IF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S FATHER HAD MOVED SOUTHWARD, NOT NORTHWARD
The two sections in the Civil War in America were led by two men,
Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the one President of the United
States and the other President of the Confederate States, who were born
within about one hundred miles of each other in the State of Kentucky,
and within nine months of each other in point of time. For it was in
June, 1808, that Jefferson Davis first saw the light in Christian
County, Kentucky, and in February, 1809, that Abraham Lincoln was born
in Hardin County, in the same State.
Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Lincoln, the
father of Abraham Lincoln, were men of the same English-American origin,
and the families were originally of virtually the same class, though
Thomas Lincoln, doubtless as the result of the death of his father at
the hands of the Indians, when Thomas was a child, had fallen somewhat
in the social scale. Both men became dissatisfied with material
conditions in Kentucky at about the same time, and both emigrated with
their families. But Samuel Davis went southward into Mississippi, while
Thomas Lincoln went northward into Indiana.
That the sons of both these Kentuckians had in them the fire of genius,
the history of their country has abundantly proved. Each was destined by
the compelling force of his character and gifts to play a great part.
Like all other men, each was molded by his environment. The illiterate
Thomas Lincoln was credited by his immortal son with the intention, in
emigrating, to escape from a slave State. But is it not probable that
the son, deeply preoccupied as he was in later years with the subject of
the emancipation of the slaves, had projected backward, by a psychologic
habit common to all mankind, this idea from his own mind into that of
his father? In all probability no other motive than that of accident or
convenience--for Thomas Lincoln was a poor and rather "shiftless"
man--impelled Abraham Lincoln's father to go to Indiana instead of
following the trail which so many of the more enterprising Kentuckians
were taking to Mississippi or Louisiana. It was to that section that
enterprise beckoned, for agriculture was carried on in the Southwest
upon a large scale, and broader plantations were open to the adventuring
settler. Indiana, on the other hand, was a "poor man's country."
What if Thomas Lincoln had possessed a little more energy, and a few
more shillings, and had gone to Mississippi instead of to Indiana and
afterwards to Illinois? What if he had become a plantation and slave
owner, and had thus subjected his boy Abraham to the overmastering
influence of a southern environment? So far as I can recall, Mississippi
never produced an anti-slavery man.
In this event, there would have been for the national cause, for the
saving of the Union, for the emancipation of the slaves, no Abraham
Lincoln. On the other hand, the tremendous power and patience of
Lincoln's nature, the majesty and greatness of his character, the
resources of his intellect, would in all likelihood have been added to
the sum of the statesmanship which was enlisted on the Southern side.
It is even conceivable that Lincoln, rather than Davis, would have been
the president of the Southern Confederacy. Only a combination of the
most extraordinary circumstances made him the nominee of the Republican
party for the presidency in 1860. If he had been the leading statesman
and politician of Mississippi, his path to the Confederate presidency,
as the success of Davis proved, would have been comparatively easy.
Without Lincoln, the anti-slavery agitation would have gone on just the
same. The Republican party would have been constituted just the same.
Everything up to the 18th day of May, 1860, when Lincoln was nominated
for president at the Wigwam in Chicago, would have gone on just the
same. But lacking Lincoln, what a world of things afterward would have
happened differently!
In the first place, it is probable that Seward would have been nominated
for president. Very likely he would not have been elected; and as it was
Lincoln who "smoked out" Douglas, it is probable that Douglas would
have prevailed over all other Democratic candidates and been nominated
at Charleston and elected president.
In which case there would have been no secession, and very likely no
war, either at that time or later. Slavery would have become intrenched,
to yield, perhaps, in the end only to economic influences, the operation
of which had already doomed it.
But if Seward had been nominated and elected, secession would have taken
place and war would have resulted. The sort of leader that the Union
would have had in Seward may be inferred with perfect certainty from the
famous, or rather infamous, proposition entitled, "Some Thoughts for the
President's Consideration," which Seward solemnly laid before Lincoln
less than a month after his inauguration. This extraordinary document,
one of the most senseless and wicked programmes ever prepared by a man
of state, advocated a change of the national issue from slavery to a
foreign war; it advised that war be at once declared against France and
Spain, and "explanations demanded" from Great Britain and Russia! In
order that this brilliant programme might be carried out successfully,
Seward suggested that he himself be made Dictator!
This scheme, I repeat, illustrated the sort of alternative material that
we should have had, lacking Lincoln. Chase, indeed, who was also a
leading candidate for the presidency, would have been wiser. But in no
position that he ever held, after 1860, did Chase bring forth any of the
fruits of genius. Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was a greater man, but did
not command general support. Neither did Edward Bates, of Missouri, also
a western candidate for the presidency.
The great soldiers who finally triumphed in the field as the
instruments of Lincoln's policy and fought their way to victory for the
Union--Grant, Sherman, Thomas, Meade, Sheridan--would have been ranged
on the Northern side just the same whether Lincoln or another had been
at the head of affairs. But it is doubtful whether another president
would have found them out. Lincoln made his own grave mistakes regarding
men. But he put forward no general because that general was _his man_.
He observed and waited. A man of the people himself, grandly simple, he
somehow nosed out the men of the same type. All the generals who proved
great were his discoveries.
The structure of Lincoln's achievements was not, however, the result of
negative circumstances. It did not rise because things were not just so
and so. It was a positive thing--the result of the active operations of
a powerful genius, which the people recognized before the politicians
and the writers did. In the people's mind, the war was "Old Abe's" war.
It was Old Abe who stood at the helm. Congress did not know it, but it
was really working Lincoln's will. The cabinet did not always know it,
but it was Lincoln who really had his way. He kept his own counsel. He
carried out his plans.
The people were right. It was Old Abe who was doing things. And without
him the most important things would have gone undone. He was an original
creation--as Lowell said, a "new birth of our new soil, the first
American." Nature, for him, threw aside her old-world molds,
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast
Of the unexhausted West,
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new,
Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true.
Yet what could be clearer than that Abraham Lincoln, who by birth and
inheritance was of the South, not the West, might have turned his
strength to the support of quite a different cause if the accident of
fate had sent him southward, not northward, in his childhood?