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 to 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 hindrance 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 center 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 work-day
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.
* * * * *
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 Quintilian; 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 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.