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[Frontispiece: Abraham Lincoln]
MEMORIAL ADDRESS
ON THE
LIFE AND CHARACTER
OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
DELIVERED,
AT THE REQUEST OF BOTH HOUSES OF THE
CONGRESS OF AMERICA,
BEFORE THEM,
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
AT WASHINGTON,
ON THE 12TH OF FEBRUARY, 1866.
BY GEORGE BANCROFT.
WASHINGTON:
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE.
1866.
ORATION.
SENATORS,
REPRESENTATIVES OF AMERICA:
That God rules in the affairs of men is as certain as any truth of
physical science. On the great moving power which is from the beginning
hangs the world of the senses and the world of thought and action.
Eternal wisdom marshals the great procession of the nations, working in
patient continuity through the ages, never halting and never abrupt,
encompassing all events in its oversight, and ever effecting its will,
though mortals may slumber in apathy or oppose with madness. Kings are
lifted up or thrown down, nations come and go, republics flourish and
wither, dynasties pass away like a tale that is told; but nothing is by
chance, though men, in their ignorance of causes, may think so. The
deeds of time are governed, as well as judged, by the decrees of
eternity. The caprice of fleeting existences bends to the immovable
omnipotence, which plants its foot on all the centuries and has neither
change of purpose nor repose. Sometimes, like a messenger through the
thick darkness of night, it steps along mysterious ways; but when the
hour strikes for a people, or for mankind, to pass into a new form of
being, unseen hands draw the bolts from the gates of futurity; an
all-subduing influence prepares the minds of men for the coming
revolution; those who plan resistance find themselves in conflict with
the will of Providence rather than with human devices; and all hearts
and all understandings, most of all the opinions and influences of the
unwilling, are wonderfully attracted and compelled to bear forward the
change, which becomes more an obedience to the law of universal nature
than submission to the arbitrament of man.
In the fulness of time a republic rose up in the wilderness of America.
Thousands of years had passed away before this child of the ages could
be born. From whatever there was of good in the systems of former
centuries she drew her nourishment; the wrecks of the past were her
warnings. With the deepest sentiment of faith fixed in her inmost
nature, she disenthralled religion from bondage to temporal power, that
her worship might be worship only in spirit and in truth. The wisdom
which had passed from India through Greece, with what Greece had added
of her own; the jurisprudence of Rome; the mediaeval municipalities;
the Teutonic method of representation; the political experience of
England; the benignant wisdom of the expositors of the law of nature
and of nations in France and Holland, all shed on her their selectest
influence. She washed the gold of political wisdom from the sands
wherever it was found; she cleft it from the rocks; she gleaned it
among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of
all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial
political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics. The
wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture of monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these names to extract
from them the vital elements of social forms, and blend them
harmoniously in the free commonwealth, which comes nearest to the
illustration of the natural equality of all men. She intrusted the
guardianship of established rights to law, the movements of reform to
the spirit of the people, and drew her force from the happy
reconciliation of both.
Republics had heretofore been limited to small cantons, or cities and
their dependencies; America, doing that of which the like had not
before been known upon the earth, or believed by kings and statesmen to
be possible, extended her republic across a continent. Under her
auspices the vine of liberty took deep root and filled the land; the
hills were covered with its shadow, its boughs were like the goodly
cedars, and reached unto both oceans. The fame of this only daughter of
freedom went out into all the lands of the earth; from her the human
race drew hope.
Neither hereditary monarchy nor hereditary aristocracy planted itself
on our soil; the only hereditary condition that fastened itself upon us
was servitude. Nature works in sincerity, and is ever true to its law.
The bee hives honey; the viper distils poison; the vine stores its
juices, and so do the poppy and the upas. In like manner every thought
and every action ripens its seed, each according to its kind. In the
individual man, and still more in a nation, a just idea gives life, and
progress, and glory; a false conception portends disaster, shame, and
death. A hundred and twenty years ago a West Jersey Quaker wrote: "This
trade of importing slaves is dark gloominess hanging over the land; the
consequences will be grievous to posterity." At the north the growth of
slavery was arrested by natural causes; in the region nearest the
tropics it throve rankly, and worked itself into the organism of the
rising States. Virginia stood between the two, with soil, and climate,
and resources demanding free labor, yet capable of the profitable
employment of the slave. She was the land of great statesmen, and they
saw the danger of her being whelmed under the rising flood in time to
struggle against the delusions of avarice and pride. Ninety-four years
ago the legislature of Virginia addressed the British king, saying that
the trade in slaves was "of great inhumanity," was opposed to the
"security and happiness" of their constituents, "would in time have the
most destructive influence," and "endanger their very existence." And
the king answered them that, "upon pain of his highest displeasure, the
importation of slaves should not be in any respect obstructed."
"Pharisaical Britain," wrote Franklin in behalf of Virginia, "to pride
thyself in setting free a single slave that happened to land on thy
coasts, while thy laws continue a traffic whereby so many hundreds of
thousands are dragged into a slavery that is entailed on their
posterity." "A serious view of this subject," said Patrick Henry in
1773, "gives a gloomy prospect to future times." In the same year
George Mason wrote to the legislature of Virginia: "The laws of
impartial Providence may avenge our injustice upon our posterity."
Conforming his conduct to his convictions, Jefferson, in Virginia, and
in the Continental Congress, with the approval of Edmund Pendleton,
branded the slave-trade as piracy; and he fixed in the Declaration of
Independence, as the corner-stone of America: "All men are created
equal, with an unalienable right to liberty." On the first organization
of temporary governments for the continental domain, Jefferson, but for
the default of New Jersey, would, in 1784, have consecrated every part
of that territory to freedom. In the formation of the national
Constitution, Virginia, opposed by a part of New England, vainly
struggled to abolish the slave-trade at once and forever; and when the
ordinance of 1787 was introduced by Nathan Dane without the clause
prohibiting slavery, it was through the favorable disposition of
Virginia and the South that the clause of Jefferson was restored, and
the whole northwestern territory--all the territory that then belonged
to the nation--was reserved for the labor of freemen.
The hope prevailed in Virginia that the abolition of the slave-trade
would bring with it the gradual abolition of slavery; but the
expectation was doomed to disappointment. In supporting incipient
measures for emancipation, Jefferson encountered difficulties greater
than he could overcome, and, after vain wrestlings, the words that
broke from him, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is
just, that His justice cannot sleep forever," were words of despair. It
was the desire of Washington's heart that Virginia should remove
slavery by a public act; and as the prospects of a general emancipation
grew more and more dim, he, in utter hopelessness of the action of the
State, did all that he could by bequeathing freedom to his own slaves.
Good and true men had, from the days of 1776, suggested the colonizing
of the negro in the home of his ancestors; but the idea of colonization
was thought to increase the difficulty of emancipation, and, in spite
of strong support, while it accomplished much good for Africa, it
proved impracticable as a remedy at home. Madison, who in early life
disliked slavery so much that he wished "to depend as little as
possible on the labor of slaves;" Madison, who held that where slavery
exists "the republican theory becomes fallacious;" Madison, who in the
last years of his life would not consent to the annexation of Texas,
lest his countrymen should fill it with slaves; Madison, who said,
"slavery is the greatest evil under which the nation labors--a
portentous evil--an evil, moral, political, and economical--a sad blot
on our free country"--went mournfully into old age with the cheerless
words: "No satisfactory plan has yet been devised for taking out the
stain."
The men of the Revolution passed away; a new generation sprang up,
impatient that an institution to which they clung should be condemned
as inhuman, unwise, and unjust. In the throes of discontent at the
self-reproach of their fathers, and blinded by the lustre of wealth to
be acquired by the culture of a new staple, they devised the theory
that slavery, which they would not abolish, was not evil, but good.
They turned on the friends of colonization, and confidently demanded:
"Why take black men from a civilized and Christian country, where their
labor is a source of immense gain, and a power to control the markets
of the world, and send them to a land of ignorance, idolatry, and
indolence, which was the home of their forefathers, but not theirs?
Slavery is a blessing. Were they not in their ancestral land naked,
scarcely lifted above brutes, ignorant of the course of the sun,
controlled by nature? And in their new abode have they not been taught
to know the difference of the seasons, to plough, and plant, and reap,
to drive oxen, to tame the horse, to exchange their scanty dialect for
the richest of all the languages among men, and the stupid adoration of
follies for the purest religion? And since slavery is good for the
blacks, it is good for their masters, bringing opulence and the
opportunity of educating a race. The slavery of the black is good in
itself; he shall serve the white man forever." And nature, which better
understood the quality of fleeting interest and passion, laughed as it
caught the echo, "man" and "forever!"
A regular development of pretensions followed the new declaration with
logical consistency. Under the old declaration every one of the States
had retained, each for itself, the right of manumitting all slaves by
an ordinary act of legislation; now the power of the people over
servitude through their legislatures was curtailed, and the privileged
class was swift in imposing legal and constitutional obstructions on
the people themselves. The power of emancipation was narrowed or taken
away. The slave might not be disquieted by education. There remained an
unconfessed consciousness that the system of bondage was wrong, and a
restless memory that it was at variance with the true American
tradition; its safety was therefore to be secured by political
organization. The generation that made the Constitution took care for
the predominance of freedom in Congress by the ordinance of Jefferson;
the new school aspired to secure for slavery an equality of votes in
the Senate, and, while it hinted at an organic act that should concede
to the collective South a veto power on national legislation, it
assumed that each State separately had the right to revise and nullify
laws of the United States, according to the discretion of its judgment.
The new theory hung as a bias on the foreign relations of the country;
there could be no recognition of Hayti, nor even of the American colony
of Liberia; and the world was given to understand that the
establishment of free labor in Cuba would be a reason for wresting that
island from Spain. Territories were annexed--Louisiana, Florida, Texas,
half of Mexico; slavery must have its share in them all, and it
accepted for a time a dividing line between the unquestioned domain of
free labor and that in which involuntary labor was to be tolerated. A
few years passed away, and the new school, strong and arrogant,
demanded and received an apology for applying the Jefferson proviso to
Oregon.
The application of that proviso was interrupted for three
administrations, but justice moved steadily onward. In the news that
the men of California had chosen freedom, Calhoun heard the knell of
parting slavery, and on his death-bed he counselled secession.
Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison had died despairing of the
abolition of slavery; Calhoun died in despair at the growth of freedom.
His system rushed irresistibly to its natural development. The
death-struggle for California was followed by a short truce; but the
new school of politicians, who said that slavery was not evil, but
good, soon sought to recover the ground they had lost, and, confident
of securing Kansas, they demanded that the established line in the
Territories between freedom and slavery should be blotted out. The
country, believing in the strength and enterprise and expansive energy
of freedom, made answer, though reluctantly: "Be it so; let there be no
strife between brethren; let freedom and slavery compete for the
Territories on equal terms, in a fair field, under an impartial
administration;" and on this theory, if on any, the contest might have
been left to the decision of time.
The South started back in appalment from its victory, for it knew that
a fair competition foreboded its defeat. But where could it now find an
ally to save it from its own mistake? What I have next to say is spoken
with no emotion but regret. Our meeting to-day is, as it were, at the
grave, in the presence of eternity, and the truth must be uttered in
soberness and sincerity. In a great republic, as was observed more than
two thousand years ago, any attempt to overturn the state owes its
strength to aid from some branch of the government. The Chief Justice
of the United States, without any necessity or occasion, volunteered to
come to the rescue of the theory of slavery; and from his court there
lay no appeal but to the bar of humanity and history. Against the
Constitution, against the memory of the nation, against a previous
decision, against a series of enactments, he decided that the slave is
property; that slave property is entitled to no less protection than
any other property; that the Constitution upholds it in every Territory
against any act of a local legislature, and even against Congress
itself; or, as the President for that term tersely promulgated the
saying, "Kansas is as much a slave State as South Carolina or Georgia;
slavery, by virtue of the Constitution, exists in every Territory." The
municipal character of slavery being thus taken away, and slave
property decreed to be "sacred," the authority of the courts was
invoked to introduce it by the comity of law into States where slavery
had been abolished, and in one of the courts of the United States a
judge pronounced the African slave-trade legitimate, and numerous and
powerful advocates demanded its restoration.
Moreover, the Chief Justice, in his elaborate opinion, announced what
had never been heard from any magistrate of Greece or Rome; what was
unknown to civil law, and canon law, and feudal law, and common law,
and constitutional law; unknown to Jay, to Rutledge, Ellsworth, and
Marshall--that there are "slave races." The spirit of evil is intensely
logical. Having the authority of this decision, five States swiftly
followed the earlier example of a sixth, and opened the way for
reducing the free negro to bondage; the migrating free negro became a
slave if he but entered within the jurisdiction of a seventh; and an
eighth, from its extent, and soil, and mineral resources, destined to
incalculable greatness, closed its eyes on its coming, prosperity, and
enacted, as by Taney's dictum it had the right to do, that every free
black man who would live within its limits must accept the condition of
slavery for himself and his posterity.
Only one step more remained to be taken. Jefferson and the leading
statesmen of his day held fast to the idea that the enslavement of the
African was socially, morally, and politically wrong. The new school
was founded exactly upon the opposite idea; and they resolved, first,
to distract the democratic party, for which the Supreme Court had now
furnished the means, and then to establish a new government, with negro
slavery for its corner-stone, as socially, morally, and politically
right.
As the Presidential election drew on, one of the great traditional
parties did not make its appearance; the other reeled as it sought to
preserve its old position, and the candidate who most nearly
represented its best opinion, driven by patriotic zeal, roamed the
country from end to end to speak for union, eager, at least, to
confront its enemies, yet not having hope that it would find its
deliverance through him. The storm rose to a whirlwind; who should
allay its wrath? The most experienced statesmen of the country had
failed; there was no hope from those who were great after the flesh:
could relief come from one whose wisdom was like the wisdom of little
children?
The choice of America fell on a man born west of the Alleghanies, in
the cabin of poor people of Hardin county, Kentucky--ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
His mother could read, but not write; his father could do neither; but
his parents sent him, with an old spelling-book, to school, and he
learned in his childhood to do both.
When eight years old he floated down the Ohio with his father on a
raft, which bore the family and all their possessions to the shore of
Indiana; and, child as he was, he gave help as they toiled through
dense forests to the interior of Spencer county. There, in the land of
free labor, he grew up in a log-cabin, with the solemn solitude for his
teacher in his meditative hours. Of Asiatic literature he knew only the
Bible; of Greek, Latin, and mediaeval, no more than the translation of
Aesop's Fables; of English, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The
traditions of George Fox and William Penn passed to him dimly along
the lines of two centuries through his ancestors, who were Quakers.
Otherwise his education was altogether American. The Declaration of
Independence was his compendium of political wisdom, the Life of
Washington his constant study, and something of Jefferson and Madison
reached him through Henry Clay, whom he honored from boyhood. For the
rest, from day to day, he lived the life of the American people, walked
in its light, reasoned with its reason, thought with its power of
thought, felt the beatings of its mighty heart, and so was in every way
a child of nature, a child of the West, a child of America.
At nineteen, feeling impulses of ambition to get on in the world, he
engaged himself to go down the Mississippi in a flatboat, receiving ten
dollars a month for his wages, and afterwards he made the trip once
more. At twenty-one he drove his father's cattle, as the family
migrated to Illinois, and split rails to fence in the new homestead in
the wild. At twenty-three he was a captain of volunteers in the Black
Hawk war. He kept a store. He learned something of surveying, but of
English literature he added to Bunyan nothing but Shakspeare's plays.
At twenty-five he was elected to the legislature of Illinois, where he
served eight years. At twenty-seven he was admitted to the bar. In 1837
he chose his home at Springfield, the beautiful centre of the richest
land in the State. In 1847 he was a member of the national Congress,
where he voted about forty times in favor of the principle of the
Jefferson proviso. In 1849 he sought, eagerly but unsuccessfully, the
place of Commissioner of the Land Office, and he refused an appointment
that would have transferred his residence to Oregon. In 1854 he gave
his influence to elect from Illinois, to the American Senate, a
Democrat, who would certainly do justice to Kansas. In 1858, as the
rival of Douglas, he went before the people of the mighty Prairie
State, saying, "This Union cannot permanently endure half slave and
half free; the Union will not be dissolved, but the house will cease to
be divided;" and now, in 1861, with no experience whatever as an
executive officer, while States were madly flying from their orbit, and
wise men knew not where to find counsel, this descendant of Quakers,
this pupil of Bunyan, this offspring of the great West, was elected
President of America.
He measured the difficulty of the duty that devolved upon him, and was
resolved to fulfil it. As on the eleventh of February, 1861, he left
Springfield, which for a quarter of a century had been his happy home,
to the crowd of his friends and neighbors, whom he was never more to
meet, he spoke a solemn farewell: "I know not how soon I shall see you
again. A duty has devolved upon me, greater than that which has
devolved upon any other man since Washington. He never would have
succeeded, except for the aid of Divine Providence, upon which he at
all times relied. On the same Almighty Being I place my reliance. Pray
that I may receive that Divine assistance, without which I cannot
succeed, but with which success is certain." To the men of Indiana he
said: "I am but an accidental, temporary instrument; it is your
business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty." At the capital
of Ohio he said: "Without a name, without a reason why I should have a
name, there has fallen upon me a task such as did not rest even upon
the Father of his country." At various places in New York, especially
at Albany, before the legislature, which tendered him the united
support of the great Empire State, he said: "While I hold myself the
humblest of all the individuals who have ever been elevated to the
Presidency, I have a more difficult task to perform than any of them. I
bring a true heart to the work. I must rely upon the people of the
whole country for support, and with their sustaining aid even I, humble
as I am, cannot fail to carry the ship of state safely through the
storm." To the assembly of New Jersey, at Trenton, he explained: "I
shall take the ground I deem most just to the North, the East, the
West, the South, and the whole country, in good temper, certainly with
no malice to any section. I am devoted to peace, but it may be
necessary to put the foot down firmly." In the old Independence Hall,
of Philadelphia, he said: "I have never had a feeling politically that
did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of
Independence, which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this
country, but to the world in all future time. If the country cannot be
saved without giving up that principle, I would rather be assassinated
on the spot than surrender it. I have said nothing but what I am
willing to live and die by."
Travelling in the dead of night to escape assassination, LINCOLN
arrived at Washington nine days before his inauguration. The outgoing
President, at the opening of the session of Congress, had still kept as
the majority of his advisers men engaged in treason; had declared that
in case of even an "imaginary" apprehension of danger from notions of
freedom among the slaves, "disunion would become inevitable." LINCOLN
and others had questioned the opinion of Taney; such impugning he
ascribed to the "factious temper of the times." The favorite doctrine
of the majority of the Democratic party on the power of a territorial
legislature over slavery he condemned as an attack on "the sacred
rights of property." The State legislatures, he insisted, must repeal
what he called "their unconstitutional and obnoxious enactments," and
which, if such, were "null and void," or "it would be impossible for
any human power to save the Union." Nay! if these unimportant acts were
not repealed, "the injured States would be justified in revolutionary
resistance to the government of the Union." He maintained that no State
might secede at its sovereign will and pleasure; that the Union was
meant for perpetuity, and that Congress might attempt to preserve it,
but only by conciliation; that "the sword was not placed in their hands
to preserve it by force;" that "the last desperate remedy of a
despairing people" would be "an explanatory amendment recognising the
decision of the Supreme Court of the United States." The American Union
he called "a confederacy" of States, and he thought it a duty to make
the appeal for the amendment "before any of these States should
separate themselves from the Union." The views of the Lieutenant
General, containing some patriotic advice, "conceded the right of
secession," pronounced a quadruple rupture of the Union "a smaller evil
than the reuniting of the fragments by the sword," and "eschewed the
idea of invading a seceded State." After changes in the Cabinet, the
President informed Congress that "matters were still worse;" that "the
South suffered serious grievances," which should be redressed "in
peace." The day after this message the flag of the Union was fired upon
from Fort Morris, and the insult was not revenged or noticed. Senators
in Congress telegraphed to their constituents to seize the national
forts, and they were not arrested. The finances of the country were
grievously embarrassed. Its little army was not within reach; the part
of it in Texas, with all its stores, was made over by its commander to
rebels. One State after another voted in convention to secede. A peace
congress, so called, met at the request of Virginia, to concert the
terms of a capitulation which should secure permission for the
continuance of the Union. Congress, in both branches, sought to devise
conciliatory expedients; the Territories of the country were organized
in a manner not to conflict with any pretensions of the South, or any
decision of the Supreme Court; and, nevertheless, the representatives
of the rebellion formed at Montgomery a provisional government, and
pursued their relentless purpose with such success that the Lieutenant
General feared the city of Washington might find itself "included in a
foreign country," and proposed, among the options for the consideration
of LINCOLN, to bid the wayward States "depart in peace." The great
republic appeared to have its emblem in the vast unfinished Capitol, at
that moment surrounded by masses of stone and prostrate columns never
yet lifted into their places, seemingly the monument of high but
delusive aspirations, the confused wreck of inchoate magnificence,
sadder than any ruin of Egyptian Thebes or Athens.
The fourth of March came. With instinctive wisdom the new President,
speaking to the people on taking the oath of office, put aside every
question that divided the country, and gained a right to universal
support by planting himself on the single idea of Union. The Union he
declared to be unbroken and perpetual, and he announced his
determination to fulfil "the simple duty of taking care that the laws
be faithfully executed in all the States." Seven days later, the
convention of Confederate States unanimously adopted a constitution of
their own, and the new government was authoritatively announced to be
founded on the idea that the negro race is a slave race; that slavery
is its natural and normal condition. The issue was made up, whether the
great republic was to maintain its providential place in the history of
mankind, or a rebellion founded on negro slavery gain a recognition of
its principle throughout the civilized world. To the disaffected
LINCOLN had said, "You can have no conflict without being yourselves
the aggressors." To fire the passions of the southern portion of the
people, the confederate government chose to become aggressors, and, on
the morning of the twelfth of April, began the bombardment of Fort
Sumter, and compelled its evacuation.
It is the glory of the late President that he had perfect faith in the
perpetuity of the Union. Supported in advance by Douglas, who spoke as
with the voice of a million, he instantly called a meeting of Congress,
and summoned the people to come up and repossess the forts, places, and
property which had been seized from the Union. The men of the north
were trained in schools; industrious and frugal; many of them
delicately bred, their minds teeming with ideas and fertile in plans of
enterprise; given to the culture of the arts; eager in the pursuit of
wealth, yet employing wealth less for ostentation than for developing
the resources of their country; seeking happiness in the calm of
domestic life; and such lovers of peace, that for generations they had
been reputed unwarlike. Now, at the cry of their country in its
distress, they rose up with unappeasable patriotism; not hirelings--the
purest and of the best blood in the land. Sons of a pious ancestry,
with a clear perception of duty, unclouded faith and fixed resolve to
succeed, they thronged around the President, to support the wronged,
the beautiful flag of the nation. The halls of theological seminaries
sent forth their young men, whose lips were touched with eloquence,
whose hearts kindled with devotion, to serve in the ranks, and make
their way to command only as they learned the art of war. Striplings in
the colleges, as well the most gentle and the most studious, those of
sweetest temper and loveliest character and brightest genius, passed
from their classes to the camp. The lumbermen from the forests, the
mechanics from their benches, where they had been trained, by the
exercise of political rights, to share the life and hope of the
republic, to feel their responsibility to their forefathers, their
posterity and mankind, went to the front, resolved that their dignity,
as a constituent part of this republic, should not be impaired. Farmers
and sons of farmers left the land but half ploughed, the grain but half
planted, and, taking up the musket, learned to face without fear the
presence of peril and the corning of death in the shocks of war, while
their hearts were still attracted to their herds and fields, and all
the tender affections of home. Whatever there was of truth and faith
and public love in the common heart, broke out with one expression. The
mighty winds blew from every quarter, to fan the flame of the sacred
and unquenchable fire.
For a time the war was thought to be confined to our own domestic
affairs, but it was soon seen that it involved the destinies of
mankind; its principles and causes shook the politics of Europe to the
centre, and from Lisbon to Pekin divided the governments of the world.
There was a kingdom whose people had in an eminent degree attained to
freedom of industry and the security of person and property. Its middle
class rose to greatness. Out of that class sprung the noblest poets and
philosophers, whose words built up the intellect of its people; skilful
navigators, to find out for its merchants the many paths of the oceans;
discoverers in natural science, whose inventions guided its industry to
wealth, till it equalled any nation of the world in letters, and
excelled all in trade and commerce. But its government was become a
government of land, and not of men; every blade of grass was
represented, but only a small minority of the people. In the transition
from the feudal forms the heads of the social organization freed
themselves from the military services which were the conditions of
their tenure, and, throwing the burden on the industrial classes, kept
all the soil to themselves. Vast estates that had been managed by
monasteries as endowments for religion and charity were impropriated to
swell the wealth of courtiers and favorites; and the commons, where the
poor man once had his right of pasture, were taken away, and, under
forms of law, enclosed distributively within the domains of the
adjacent landholders. Although no law forbade any inhabitant from
purchasing land, the costliness of the transfer constituted a
prohibition; so that it was the rule of the country that the plough
should not be in the hands of its owner. The church was rested on a
contradiction; claiming to be an embodiment of absolute truth, it was a
creature of the statute-book.
The progress of time increased the terrible contrast between wealth and
poverty. In their years of strength the laboring people, cut off from
all share in governing the state, derived a scant support from the
severest toil, and had no hope for old age but in public charity or
death. A grasping ambition had dotted the world with military posts,
kept watch over our borders on the northeast, at the Bermudas, in the
West Indies, appropriated the gates of the Pacific, of the Southern and
of the Indian ocean, hovered on our northwest at Vancouver, held the
whole of the newest continent, and the entrances to the old
Mediterranean and Red Sea, and garrisoned forts all the way from Madras
to China. That aristocracy had gazed with terror on the growth of a
commonwealth where freeholders existed by the million, and religion was
not in bondage to the state, and now they could not repress their joy
at its perils. They had not one word of sympathy for the kind-hearted
poor man's son whom America had chosen for her chief; they jeered at
his large hands, and long feet, and ungainly stature; and the British
secretary of state for foreign affairs made haste to send word through
the palaces of Europe that the great republic was in its agony; that
the republic was no more; that a headstone was all that remained due by
the law of nations to "the late Union." But it is written, "Let the
dead bury their dead;" they may not bury the living. Let the dead bury
their dead; let a bill of reform remove the worn-out government of a
class, and infuse new life into the British constitution by confiding
rightful power to the people.
But while the vitality of America is indestructible, the British
government hurried to do what never before had been done by Christian
powers; what was in direct conflict with its own exposition of public
law in the time of our struggle for independence. Though the insurgent
States had not a ship in an open harbor, it invested them with all the
rights of a belligerent, even on the ocean; and this, too, when the
rebellion was not only directed against the gentlest and most
beneficent government on earth, without a shadow of justifiable cause,
but when the rebellion was directed against human nature itself for the
perpetual enslavement of a race. And the effect of this recognition
was, that acts in themselves piratical found shelter in British courts
of law. The resources of British capitalists, their workshops, their
armories, their private arsenals, their ship-yards, were in league with
the insurgents, and every British harbor in the wide world became a
safe port for British ships, manned by British sailors, and armed with
British guns, to prey on our peaceful commerce; even on our ships
coming from British ports, freighted with British products, or that had
carried gifts of grain to the English poor. The prime minister, in the
House of Commons, sustained by cheers, scoffed at the thought that
their laws could be amended at our request, so as to preserve real
neutrality; and to remonstrances, now owned to have been just, their
secretary of state answered that they could not change their laws _ad
infinitum_.
The people of America then wished, as they always have wished, as they
still wish, friendly relations with England, and no man in England or
America can desire it more strongly than I. This country has always
yearned for good relations with England. Thrice only in all its history
has that yearning been fairly met: in the days of Hampden and Cromwell,
again in the first ministry of the elder Pitt, and once again in the
ministry of Shelburne. Not that there have not at all times been just
men among the peers of Britain--like Halifax in the days of James the
Second, or a Granville, an Argyll, or a Houghton in ours; and we cannot
be indifferent to a country that produces statesmen like Cobden and
Bright; but the best bower anchor of peace was the working class of
England, who suffered most from our civil war, but who, while they
broke their diminished bread in sorrow, always encouraged us to
persevere.
The act of recognising the rebel belligerents was concerted with
France--France, so beloved in America, on which she had conferred the
greatest benefits that one people ever conferred on another; France,
which stands foremost on the continent of Europe for the solidity of
her culture, as well as for the bravery and generous impulses of her
sons; France, which for centuries had been moving steadily in her own
way towards intellectual and political freedom. The policy regarding
further colonization of America by European powers, known commonly as
the doctrine of Monroe, had its origin in France, and if it takes any
man's name, should bear the name of Turgot. It was adopted by Louis the
Sixteenth, in the cabinet of which Vergennes was the most important
member. It is emphatically the policy of France, to which, with
transient deviations, the Bourbons, the First Napoleon, the House of
Orleans have adhered.
The late President was perpetually harassed by rumors that the Emperor
Napoleon the Third desired formally to recognise the States in
rebellion as an independent power, and that England held him back by
her reluctance, or France by her traditions of freedom, or he himself
by his own better judgment and clear perception of events. But the
republic of Mexico, on our borders, was, like ourselves, distracted by
a rebellion, and from a similar cause. The monarchy of England had
fastened upon us slavery which did not disappear with independence; in
like manner, the ecclesiastical policy established by the Spanish
council of the Indies, in the days of Charles the Fifth and Philip the
Second, retained its vigor in the Mexican republic. The fifty years of
civil war under which she had languished was due to the bigoted system
which was the legacy of monarchy, just as here the inheritance of
slavery kept alive political strife, and culminated in civil war. As
with us there could be no quiet but through the end of slavery, so in
Mexico there could be no prosperity until the crushing tyranny of
intolerance should cease. The party of slavery in the United States
sent their emissaries to Europe to solicit aid; and so did the party of
the church in Mexico, as organized by the old Spanish council of the
Indies, but with a different result. Just as the Republican party had
made an end of the rebellion, and was establishing the best government
ever known in that region, and giving promise to the nation of order,
peace, and prosperity, word was brought us, in the moment of our
deepest affliction, that the French Emperor, moved by a desire to erect
in North America a buttress for imperialism, would transform the
republic of Mexico into a secundo-geniture for the house of Hapsburg.
America might complain; she could not then interpose, and delay seemed
justifiable. It was seen that Mexico could not, with all its wealth of
land, compete in cereal products with our northwest, nor in tropical
products with Cuba, nor could it, under a disputed dynasty, attract
capital, or create public works, or develop mines, or borrow money; so
that the imperial system of Mexico, which was forced at once to
recognise the wisdom of the policy of the republic by adopting it,
could prove only an unremunerating drain on the French treasury for the
support of an Austrian adventurer.
Meantime a new series of momentous questions grows up, and forces
itself on the consideration of the thoughtful. Republicanism has
learned how to introduce into its constitution every element of order,
as well as every element of freedom; but thus far the continuity of its
government has seemed to depend on the continuity of elections. It is
now to be considered how perpetuity is to be secured against foreign
occupation. The successor of Charles the First of England dated his
reign from the death of his father; the Bourbons, coming back after a
long series of revolutions, claimed that the Louis who became king was
the eighteenth of that name. The present Emperor of the French,
disdaining a title from election alone, calls himself Napoleon the
Third. Shall a republic have less power of continuance when invading
armies prevent a peaceful resort to the ballot-box? What force shall it
attach to intervening legislation? What validity to debts contracted
for its overthrow? These momentous questions are, by the invasion of
Mexico, thrown up for solution. A free state once truly constituted
should be as undying as its people: the republic of Mexico must rise
again.
It was the condition of affairs in Mexico that involved the Pope of
Rome in our difficulties so far that he alone among sovereigns
recognised the chief of the Confederate States as a president, and his
supporters as a people; and in letters to two great prelates of the
Catholic church in the United States gave counsels for peace at a time
when peace meant the victory of secession. Yet events move as they are
ordered. The blessing of the Pope at Rome on the head of Duke
Maximilian could not revive in the nineteenth century the
ecclesiastical policy of the sixteenth, and the result is only a new
proof that there can be no prosperity in the state without religious
freedom.
When it came home to the consciousness of the Americans that the war
which they were waging was a war for the liberty of all the nations of
the world, for freedom itself, they thanked God for giving them
strength to endure the severity of the trial to which He put their
sincerity, and nerved themselves for their duty with an inexorable
will. The President was led along by the greatness of their
self-sacrificing example; and as a child, in a dark night, on a rugged
way, catches hold of the hand of its father for guidance and support,
he clung fast to the hand of the people, and moved calmly through the
gloom. While the statesmanship of Europe was mocking at the hopeless
vanity of their efforts, they put forth such miracles of energy as the
history of the world had never known. The contributions to the popular
loans amounted in four years to twenty-seven and a half hundred
millions of dollars; the revenue of the country from taxation was
increased seven-fold. The navy of the United States, drawing into the
public service the willing militia of the seas, doubled its tonnage in
eight months, and established an actual blockade from Cape Hatteras to
the Rio Grande; in the course of the war it was increased five-fold in
men and in tonnage, while the inventive genius of the country devised
more effective kinds of ordnance, and new forms of naval architecture
in wood and iron. There went into the field, for various terms of
enlistment, about two million men, and in March last the men in the
army exceeded a million: that is to say, nine of every twenty
able-bodied men in the free Territories and States took some part in
the war; and at one time every fifth of their able-bodied men was in
service. In one single month one hundred and sixty-five thousand men
were recruited into service. Once, within four weeks, Ohio organized
and placed in the field forty-two regiments of infantry--nearly
thirty-six thousand men; and Ohio was like other States in the east and
in the west. The well-mounted cavalry numbered eighty-four thousand; of
horses and mules there were bought, from first to last, two-thirds of a
million. In the movements of troops science came in aid of patriotism,
so that, to choose a single instance out of many, an army twenty-three
thousand strong, with its artillery, trains, baggage, and animals, were
moved by rail from the Potomac to the Tennessee, twelve hundred miles,
in seven days. On the long marches, wonders of military construction
bridged the rivers, and wherever an army halted, ample supplies awaited
them at their ever-changing base. The vile thought that life is the
greatest of blessings did not rise up. In six hundred and twenty-five
battles and severe skirmishes blood flowed like water. It streamed over
the grassy plains; it stained the rocks; the undergrowth of the forests
was red with it; and the armies marched on with majestic courage from
one conflict to another, knowing that they were fighting for God and
liberty. The organization of the medical department met its infinitely
multiplied duties with exactness and despatch. At the news of a battle;
the best surgeons of our cities hastened to the field, to offer the
untiring aid of the greatest experience and skill. The gentlest and
most refined of women left homes of luxury and ease to build hospital
tents near the armies, and serve as nurses to the sick and dying.
Beside the large supply of religious teachers by the public, the
congregations spared to their brothers in the field the ablest
ministers. The Christian Commission, which expended more than six and a
quarter millions, sent nearly five thousand clergymen, chosen out of
the best, to keep unsoiled the religious character of the men, and made
gifts of clothes and food and medicine. The organization of private
charity assumed unheard-of dimensions. The Sanitary Commission, which
had seven thousand societies, distributed, under the direction of an
unpaid board, spontaneous contributions to the amount of fifteen
millions in supplies or money--a million and a half in money from
California alone--and dotted the scene of war, from Paducah to Port
Royal, from Belle Plain, Virginia, to Brownsville, Texas, with homes
and lodges.
The country had for its allies the river Mississippi, which would not
be divided, and the range of mountains which carried the stronghold of
the free through Western Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee to the
highlands of Alabama. But it invoked the still higher power of immortal
justice. In ancient Greece, where servitude was the universal custom,
it was held that if a child were to strike its parent, the slave should
defend the parent, and by that act recover his freedom. After vain
resistance, LINCOLN, who had tried to solve the question by gradual
emancipation, by colonization, and by compensation, at last saw that
slavery must be abolished, or the republic must die; and on the first
day of January, 1863, he wrote liberty on the banners of the armies.
When this proclamation, which struck the fetters from three millions of
slaves, reached Europe, Lord Russell, a countryman of Milton and
Wilberforce, eagerly put himself forward to speak of it in the name of
mankind, saying: "It is of a very strange nature;" "a measure of war of
a very questionable kind;" an act "of vengeance on the slave owner,"
that does no more than "profess to emancipate slaves where the United
States authorities cannot make emancipation a reality." Now there was
no part of the country embraced in the proclamation where the United
States could not and did not make emancipation a reality.