Union and Liberty
"There is what I call the American idea," declared Theodore Parker in
the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1850. "This idea demands, as the
proximate organization thereof, a democracy--that is, a government of
all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a
government on the principle of eternal justice, the unchanging law of
God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom."
These are noble words, and they are thought to have suggested a familiar
phrase of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, thirteen years later. Yet
students of literature, no less than students of politics, recognize the
difficulty of summarizing in words a national "idea." Precisely what was
the Greek "idea"? What is today the French "idea"? No single formula is
adequate to express such a complex of fact, theories, moods--not even
the famous "Liberty, Fraternity, Equality." The existence of a truly
national life and literature presupposes a certain degree of unity, an
integration of race, language, political institutions, and social
ideals. It is obvious that this problem of national integration meets
peculiar obstacles in the United States. Divergencies of race,
tradition, and social theory, and clashing interests of different
sections have been felt from the beginning of the nation's life. There
was well-nigh complete solidarity in the single province of New England
during a portion of the seventeenth century, and under the leadership of
the great Virginians there was sufficient national fusion to make the
Revolution successful. But early in the nineteenth century, the opening
of the new West, and the increasing economic importance of Slavery as a
peculiar institution of the South, provoked again the ominous question
of the possibility of an enduring Union. From 1820 until the end of the
Civil War, it was the chief political issue of the United States. The
aim of the present chapter is to show how the theme of Union and Liberty
affected our literature.
To appreciate the significance of this theme we must remind ourselves
again of what many persons have called the civic note in our national
writing. Franklin exemplified it in his day. It is far removed from the
pure literary art of a Poe, a Hawthorne, a Henry James. It aims at
action rather than beauty. It seeks to persuade, to convince, to bring
things to pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster,
as they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to
compromise and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion; in
the epoch-making novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of
Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons
blazing with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the
human heart. We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war
itself, and finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor
of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains,
in the noblest tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our
continuance as a nation.
Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides
Dickens have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question
adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of
our existence oratory was necessary as a stimulus to communal thought
and feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as
essential to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and
the armed conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so
swiftly and dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution,
the orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual
leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and
bench.
The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this
glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the
glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for
a while a part of the political system of the United States. Union and
Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater of
these was Union. The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia
hazarded his career at the outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the
Kentucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable act of his life was
his successful management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile
Compromise of 1850. All his life long he fought for national issues; for
the War of 1812, for a protective tariff and an "American system," for
the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and he
had plead generously for the young South American republics and for
struggling Greece. He had become the perpetual candidate of his party
for the Presidency, and had gone down again and again in unforeseen and
heart-rending defeat. Yet he could say honorably: "If any one desires to
know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the
preservation of this union will furnish him the key." One could wish
that the speeches of this fascinating American were more readable today.
They seem thin, facile, full of phrases--such adroit phrases as would
catch the ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, hard
thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay's day. Calhoun
had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity for it,
although he was too indolent to employ his great gifts steadily. Yet it
was Webster who analyzed kindly and a little sadly, for he was talking
during Clay's last illness and just before his own, his old rival's
defect in literary quality: "He was never a man of books.... I could
never imagine him sitting comfortably in his library and reading quietly
out of the great books of the past. He has been too fond of
excitement--he has lived upon it; he has been too fond of company, not
enough alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were the
limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more
unerringly than in these words?
When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in
1830, "Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable," the
words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than any
similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer,
fuller nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past," brooding, as
Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem of
preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful
seventh of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of
his personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the
ruin of his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing,
and the South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the
worst that can fairly be said against that speech today is that it
lacked moral imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to
visualize, the human results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent
necessity of maintaining the old Union it was consistent with Webster's
whole development of political thought.
What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers
literally spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that
alienation of 1850, as a fallen angel? No one can say fully, for we
touch here the mysteries of personality and of the spoken word. But
enough survives from the Webster legend, from his correspondence and
political and legal oratory, to bring us into the presence of a
superman. The dark Titan face, painted by such masters as Carlyle,
Hawthorne, and Emerson; the magical voice, remembered now but by a few
old men; the bodily presence, with its leonine suggestion of sleepy
power only half put forth--these aided Webster to awe men or allure them
into personal idolatry. Yet outside of New England he was admired rather
than loved. There is still universal recognition of the mental capacity
of this foremost lawyer and foremost statesman of his time. He was
unsurpassed in his skill for direct, simple, limpid statement; but he
could rise at will to a high Roman stateliness of diction, a splendid
sonorousness of cadence. His greatest public appearances were in the
Dartmouth College Case before the Supreme Court, the Plymouth, Bunker
Hill, and Adams-Jefferson commemorative orations, the Reply to Hayne,
and the Seventh of March speeches in the Senate. Though he exhibited in
his private life something of the prodigal recklessness of the pioneer,
his mental operations were conservative, constructive. His lifelong
antagonist Calhoun declared that "The United States are not a nation."
Webster, in opposition to this theory of a confederation of states,
devoted his superb talents to the demonstration of the thesis that the
United States "is," not "are." Thus he came to be known as the typical
expounder of the Constitution. When he reached, in 1850, the
turning-point of his career, his countrymen knew by heart his personal
and political history, the New Hampshire boyhood and education, the rise
to mastery at the New England bar, the service in the House of
Representatives and the Senate and as Secretary of State. His speeches
were already in the schoolbooks, and for twenty years boys had been
declaiming his arguments against nullification. He had helped to teach
America to think and to feel. Indeed it was through his oratory that
many of his fellow-citizens had gained their highest conception of the
beauty, the potency, and the dignity of human speech. And in truth he
never exhibited his logical power and demonstrative skill more superbly
than in the plea of the seventh of March for the preservation of the
status quo, for the avoidance of mutual recrimination between North and
South, for obedience to the law of the land. It was his supreme effort
to reconcile an irreconcilable situation.
It failed, as we know. Whittier, Emerson, Theodore Parker, and indeed
most of the voters of New England, believed that Webster had bartered
his private convictions in the hope of securing the Presidential
nomination in 1852. They assailed him savagely, and Webster died, a
broken man, in the autumn of the Presidential year. "I have given my
life to law and politics," he wrote to Professor Silliman. "Law is
uncertain and politics are utterly vain." The dispassionate judgment of
the present hour frees him from the charge of conscious treachery to
principle. He was rather a martyr to his own conception of the
obligations imposed by nationality. When these obligations run counter
to human realities, the theories of statesmen must give way. Emerson
could not refute that logic of Webster's argument for the Fugitive Slave
Law, but he could at least record in his private Journal: "I will not
obey it, by God!" So said hundreds of thousands of obscure men in the
North, but Webster did not or could not hear them.
While no other orator of that period was so richly endowed as Daniel
Webster, the struggle for Union and Liberty enlisted on both sides many
eloquent men. John C. Calhoun's acute, ingenious, masterly political
theorizing can still be studied in speeches that have lost little of
their effectiveness through the lapse of time. The years have dealt
roughly with Edward Everett, once thought to be the pattern of
oratorical gifts and graces. In commemorative oratory, indeed, he ranked
with Webster, but the dust is settling upon his learned and ornate
pages. Rufus Choate, another conservative Whig in politics, and a
leader, like Wirt and Pinkney, at the bar, had an exotic, almost
Oriental fancy, a gorgeousness of diction, and an intensity of emotion
unrivaled among his contemporaries. His Dartmouth College eulogy of
Webster in 1853 shows him at his best. The Anti-Slavery orators, on the
other hand, had the advantage of a specific moral issue in which they
led the attack. Wendell Phillips was the most polished, the most
consummate in his air of informality, and his example did much to
puncture the American tradition of high-flown oratory. He was an expert
in virulent denunciation, passionately unfair beneath his mask of
conversational decorum, an aristocratic demagogue. He is still
distrusted and hated by the Brahmin class of his own city, still adored
by the children and grandchildren of slaves. Charles Sumner, like Edward
Everett, seems sinking into popular oblivion, in spite of the statues
and portraits and massive volumes of erudite and caustic and high-minded
orations. He may be seen at his best in such books as Longfellow's
Journal and Correspondence and the Life and Letters of George Ticknor.
There one has a pleasant picture of a booklover, traveler, and friend.
But in his public speech he was arrogant, unsympathetic, domineering.
"Sumner is my idea of a bishop," said Lincoln tentatively. There are
bishops and bishops, however, and if Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln
and hosts of other Americans admired, had only belonged to the Church of
England, what an admirable Victorian bishop he might have made! Perhaps
his best service to the cause of union was rendered by his speeches in
England, where he fairly mobbed the mob and won them by his wit,
courage, and by his appeal to the instinct of fair play. Beecher's
oratory, in and out of the pulpit, was temperamental, sentimental in the
better sense, and admirably human in all its instincts. He had an
immense following, not only in political and humanitarian fields, but as
a lovable type of the everyday American who can say undisputed things
not only solemnly, if need be, but by preference with an infectious
smile. The people who loved Mr. Beecher are the people who understand
Mr. Bryan.
Foremost among the journalists of the great debate were William Lloyd
Garrison and Horace Greeley. Garrison was a perfect example of the
successful journalist as described by Zola--the man who keeps on
pounding at a single idea until he has driven it into the head of the
public. Everyone knows at least the sentence from his salutatory
editorial in The Liberator on January 1, 1831: "I am in earnest--I will
not retreat a single inch--And I will be heard." He kept this vow, and
he also kept the accompanying and highly characteristic promise: "I will
be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject,
I do not wish to think, or write, or speak, with moderation." But there
would be little political literature in the world if its production were
entrusted to the moderate type of man, and the files of The Liberator,
though certainly harsh and full of all uncharitableness towards
slave-owners, make excellent reading for the twentieth century American
who perceives that in spite of the triumph of emancipation, in which
Garrison had his fair share of glory, many aspects of our race-problem
remain unsolved. Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York
Tribune, was a farmer's boy who learned early to speak and write the
vocabulary of the plain people. Always interested in new ideas, even in
Transcendentalism and Fourierism, his courage and energy and
journalistic vigor gave him leadership in the later phases of the
movement for enfranchisement. He did not hesitate to offer unasked
advice to Lincoln on many occasions, and Lincoln enriched our literature
by his replies. Greeley had his share of faults and fatuities, but in
his best days he had an impressively loyal following among both rural
and city-bred readers of his paper, and he remains one of the best
examples of that obsolescent personal journalism which is destined to
disappear under modern conditions of newspaper production. Readers
really used to care for "what Greeley said" and "Dana said" and "Sam
Bowles said," and all of these men, with scores of others, have left
their stamp upon the phrases and the tone of our political writing.
In the concrete issue of Slavery, however, it must be admitted that the
most remarkable literary victory was scored, not by any orator or
journalist, but by an almost unknown little woman, the author of Uncle
Tom's Cabin. No American novel has had so curious a history and so great
or so immediate an influence in this country and in Europe. In spite of
all that has been written about it, its author's purpose is still widely
misunderstood, particularly in the South, and the controversy over this
one epoch-making novel has tended to obscure the literary reputation
which Mrs. Stowe won by her other books.
Harriet Beecher, the daughter and the sister of famous clergymen, was
born in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1811. For seventeen years, from 1832
to 1849, she lived in the border city of Cincinnati, within sight of
slave territory, and in daily contact with victims of the slave system.
While her sympathies, like those of her father Lyman Beecher, were
anti-slavery, she was not an Abolitionist in the Garrisonian sense of
that word. At twenty-five she had married a widowed professor, Calvin
Stowe, to whom she bore many children. She had written a few sketches of
New England life, and her family thought her a woman of genius. Such was
the situation in the winter of 1849-1850, when the Stowes migrated to
Brunswick, Maine, where the husband had been appointed to a chair at
Bowdoin. Pitiably poor, and distracted by household cares which she had
to face single-handed--for the Professor was a "feckless body"--Mrs.
Stowe nevertheless could not be indifferent to the national crisis over
the Fugitive Slave Law. She had seen its working. When her sister-in-law
wrote to her: "If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something
that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery
is," Mrs. Stowe exclaimed: "God helping me, I will write something; I
will if I live."
Uncle Tom's Cabin, begun in the spring of 1850, was a woman's answer to
Webster's seventh of March speech. Its object was plainly stated to be
"to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; to show, their
wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to
defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for
them, by their best friends under it." The book was permeated with what
we now call the 1848 anti-aristocratic sentiment, the direct heritage of
the French Revolution. "There is a dies irœ coming on, sooner or later,"
admits St. Clare in the story. "The same thing is working, in Europe, in
England, and in this country." There was no sectional hostility in Mrs.
Stowe's heart. "The people of the free states have defended, encouraged,
and participated [in slavery]; and are more guilty for it, before God,
than the South, in that they have not the apology of education or
custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should in
times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders,
and proverbially the hardest masters, of slaves; the sons of the free
states would not have connived at the extension of slavery in our
national body." "Your book is going to be the great pacificator," wrote
a friend of Mrs. Stowe; "it will unite North and South." But the
distinctly Christian and fraternal intention of the book was swiftly
forgotten in the storm of controversy that followed its appearance. It
had been written hastily, fervidly, in the intervals of domestic toil at
Brunswick, had been printed as a serial in The National Era without
attracting much attention, and was issued in book form in March, 1852.
Its sudden and amazing success was not confined to this country. The
story ran in three Paris newspapers at once, was promptly dramatized,
and has held the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon the
Index in Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions
of copies were sold in Europe, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, more than any
other cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in
the English cotton crisis of our Civil War.
It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to
recognize its excellencies. "If our art has not scope enough to include
a book of this kind," said Madame George Sand, "we had better stretch
the terms of our art a little." For the book proved to be, as its author
had hoped, a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss
Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of
Balzac's indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good
to be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little
Eva--nor, for that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell.
There is some melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd
recognition scenes at the close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius
which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the
vast and ominous system of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity,
blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor
Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle
Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or
evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have
and they give the illusion of volition.
Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them
Dred, The Minister's Wooing, Oldtown Folks, Oldtown Fireside Stories. In
the local short story she deserves the honors due to one of the
pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor, and her
humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite independent
of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of that
astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a
single book. She would not mind this fate.
The poetry of the idea of Freedom and of the sectional struggle which
was necessary before that idea could be realized in national policy is
on the whole not commensurate with the significance of the issue itself.
Any collection of American political verse produced during this period
exhibits spirited and sincere writing, but the combination of mature
literary art and impressive general ideas is comparatively rare. There
are single poems of Whittier, Lowell, and Whitman which meet every test
of effective political and social verse, but the main body of poetry,
both sectional and national, written during the thirty years ending with
1865 lacks breadth, power, imaginative daring. The continental
spaciousness and energy which foreign critics thought they discovered in
Whitman is not characteristic of our poetry as a whole. Victor Hugo and
Shelley and Swinburne have written far more magnificent republican
poetry than ours. The passion for freedom has been very real upon this
side of the Atlantic; it pulsed in the local loyalty of the men who sang
Dixie as well as in their antagonists who chanted John Brown's Body and
The Battle Hymn of the Republic; but this passion has not yet lifted and
ennobled any notable mass of American verse. Even the sentiment of union
was more adequately voiced in editorials and sermons and orations, even
in a short story--Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country--than by
most of the poets who attempted to glorify that theme.
Nevertheless the verse of these thirty years is rich in provincial and
sectional loyalties. It has earnestness and pathos. We have, indeed, no
adequate national anthem, even yet, for neither the words nor the music
of The Star-Spangled Banner fully express what we feel while we are
trying to sing it, as the Marseillaise, for example, does express the
very spirit of revolutionary republicanism. But in true pioneer fashion
we get along with a makeshift until something better turns up. The lyric
and narrative verse of the Civil War itself was great in quantity, and
not more inferior in quality than the war verse of other nations has
often proved to be when read after the immediate occasion for it has
passed. Single lyrics by Timrod and Paul Hayne, Boker, H. H. Brownell,
Read, Stedman, and other men are still full of fire. Yet Mrs. Howe's
Battle Hymn, scribbled hastily in the gray dawn, interpreted, as no
other lyric of the war quite succeeded in interpreting, the mystical
glory of sacrifice for Freedom. Soldiers sang it in camp; women read it
with tears; children repeated it in school, vaguely but truly perceiving
in it, as their fathers had perceived in Webster's Reply to Hayne thirty
years before, the idea of union made "simple, sensuous, passionate." No
American poem has had a more dramatic and intense life in the quick
breathing imagination of men.
More and more, however, the instinct of our people is turning to the
words of Abraham Lincoln as the truest embodiment in language, as his
life was the truest embodiment in action, of our national ideal. It is a
curious reversal of contemporary judgments that thus discovers in the
homely phrases of a frontier lawyer the most perfect literary expression
of the deeper spirit of his time. "How knoweth this man letters, having
never learned?" asked the critical East. The answer is that he had
learned in a better school than the East afforded. The story of
Lincoln's life is happily too familiar to need retelling here, but some
of the elements in his growth in the mastery of speech may at least be
summarized.
Lincoln had a slow, tireless mind, capable of intense concentration. It
was characteristic of him that he rarely took notes when trying a law
case, saying that the notes distracted his attention. When his partner
Herndon was asked when Lincoln had found time to study out the
constitutional history of the United States, Herndon expressed the
opinion that it was when Lincoln was lying on his back on the office
sofa, apparently watching the flies upon the ceiling. This combination
of bodily repose with intense mental and spiritual activity is familiar
to those who have studied the biography of some of the great mystics.
Walter Pater pointed it out in the case of Wordsworth.
In recalling the poverty and restriction of Lincoln's boyhood and his
infrequent contact with schoolhouses, it is well to remember that he
managed nevertheless to read every book within twenty miles of him.
These were not many, it is true, but they included The Bible, Æesop's
Fables, Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and, a little later, Burns
and Shakespeare. Better food than this for the mind of a boy has never
been found. Then he came to the history of his own country since the
Declaration of Independence and mastered it. "I am tolerably well
acquainted with the history of the country," he remarked in his Chicago
speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he exhibited a
familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution which amazed
the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the address. "He
has wit, facts, dates," said Douglas, in extenuation of his own
disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas
returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the
young Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met,
either here or anywhere else." Douglas had won the senatorship and could
afford to be generous, but he knew well enough that his opponent's facts
and dates had been unanswerable. Lincoln's mental grip, indeed, was the
grip of a born wrestler. "I've got him," he had exclaimed toward the end
of the first debate, and the Protean Little Giant, as Douglas was
called, had turned and twisted in vain, caught by "that long-armed
creature from Illinois." He could indeed win the election of 1858, but
he had been forced into an interpretation of the Dred Scott decision
which cost him the Presidency in 1860.
Lincoln's keen interest in words and definitions, his patience in
searching the dictionary, is known to every student of his life. Part of
his singular discrimination in the use of language is due to his legal
training, but his style was never professionalized. Neither did it have
anything of that frontier glibness and banality which was the curse of
popular oratory in the West and South. Words were weapons in the hands
of this self-taught fighter for ideas: he kept their edges sharp, and
could if necessary use them with deadly accuracy. He framed the
"Freeport dilemma" for the unwary feet of Douglas as cunningly as a
fox-hunter lays his trap. "Gentlemen," he had said of an earlier effort,
"Judge Douglas informed you that this speech of mine was probably
carefully prepared. I admit that it was."
The story, too, was a weapon of attack and defense for this master
fabulist. Sometimes it was a readier mode of argument than any
syllogism; sometimes it gave him, like the traditional diplomatist's
pinch of snuff, an excuse for pausing while he studied his adversary or
made up his own mind; sometimes, with the instinct of a poetic soul, he
invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in
Sangamon County." For although upon his intellectual side the man was a
subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the
concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing
"a man" who symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even his
invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for
specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be that
of an explainer, at first to a local audience in store or tavern or
courtroom, then to upturned serious faces of Illinois farmers who wished
to hear national issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation
in the agony of civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to
Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the essence of democracy.
As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as if
the man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the
world. But it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand
reply to a serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting
deputation of clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and
clarify a complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness
and fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He
never wasted a word. "Go to work is the only cure for your case," he
wrote to John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none
of over four letters. The Gettysburg Address contains but two hundred
and seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said
Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the"
oration of that day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I
could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the
occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today the Address
reads as if Lincoln knew that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze.
Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic
literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of
language, consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of
his nature which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal of
American citizenship and its significance to the world. There was
melancholy in that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there
was mysticism and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his
responsibilities increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity
for the sorrowful, patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an
expectation for the future of humanity which may best be described in
the old phrase "waiting for the Kingdom of God." His recurrent dream of
the ship coming into port under full sail, which preluded many important
events in his own life--he had it the night before he was
assassinated--is significant not only of that triumph of a free nation
which he helped to make possible, but also of the victory of what he
loved to call "the whole family of man." "That is the real issue," he
had declared in closing the debates with Douglas; "that is the issue
that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge
Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between
these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are
the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of
time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of
humanity, and the other the divine right of kings."
For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American
conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old
English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical
hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he
was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things
to come," with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the
immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal
task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy
this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is
also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he
was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter
of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough
to see that ship coming into the harbor under full sail.