1864-1865
By arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.
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
coöperation, 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
statecraft; 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 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 of 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 state-craft 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 obstinacy in prejudice,
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 anti-slavery, 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 anti-slavery 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
forfeiting 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.