THE CAUSE OF BULLETS, ’61; BALLOTS, ’92.--ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE PEOPLE’S
CHOICE IN ’60.
Of political parties in America, De Tocqueville declared that
“Aristocratic or democratic passions may easily be detected at
the bottom of all parties, and although they escape a superficial
observation, they are the main point and soul of every faction in the
United States.”
That greatest conflict of American history, the military and political
struggle between the forces of slavery and the forces of human freedom,
was no less a conflict between aristocracy and democracy. In the
South, which President-elect Cleveland only the other day termed--with
undoubted historical accuracy--the cradle of American liberty, there
had been developed a social and political aristocracy as distinct and
powerful as almost any the world has seen.
To this development, which did not become marked until after the early
part of the present century, many causes contributed. The industry of
the South had become centralized in the hands of large land owners
who cultivated extensive plantations with slave labor. The tremendous
growth of slavery exerted a depressing effect upon the manufacturing
spirit; the artisan, the mechanic, and the trader came to be regarded
as socially inferior. The planting of rice, sugar cane, and especially
cotton, which was found to be the most profitable business, was also
the most esteemed; and the South became an almost purely agricultural
section.
Lorin Blodget lays it down as an accepted rule that “the country wholly
devoted to agriculture necessarily tends to aristocratic despotism,
or some form of enslavement of the masses;” and he quotes similar
expressions from Adam Smith, Buckle, and other recognized authorities
on political economy.
Nor are reasons hard to find. De Tocqueville points out that the great
guarantees of popular liberty in America are universal education and
the general division of landed property. Now, in a purely agricultural
country the education of the people is certain to be defective.
The population is necessarily dispersed, for where there are no
manufactories there can be few towns; and where there are few towns
there are fewer and less efficient schools, and libraries and lyceums
are practically unknown. Harrison’s “History of Virginia” states that
that State had, in 1848, 166,000 youths between seven and sixteen years
old, of whom only 40,000 attended any school.
Landed property had naturally tended to fall more and more into a few
hands. As John Stuart Mill said of ancient Rome: “When inequality
of wealth once commences in a community not constantly engaged in
repairing, by industry, the injuries of fortune, its advances are
gigantic; the great masses swallow up the smaller. The Roman Empire
ultimately became covered with the vast landed possessions of a
comparatively few families, for whose luxury, and still more for
whose ostentation, the most costly products were raised, while the
cultivators of the soil were slaves or small tenants in a nearly
servile condition.” The description is closely applicable to the landed
aristocracy of the South in the years immediately before the war.
It is a mistake--a not uncommon mistake--to suppose that the
_ante-bellum_ South was poor. It was rich--considerably richer than the
North, in proportion to its population. In 1860 the South had much more
than its share of the assessed wealth of the nation. The total value
of property in the Union was $12,000,000,000, and of this the Southern
States, with only one-third of the country’s population (and less than
one-fourth of the country’s _white_ population), had $5,000,000,000, or
more than forty per cent.
But in the agricultural South wealth was far more unevenly distributed
than in the manufacturing and commercial North. In the latter great
fortunes were made, but were almost sure to be distributed among
several heirs, or lost in the fluctuations of trade, while the
prevalence of the industrial and inventive spirit opened the path of
advancement to those born at the bottom of the ladder. In the former,
large landed properties were handed down from father to son, and tended
to grow larger by accretion, as is the rule with great estates. The
small land owner could not compete with them. The peasant, whose only
calling was the tilling of the soil, had little prospect of bettering
his condition.
“The Southern planter,” says a member[2] of one of the old landed
families, who is now well known as the self-appointed manager of
New York society, “was a born aristocrat. He had literally as much
power in his little sphere as any old feudal lord. His slaves were
the creatures of his caprice and pleasure. The work of their hands
supported him, gave him his position and influence. I have lived on a
plantation with twelve hundred slaves, all devotedly attached to their
master, evidencing as much loyalty and fealty as an Englishman to his
sovereign, and taking great pride in their master and mistress.”
The planter’s life was one of patriarchal magnificence. His
entertainments, according to the same authority, “would be appreciated
in the old Faubourg at Paris;” his wines were old and abundant; his
songs were the ballads of his historical prototype, the mediæval baron
of England:
“Lord Thomas, he was a bold forester,
The keeper of the King’s deer;
Lady Eleanor was a fine woman,
Lord Thomas he loved her dear.”
Political power within its own commonwealths was of course practically
monopolized by this land-owning caste. Of power in national politics it
wielded a tremendous share. It had taken advantage of that feature of
the Federal Constitution which, when it was first framed, Patrick Henry
attacked when he prophesied that “an aristocracy of the rich and well
born would spring up and trample upon the masses.” Outnumbered in the
House of Representatives, it had firmly intrenched itself in the United
States Senate.
In that body, up to the time just before the war, when it was no longer
possible to create a new Southern State to offset each Northern
State, it held half the seats and votes--a position that gave it
complete control of all Presidential nominations to office. Through its
possession of this unassailable veto power on appointments, it had come
to pass that, as Mr. Blaine observes in his “Twenty Years of Congress,”
“the Courts of the United States, both Supreme and District, throughout
the Union, were filled with men acceptable to the South. Cabinets were
constituted in the same way. Representatives of the government in
foreign countries were necessarily taken from the class approved by
the same power. Mr. Webster, speaking in his most conservative tone in
the famous speech of March 7, 1850, declared that from the formation
of the Union to that hour the South had monopolized three-fourths of
the places of honor and emolument under the Federal Government. It was
an accepted fact that the class interest of slavery, by holding a tie
in the Senate, could defeat any measure or any nomination to which its
leaders might be opposed; and, thus banded together by an absolutely
cohesive political force, they could and did dictate terms.”
Such was the land-holding, slave-holding, office-holding aristocracy,
against which the first directly and avowedly antagonistic movement was
that of the Republican party. Young and weak in its first Presidential
contest of 1856, the new organization gathered strength steadily; and
when, on April 29, 1860, the Democratic Convention at Baltimore was
rent asunder by the Secessionists, it became clear that the Republicans
would have to face the threatened disruption of the Union.
The Republican Convention met at Chicago and chose, in preference
to the able and experienced Seward, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, a
man who, then comparatively unknown, was to take rank as perhaps the
noblest and greatest of all America’s sons.
Lincoln, when asked for an account of his boyhood, said that it
might be summed up in Crabbe’s famous line: “The short and simple
annals of the poor.” J. G. Holland thus reviews the career of the
man who led the struggle that began in 1860: “Born in the humblest
and remotest obscurity, subjected to the rudest toil in the meanest
offices, achieving the development of his powers by means of his own
institution, he had, with none of the tricks of the demagogue, with
none of the aids of wealth and social influence, with none of the
opportunities for exhibiting his powers which high official position
bestows, against all the combinations of genius and eminence and
interest, raised himself by force of manly excellence of heart and
brain into national recognition, and had become the local center of
the affectionate interest and curious inquisition of thirty millions of
people.”
To the end of his life, Lincoln was the very incarnation of democratic
simplicity. He was never at home in a drawing-room; he never could
dispose gracefully his hands and feet--appendages whose size was
proportionate to his huge stature. After his nomination for the
Presidency, he used to answer his own bell at his little house in
Springfield, Illinois.
The people’s man of 1860, ABRAHAM LINCOLN! The pulse of patriotism
quickens at the pronunciation of the name. The people’s plain Abe
Lincoln; one of them, a commoner, of them, with them, like them.
To foreign nations, he may have appeared as “President Abraham
Lincoln, Chief Magistrate of the United States.” He may have been
“Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy,” in the minds of his
subordinates in those two important branches of his administration
from ’61 to ’65. History may record him as the “wise, able, and
philanthropical.” But his memory will last enshrined in a temple more
lasting than bronze or stone--the hearts of the people.
To them he was Abe Lincoln--one of them, feeling their sensations,
a common bond between him and them. He was a democrat by birth, by
experience, by sentiment, reason, and patriotism. He was a President
of the masses, and how well and loyally did they love him! His homely
ways and phrases, his unadorned and vigorous speeches, were the ways of
the people, speeches of the people; loved by the people for the very
enemies he had made, for his enemies were the enemies of the people.
Every caricature of Lincoln was a caricature of the people; every
attack upon his personality was an attack upon the personality of the
“mudsills” of the people, and his call to arms was their call to arms,
and they sprang forward, responsive to his appeal, recognizing in it
their appeal, as no sham aristocrat or autocrat can ever hope to have a
nation do.
His memory will not remain green in the minds of the masses by his
martyrdom; but dear will the picture be, from generation to generation,
of the boy studying by the light of a flickering fire, and splitting
rails for daily bread; fighting his way onward and upward without
wealth, or powerful friends, until at last, in the supreme hour of the
people’s need, he comes to bear their standard in the battle which
they waged against “caste.” He did not come to the contest as a hired
soldier, but as a volunteer, feeling all that was felt by the common
soldier. It was _his_ battle, for he had felt the sting of class
distinction, as did every private soldier of his army.
Loving, loyal, faithful Abe Lincoln! May your name never be belittled
by any of your descendants adopting a crest or coat-of-arms. Your
coat-of-arms is engraved in figures as lasting as the eternal hills of
America upon the minds of the people. Should a degenerate descendant
seek a coat-of-arms, let him make it an axe and rail, surrounded
by the laurel wreath bestowed by the loving, trusting people; for
Abe Lincoln was best and only loved by the very term by which the
aristocrats attempted to disparage him--“the rail-splitter.” After
the election of Abraham Lincoln, while he remained at Springfield,
the chosen representative of the people, he was the most approachable
man in America; even though at that time he must have felt the heavy
weight of responsibility thrust upon him, viewing as he could the mass
which, like a snowball, was increasing as it progressed under the weak
administration of his predecessor. Think of the anxious hours that
this man spent, knowing what the people expected of him, and seeing
the number of his difficulties being added to, day by day, while
those who had the burden to bear were obliged, until the fourth of
the succeeding March, to sit still and watch the accumulation. Yet
in those anxious hours, while receiving counsel of the mighty of the
political world, many of whom were strangers to him and to whom he was
a stranger, yet, still, while watching thus, the pillar of the Union,
stone by stone falling away; while thus counselled, advised by those
he knew not whether to trust or not; while his mind must necessarily
have been weighed down with the thought of his own possible inability
to meet the expectations of his friends, the people, in that great
new sphere to which they had called him, Abe Lincoln still had time
to grasp the hand and wish good cheer to an old friend, neighbor, or
one of the people. From birth to death, his life will form a lesson
that the new Chief of the people whom they have called to be President
of the United States, Grover Cleveland, could well study, and Abe
Lincoln’s example emulate, if he would hold the love of those who, by
their votes, put him into the Presidential chair.
This man, Abraham Lincoln, represented that class of people who had
been dubbed “mudsills” by the orators who represented the believers
in “caste” in the South. He stood as the very personification of
“mudsillism,” which, read in the light of recently written history,
meant the Common People--that is, the majority; and the majority ruled
after his election in 1860, even though it required the use of bullets
against the aristocratic class, just as the majority will rule in 1892,
after the election of Grover Cleveland as representative of the Common
People.
The South sought by secession to absolve itself from the domination of
the masses. It was like the patricians of Rome seeking the Sacred Hill
to build a new city. It failed, as will ever the minority, representing
a false idea of American society and a false conception of the spirit
with which every American is imbued, do in the future. But, be it
said to the credit of the believers in aristocracy in 1860, that they
had the courage of their convictions, and they fought a manly battle
to establish that which is impossible in America. The history of the
Southerners’ sufferings and dangers, endured uncomplainingly, forms a
bright and shining exception to the conduct of the typical believer in
“caste.” Sham aristocracy, which has disregarded the rights and wounded
the feelings of the people for the past twenty-five years, that sham
aristocracy which is a direct outgrowth resulting from the suppression
of the Southern aristocracy, if tested as the Southern aristocracy
has been, would be found deficient in those qualities of courage and
determination which made even the Southerners’ false ideas respected
and respectable.
The sham aristocracy of to-day, unlike the false aristocracy of 1860,
would hire bullies, outcasts, and vagrants to do their fighting, as did
those magnificent illustrations of “caste” in our country, Carnegie and
Frick, at Homestead, and Son-in-law Webb at Buffalo.
The advocates of “caste” in 1860, the Southerners, not alone possessed
courage and determination, but, accepting the result of the conflict,
have exhibited since the days of Reconstruction that wonderful
degree of political acumen for which they have ever been famous.
Early recognizing that in their struggle for an independent national
existence, the Southern Confederacy, they had been defeated--not by
the aristocracy of the North and West, but by the Common People; that
is, the most powerful portion of the population of the Union--the
Southerner, the secessionist, the aristocrat of 1860, submerged himself
in the ocean of the Common People, the great majority, the democracy!
The Secessionist, who opposed Abraham Lincoln’s administration in 1860
and used bullets to express his opposition in 1861, had firm conviction
carried to his hesitating heart by the events that transpired between
1861 and 1865, that the “Common People”--the majority--must rule;
and that with the freeing of his slaves he had lost the only possible
foundation upon which he could rest his claim of social superiority
in this country. Therefore, as the wise man that he has demonstrated
himself to be, the aristocrat of 1860 has become the most earnest
and patriotic member of a broad democracy in 1892; realizing from
experience that upon that rock alone he can build the edifice of
prosperity in his section of the country; also realizing from a sad
experience that the Common People, democracy (though it was called
Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party), was the crag upon which his bark
of Secession was shivered in 1865.
[Illustration: ANDREW JACKSON.
The “People’s” President, 1828.]
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Of course I mean Ward McAllister. This is not from his book, but
from a recent article of his published in the New York _World_.