Thus ended the attempted secession of these States; thus the four
years' war. But the main things come subtly and invisibly afterward,
perhaps long afterward--neither military, political, nor (great as
those are), historical. I say, certain secondary and indirect results,
out of the tragedy of this death, are, in my opinion, greatest. Not
the event of the murder itself. Not that Mr. Lincoln strings the
principal points and personages of the period, like beads, upon the
single string of his career. Not that his idiosyncrasy, in its sudden
appearance and disappearance, stamps this Republic with a stamp more
mark'd and enduring than any yet given by any one man--(more even than
Washington's)--but, join'd with these, the immeasurable value and
meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me, in senses finally dearest
to a nation (and here all our own)--the imaginative and artistic
senses--the literary and dramatic ones. Not in any common or low
meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the race, and
to every age. A long and varied series of contradictory events
arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial
denouement. The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the
secession period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash
of lightning-illumination--one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp
culmination, and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry
problems, illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal
Time, where the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at
the other, suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in
the long drama of creative thought, and give it radiation, tableau,
stranger than fiction. Fit radiation--fit close! How the
imagination--how the student loves these things! America, too, is to
have them. For not in all great deaths, nor far or near--not Cæsar in
the Roman senate-house, nor Napoleon passing away in the wild
night-storm at St. Helena--not Paleologus, falling, desperately
fighting, piled over dozens deep with Grecian corpses--not calm old
Socrates, drinking the hemlock--outvies that terminus of the secession
war, in one man's life, here in our midst, in our own time--that seal
of the emancipation of three million slaves--that parturition and
delivery of our at last really free Republic, born again, henceforth
to commence its career of genuine homogeneous Union, compact,
consistent with itself.
[12] _By permission of David McKay._