of
far-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient
of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural
nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on
the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse of
bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a
dreary outlook for persons who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders
with it lifelong, but merely from books, and America only by the report
of some fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a
carpet-bag here, had written to the Times demanding redress, and drawing
a mournful inference of democratic instability. Nor were men wanting
among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in London literature as
to mistake Cockneyism for European culture, and contempt of their
country for cosmopolitan breadth of view, and who, owing all they had
and all they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding
to join in the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.
But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or
the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against any
over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we consider the expanse
of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or the
reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times--was to be waged by a people divided at home,
unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate without
experience and without reputation, whose every measure was sure to be
cunningly hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who,
while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a
hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All
this was to be done without warning and without preparation, while at
the same time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the
political condition of four millions of people, by softening the
prejudices, allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the
co-operation, of their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were
an occasion when the heightened imagination of the historian might see
Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of
her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three years;
never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that strength be so
directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people,--to that
general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion possible
only under the influence of a political framework like our own. We find
it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be blind to the
grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on here,--to the
heroic energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving that
it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we own that
it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and moral condition of
the American who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by being
even a spectator of such qualities and achievements. That a steady
purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forces which,
at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the discussion of
schemes which could only become operative, if at all, after the war was
over; that a popular excitement has been slowly intensified into an
earnest national will; that a somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has
been made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that the
treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of
friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even useful
for good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors
of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a domestic with a
foreign war;--all these results, any one of which might suffice to prove
greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense, the
good-humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness, and the unselfish
honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it seemed, had
lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous and difficult eminence of
modern times. It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the
native metal of a man is tested; it is by the sagacity to see, and the
fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth there may be in an adverse
opinion, in order more convincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks
behind it, that a reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a
fact the force of argument; it is by a wise forecast which allows
hostile combinations to go so far as by the inevitable reaction to
become elements of his own power, that a politician proves his genius
for state-craft; and especially it is by so gently guiding public
sentiment that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points
that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in essential ones, and
thus gain the advantages of compromise without the weakness of
concession; by so instinctively comprehending the temper and prejudices
of a people as to make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom
of his freedom from temper and prejudice,--it is by qualities such as
these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief in a
commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such as these that we
firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent of
statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we wish to appreciate
him, we have only to conceive the inevitable chaos in which we should
now be weltering, had a weak man or an unwise one been chosen in his
stead.
“Bare is back,” says the Norse proverb, “without brother behind it”; and
this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary
ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible
resources of _prestige_, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent
interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create all these
out of the unwilling material around him, by superiority of character,
by patient singleness of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular
tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr.
Lincoln’s task was one of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. Long
habit had accustomed the American people to the notion of a party in
power, and of a President as its creature and organ, while the more
vital fact, that the executive for the time being represents the
abstract idea of government as a permanent principle superior to all
party and all private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They
had so long seen the public policy more or less directed by views of
party, and often even of personal advantage, as to be ready to suspect
the motives of a chief magistrate compelled, for the first time in our
history, to feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and to act
upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that the first
duty of a government is to defend and maintain its own existence.
Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into the hands of the
opposition by the necessity under which the administration found itself
of applying this old truth to new relations. Nor were the opposition his
only nor his most dangerous opponents.
The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in which ethics
were more directly and visibly mingled with politics than usual. Their
leaders were trained to a method of oratory which relied for its effect
rather on the moral sense than the understanding. Their arguments were
drawn, not so much from experience as from general principles of right
and wrong. When the war came, their system continued to be applicable
and effective, for here again the reason of the people was to be reached
and kindled through their sentiments. It was one of those periods of
excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last,
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words _country_,
_human rights_, _democracy_, a meaning and a force beyond that of sober
and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained and defended by
the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in and roused
those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of
the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that
indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the
highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold,
can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,--and phrases,
when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has
ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables them to
supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the lessons taught by the French
Revolution there is none sadder or more striking than this, that you may
make everything else out of the passions of men except a political
system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and
unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma. It is always
demoralizing to extend the domain of sentiment over questions where it
has no legitimate jurisdiction; and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr.
Lincoln was in resisting a tendency of his own supporters which chimed
with his own private desires while wholly opposed to his convictions of
what would be wise policy.
The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable to be
passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be laid to
heart. Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his
command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning it
for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he was
a good stump-speaker, nominated for his _availability_,--that is,
because he had no history,--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that a
man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could
rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who was at best
only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly represent
even that, would fail of political, much more of popular, support. And
certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few resources of power
in the past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as Mr.
Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as
President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous minority, that
hardly admitted his claim to the office, and even in the party that
elected him there was also a large minority that suspected him of being
secretly a communicant with the church of Laodicea. All that he did was
sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side; all that he left
undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness and backsliding by
the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a truly colossal war by means of
both; he was to disengage the country from diplomatic entanglements of
unprecedented peril undisturbed by the help or the hinderance of either,
and to win from the crowning dangers of his administration, in the
confidence of the people, the means of his safety and their own. He has
contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington
has stood so firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three
years of stormy administration.
Mr. Lincoln’s policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down
no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise,
no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they rose,
or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin’s
motto, _Le temps et moi_. The _moi_, to be sure, was not very prominent
at first; but it has grown more and more so, till the world is beginning
to be persuaded that it stands for a character of marked individuality
and capacity for affairs. Time was his prime-minister, and, we began to
think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At first he was so slow
that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress but in
blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took the breath away
from those who think there is no getting on safely while there is a
spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being who has time
enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly
make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us
in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes in our impatience
thought otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till the
right moment brought up all his reserves. _Semper nocuit differre
paratis_, is a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be
sure to know when he is _not_ ready, and be firm against all persuasion
and reproach till he is.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln’s course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that
the chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly
accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe
politician than a conscientiously rigid _doctrinaire_, nothing more sure
to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no
pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular image of an
impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies of
mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity the toughest
facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we
commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies,
and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr.
Lincoln’s perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through
the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch
opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to
assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and
keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith that
his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last.
A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be drawn between
Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern
history,--Henry IV. of France. The career of the latter may be more
picturesque, as that of a daring captain always is; but in all its
vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that sudden change, as
by a rub of Aladdin’s lamp, from the attorney’s office in a country town
of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times like these. The
analogy between the characters and circumstances of the two men is in
many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion rather than a
crown, Henry’s chief material dependence was the Huguenot party, whose
doctrines sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if not
suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King only in name over the
greater part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet
gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party
that he was the only centre of order and legitimate authority round
which France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held the
divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with declamations
in favor of democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog of a
Béarnois,--much as our _soi-disant_ Democrats have lately been preaching
the divine right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies of the
Declaration of Independence,--Henry bore both parties in hand till he
was convinced that only one course of action could possibly combine his
own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the Protestants believed
somewhat doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat
doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned aside
remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest or a proverb (if a
little _high_, he liked them none the worse), joking continually as his
manner was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho
Panza by persons incapable of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of
wisdom in the profoundest romance ever written; namely, that, while Don
Quixote was incomparable in theoretic and ideal statesmanship, Sancho,
with his stock of proverbs, the ready money of human experience, made
the best possible practical governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws
and modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the
thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly earnest man, around whom
the fragments of France were to gather themselves till she took her
place again as a planet of the first magnitude in the European system.
In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate than Henry. However some
may think him wanting in zeal, the most fanatical can find no taint of
apostasy in any measure of his, nor can the most bitter charge him with
being influenced by motives of personal interest. The leading
distinction between the policies of the two is one of circumstances.
Henry went over to the nation; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation
over to him. One left a united France; the other, we hope and believe,
will leave a reunited America. We leave our readers to trace the further
points of difference and resemblance for themselves, merely suggesting a
general similarity which has often occurred to us. One only point of
melancholy interest we will allow ourselves to touch upon. That Mr.
Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from certain English
tourists who would consider similar revelations in regard to Queen
Victoria as thoroughly American in their want of _bienséance_. It is no
concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitness for the high place he so
worthily occupies; but he is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the
matter of good looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln
has also been reproached with Americanism by some not unfriendly British
critics; but, with all deference, we cannot say that we like him any the
worse for it, or see in it any reason why he should govern Americans
the less wisely.
People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are glad
that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us forever
from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom
America made, as God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried,
unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how much magnanimity,
and how much statecraft await the call of opportunity in simple manhood
when it believes in the justice of God and the worth of man.
Conventionalities are all very well in their proper place, but they
shrivel at the touch of nature like stubble in the fire. The genius that
sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us than that
which multiplies and reinforces itself in the instincts and convictions
of an entire people. Autocracy may have something in it more
melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it in human value and
interest.
Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improvised
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,
which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and great
powers, at least demands the long and steady application of the best
powers of such men as it can command to master even its first
principles. It is curious, that, in a country which boasts of its
intelligence, the theory should be so generally held that the most
complicated of human contrivances, and one which every day becomes more
complicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to talk for an hour
or two without stopping to think.
Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-made ruler.
But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that he was a man
of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he had
in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that to which a
partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled him not only
to see that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon in human
affairs, but that there are always two sides to every question, both of
which must be fully understood in order to understand either, and that
it is of greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the strength
than the weakness of his antagonist’s position. Nothing is more
remarkable than the unerring tact with which, in his debate with Mr.
Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the question; nor have we
ever had a more striking lesson in political tactics than the fact,
that, opposed to a man exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice
and bigotry to his purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to
those baser motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of
barbarians, he should yet have won his case before a jury of the people.
Mr. Lincoln was as far as possible from an impromptu politician. His
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as of men; his
sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honest acknowledgment of
difficulties, which enabled him to see that the only durable triumph of
political opinion is based, not on any abstract right, but upon so much
of justice, the highest attainable at any given moment in human affairs,
as may be had in the balance of mutual concession. Doubtless he had an
ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical statesman,--to aim at the
best, and to take the next best, if he is lucky enough to get even that.
His slow, but singularly masculine, intelligence taught him that
precedent is only another name for embodied experience, and that it
counts for even more in the guidance of communities of men than in that
of the individual life. He was not a man who held it good public economy
to pull down on the mere chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln’s
faith in God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom
of man. Perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that more than
anything else won him the unlimited confidence of the people, for they
felt that there would be no need of retreat from any position he had
deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance of his policy
during the war was like that of a Roman army. He left behind him a firm
road on which public confidence could follow; he took America with him
where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts became
colonies. The very homeliness of his genius was its distinction. His
kingship was conspicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so
absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate
common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose
sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos,
there was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems
to have had but one rule of conduct, always that of practical and
successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were
sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to
unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at the desirable,
a longer road.
Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and more
permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not on the
sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire’s saying, that “a consideration of petty circumstances is the
tomb of great things,” may be true of individual men, but it certainly
is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such considerations,
each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that the framers of
policy can alone divine what is practicable and therefore wise. The
imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and
every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish
and the dead alone never change their opinion. The course of a great
statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable
obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of
opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and
marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always
aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven,
and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human
commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is loyalty
to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing
motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to
solid principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with the
tide, but is never carried away by it,--that we demand in public men,
and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is
impracticable. For the impracticable, however theoretically enticing, is
always politically unwise, sound statesmanship being the application of
that prudence to the public business which is the safest guide in that
of private men.
No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrassing question with
which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, and it was one which no man in
his position, whatever his opinions, could evade; for, though he might
withstand the clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to the
persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the problem upon
him at every turn and in every shape.
It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and repeated
here by people who measure their country rather by what is thought of
it than by what it is, that our war has not been distinctly and avowedly
for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for the preservation of
our national power and greatness, in which the emancipation of the negro
has been forced upon us by circumstances and accepted as a necessity. We
are very far from denying this; nay, we admit that it is so far true
that we were slow to renounce our constitutional obligations even toward
those who had absolved us by their own act from the letter of our duty.
We are speaking of the government which, legally installed for the whole
country, was bound, so long as it was possible, not to overstep the
limits of orderly prescription, and could not, without abnegating its
own very nature, take the lead in making rebellion an excuse for
revolution. There were, no doubt, many ardent and sincere persons who
seemed to think this as simple a thing to do as to lead off a Virginia
reel. They forgot what should be forgotten least of all in a system like
ours, that the administration for the time being represents not only the
majority which elects it, but the minority as well,--a minority in this
case powerful, and so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed
even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as general agent of an
antislavery society, but President of the United States, to perform
certain functions exactly defined by law. Whatever were his wishes, it
was no less duty than policy to mark out for himself a line of action
that would not further distract the country, by raising before their
time questions which plainly would soon enough compel attention, and for
which every day was making the answer more easy.
Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured.
Though Mr. Lincoln’s policy in this critical affair has not been such as
to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for even the most
trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat according to their
cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors of Atropos, it has been at
least not unworthy of the long-headed king of Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln had
the choice of Bassanio offered him. Which of the three caskets held the
prize that was to redeem the fortunes of the country? There was the
golden one whose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain man; the
silver of compromise, which might have decided the choice of a merely
acute one; and the leaden,--dull and homely-looking, as prudence always
is,--yet with something about it sure to attract the eye of practical
wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision perhaps longer than seemed
needful to those on whom its awful responsibility was not to rest, but
when he made it, it was worthy of his cautious but sure-footed
understanding. The moral of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one,
lies in the childish simplicity of the solution. Those who fail in
guessing it, fail because they are over-ingenious, and cast about for an
answer that shall suit their own notion of the gravity of the occasion
and of their own dignity, rather than the occasion itself.
In a matter which must be finally settled by public opinion, and in
regard to which the ferment of prejudice and passion on both sides has
not yet subsided to that equilibrium of compromise from which alone a
sound public opinion can result, it is proper enough for the private
citizen to press his own convictions with all possible force of argument
and persuasion; but the popular magistrate, whose judgment must become
action, and whose action involves the whole country, is bound to wait
till the sentiment of the people is so far advanced toward his own point
of view, that what he does shall find support in it, instead of merely
confusing it with new elements of division. It was not unnatural that
men earnestly devoted to the saving of their country, and profoundly
convinced that slavery was its only real enemy, should demand a decided
policy round which all patriots might rally,--and this might have been
the wisest course for an absolute ruler. But in the then unsettled state
of the public mind, with a large party decrying even resistance to the
slaveholders’ rebellion as not only unwise, but even unlawful; with a
majority, perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long accustomed to
regard the Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to the South their
own judgment as to policy and instinct as to right, that they were in
doubt at first whether their loyalty were due to the country or to
slavery; and with a respectable body of honest and influential men who
still believed in the possibility of conciliation,--Mr. Lincoln judged
wisely, that, in laying down a policy in deference to one party, he
should be giving to the other the very fulcrum for which their
disloyalty had been waiting.
It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not to yield so far to an
honest indignation against the brokers of treason in the North as to
lose sight of the materials for misleading which were their stock in
trade, and to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry which is
to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with it to make it
specious,--that it is not the knavery of the leaders so much as the
honesty of the followers they may seduce, that gives them power for
evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing which might help the
people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless disputes about
its inevitable consequences.
The doctrine of State rights can be so handled by an adroit demagogue as
easily to confound the distinction between liberty and lawlessness in
the minds of ignorant persons, accustomed always to be influenced by
the sound of certain words, rather than to reflect upon the principles
which give them meaning. For, though Secession involves the manifest
absurdity of denying to a State the right of making war against any
foreign power while permitting it against the United States; though it
supposes a compact of mutual concessions and guaranties among States
without any arbiter in case of dissension; though it contradicts
common-sense in assuming that the men who framed our government did not
know what they meant when they substituted Union for Confederation;
though it falsifies history, which shows that the main opposition to the
adoption of the Constitution was based on the argument that it did not
allow that independence in the several States which alone would justify
them in seceding;--yet, as slavery was universally admitted to be a
reserved right, an inference could be drawn from any direct attack upon
it (though only in self-defence) to a natural right of resistance,
logical enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as the
majority of men always are, and now too much disturbed by the disorder
of the times, to consider that the order of events had any legitimate
bearing on the argument. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give
the Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired and even
strove to provoke, yet from the beginning of the war the most persistent
efforts have been made to confuse the public mind as to its origin and
motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down from the
national position they had instinctively taken to the old level of party
squabbles and antipathies. The wholly unprovoked rebellion of an
oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery the corner-stone of free
institutions, and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing
to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, “that slavery is
right in principle, and has nothing to do with difference of
complexion,” has been represented as a legitimate and gallant attempt to
maintain the true principles of democracy. The rightful endeavor of an
established government, the least onerous that ever existed, to defend
itself against a treacherous attack on its very existence, has been
cunningly made to seem the wicked effort of a fanatical clique to force
its doctrines on an oppressed population.
Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of the danger
and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuade himself of
Union majorities at the South, and to carry on a war that was half peace
in the hope of a peace that would have been all war,--while he was still
enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, under some theory that Secession,
however it might absolve States from their obligations, could not
escheat them of their claims under the Constitution, and that
slaveholders in rebellion had alone among mortals the privilege of
having their cake and eating it at the same time,--the enemies of free
government were striving to persuade the people that the war was an
Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was proclaimed as one of the
rights of man, while it was carefully kept out of sight that to suppress
rebellion is the first duty of government. All the evils that have come
upon the country have been attributed to the Abolitionists, though it is
hard to see how any party can become permanently powerful except in one
of two ways,--either by the greater truth of its principles, or the
extravagance of the party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state,
riding safe at her constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge
kraken of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and grasping it with
slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history of the matter with
the eyes of Pontoppidan. To believe that the leaders in the Southern
treason feared any danger from Abolitionism, would be to deny them
ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubt that they made
use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears of their deluded
accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought slavery weak, but
because they believed it strong enough, not to overthrow the government,
but to get possession of it; for it becomes daily clearer that they used
rebellion only as a means of revolution, and if they got revolution,
though not in the shape they looked for, is the American people to save
them from its consequences at the cost of its own existence? The
election of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their power to prevent
had they wished, was the occasion merely, and not the cause, of their
revolt. Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy
of a few earnest persons, without political weight enough to carry the
election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle was
disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position
of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects do
not follow from small causes,--that is, disproportionately small,--but
from adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To
contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the
poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for
a child’s wonder; but the real miracle lies in that divine league which
bound all the forces of nature to the service of the tiny germ in
fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at work for the past ten
years in the cause of antislavery, but Garrison and Phillips have been
far less successful propagandists than the slaveholders themselves, with
the constantly-growing arrogance of their pretensions and encroachments.
They have forced the question upon the attention of every voter in the
Free States, by defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the
defensive. But, even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread
desire on the part of the North to commit aggressions, though there was
a growing determination to resist them. The popular unanimity in favor
of the war three years ago was but in small measure the result of
antislavery sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But every
month of the war, every movement of the allies of slavery in the Free
States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses of any
people, however intelligent, are very little moved by abstract
principles of humanity and justice, until those principles are
interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of some infringement
upon their own rights, and then their instincts and passions, once
aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable reinforcement of impulse and
intensity from those higher ideas, those sublime traditions, which have
no motive political force till they are allied with a sense of immediate
personal wrong or imminent peril. Then at last the stars in their
courses begin to fight against Sisera. Had any one doubted before that
the rights of human nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue
the world over, no matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one
failed to see what the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts of
the advocates of slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon the
fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence and the radical
doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharpen his eyes.
While every day was bringing the people nearer to the conclusion which
all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, it was wise in
Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this
country, where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure
at last to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the best
genius for statesmanship. Hitherto the wisdom of the President’s
measures has been justified by the fact that they have always resulted
in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the things particularly
admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain
tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult
attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal
character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective
ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without losing
respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette
of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and
intelligence of those who have elected him. No higher compliment was
ever paid to a nation than the simple confidence, the fireside
plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always addresses himself to the reason
of the American people. This was, indeed, a true democrat, who grounded
himself on the assumption that a democracy can think. “Come, let us
reason together about this matter,” has been the tone of all his
addresses to the people; and accordingly we have never had a chief
magistrate who so won to himself the love and at the same time the
judgment of his countrymen. To us, that simple confidence of his in the
right-mindedness of his fellow-men is very touching, and its success is
as strong an argument as we have ever seen in favor of the theory that
men can govern themselves. He never appeals to any vulgar sentiment, he
never alludes to the humbleness of his origin; it probably never
occurred to him, indeed, that there was anything higher to start from
than manhood; and he put himself on a level with those he addressed, not
by going down to them, but only by taking it for granted that they had
brains and would come up to a common ground of reason. In an article
lately printed in “The Nation,” Mr. Bayard Taylor mentions the striking
fact, that in the foulest dens of the Five Points he found the portrait
of Lincoln. The wretched population that makes its hive there threw all
its votes and more against him, and yet paid this instinctive tribute to
the sweet humanity of his nature. Their ignorance sold its vote and took
its money, but all that was left of manhood in them recognized its saint
and martyr.
Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, “This is _my_ opinion, or
_my_ theory,” but, “This is the conclusion to which, in my judgment, the
time has come, and to which, accordingly, the sooner we come the better
for us.” His policy has been the policy of public opinion based on
adequate discussion and on a timely recognition of the influence of
passing events in shaping the features of events to come.
One secret of Mr. Lincoln’s remarkable success in captivating the
popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which enables
him, though under the necessity of constantly using the capital _I_, to
do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single vowel which
men’s mouths can pronounce with such difference of effect. That which
one shall hide away, as it were, behind the substance of his discourse,
or, if he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an agreeable
accent of individuality to what he says, another shall make an offensive
challenge to the self-satisfaction of all his hearers, and an
unwarranted intrusion upon each man’s sense of personal importance,
irritating every pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a
goose-flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied
Quinctilian; but he has, in the earnest simplicity and unaffected
Americanism of his own character, one art of oratory worth all the rest.
He forgets himself so entirely in his object as to give his _I_ the
sympathetic and persuasive effect of _We_ with the great body of his
countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process
of his thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an
honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently our representative
man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people were listening to
their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his thought owes nothing to any
ceremonial garb of words, but to the manly movement that comes of
settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows not what rhetoric
means. There has been nothing of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades
striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the public
utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the intelligence of
men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their ignorance.
* * * * *
On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, who according to
one party was a vulgar joker, and whom the _doctrinaires_ among his own
supporters accused of wanting every element of statesmanship, was the
most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely by the hold his
good-humored sagacity had laid on the hearts and understandings of his
countrymen. Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had drawn the
great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, but of mankind also, to
his side. So strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a
single quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian
during times of the most captivating military achievement, awkward, with
no skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind him a
fame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than
that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere
breeding. Never before that startled April morning did such multitudes
of men shed tears for the death of one they had never seen, as if with
him a friendly presence had been taken away from their lives, leaving
them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the
silent look of sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that
day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.