of history; that the life and methods of our frontiersmen take us
back to the fortunes and hopes of the men who crossed Europe when her
forests, too, were still thick upon her. But the difference is really
very fundamental, and much more worthy of remark than the likeness.
Those shadowy masses of men whom we see moving upon the face of the
earth in the far-away, questionable days when states were forming: even
those stalwart figures we see so well as they emerge from the deep
forests of Germany, to displace the Roman in all his western provinces
and set up the states we know and marvel upon at this day, show us
men working their new work at their own level. They do not turn back
a long cycle of years from the old and settled states, the ordered
cities, the tilled fields, and the elaborated governments of an ancient
civilization, to begin as it were once more at the beginning. They
carry alike their homes and their states with them in the camp and upon
the ordered march of the host. They are men of the forest, or else
men hardened always to take the sea in open boats. They live no more
roughly in the new lands than in the old. The world has been frontier
for them from the first. They may go forward with their life in these
new seats from where they left off in the old. How different the
circumstances of our first settlement and the building of new states on
this side the sea! Englishmen, bred in law and ordered government ever
since the Norman lawyers were followed a long five hundred years ago
across the narrow seas by those masterful administrators of the strong
Plantagenet race, leave an ancient realm and come into a wilderness
where states have never been; leave a land of art and letters, which
saw but yesterday “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” where
Shakespeare still lives in the gracious leisure of his closing days at
Stratford, where cities teem with trade and men go bravely dight in
cloth of gold, and turn back six centuries,--nay, a thousand years and
more,--to the first work of building states in a wilderness! They bring
the steadied habits and sobered thoughts of an ancient realm into the
wild air of an untouched continent. The weary stretches of a vast sea
lie, like a full thousand years of time, between them and the life
in which till now all their thought was bred. Here they stand, as it
were, with all their tools left behind, centuries struck out of their
reckoning, driven back upon the long dormant instincts and forgotten
craft of their race, not used this long age. Look how singular a
thing: the work of a primitive race, the thought of a civilized! Hence
the strange, almost grotesque groupings of thought and affairs in
that first day of our history. Subtle politicians speak the phrases
and practice the arts of intricate diplomacy from council chambers
placed within log huts within a clearing. Men in ruffs and lace and
polished shoe-buckles thread the lonely glades of primeval forests.
The microscopical distinctions of the schools, the thin notes of a
metaphysical theology are woven in and out through the labyrinths of
grave sermons that run hours long upon the still air of the wilderness.
Belief in dim refinements of dogma is made the test for man or woman
who seeks admission to a company of pioneers. When went there by an
age since the great flood when so singular a thing was seen as this:
thousands of civilized men suddenly rusticated and bade do the work of
primitive peoples,--Europe _frontiered_!
Of course there was a deep change wrought, if not in these men, at any
rate in their children; and every generation saw the change deepen. It
must seem to every thoughtful man a notable thing how, while the change
was wrought, the simplest of things complex were revealed in the clear
air of the New World: how all accidentals seemed to fall away from the
structure of government, and the simple first principles were laid bare
that abide always; how social distinctions were stripped off, shown
to be the mere cloaks and masks they were, and every man brought once
again to a clear realization of his actual relations to his fellows!
It was as if trained and sophisticated men had been rid of a sudden
of their sophistication and of all the theory of their life, and left
with nothing but their discipline of faculty, a schooled and sobered
instinct. And the fact that we kept always, for close upon three
hundred years, a like element in our life, a frontier people always in
our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national
history. “East” and “West,” an ever-changing line, but an unvarying
experience and a constant leaven of change working always within
the body of our folk. Our political, our economic, our social life
has felt this potent influence from the wild border all our history
through. The “West” is the great word of our history. The “Westerner”
has been the type and master of our American life. Now at length, as I
have said, we have lost our frontier: our front lies almost unbroken
along all the great coast line of the western sea. The Westerner, in
some day soon to come, will pass out of our life, as he so long ago
passed out of the life of the Old World. Then a new epoch will open for
us. Perhaps it has opened already. Slowly we shall grow old, compact
our people, study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society,
and ponder the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the bulks and
structural framework, of government. Have we not, indeed, already come
to these things? But the past we know. We can “see it steady and see it
whole;” and its central movement and motive are gross and obvious to
the eye.
Till the first century of the Constitution is rounded out we stand all
the while in the presence of that stupendous westward movement which
has filled the continent: so vast, so various, at times so tragical, so
swept by passion. Through all the long time there has been a line of
rude settlements along our front wherein the same tests of power and
of institutions were still being made that were made first upon the
sloping banks of the rivers of old Virginia and within the long sweep
of the Bay of Massachusetts. The new life of the West has reacted all
the while--who shall say how powerfully?--upon the older life of the
East; and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to
it through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and
suggestions of history. The West has taken strength, thought, training,
selected aptitudes out of the old treasures of the East,--as if out
of a new Orient; while the East has itself been kept fresh, vital,
alert, originative by the West, her blood quickened all the while, her
youth through every age renewed. Who can say in a word, in a sentence,
in a volume, what destinies have been variously wrought, with what
new examples of growth and energy, while, upon this unexampled scale,
community has passed beyond community across the vast reaches of this
great continent!
The great process is the more significant because it has been
distinctively a national process. Until the Union was formed and we
had consciously set out upon a separate national career, we moved
but timidly across the nearer hills. Our most remote settlements lay
upon the rivers and in the open glades of Tennessee and Kentucky. It
was in the years that immediately succeeded the war of 1812 that
the movement into the West began to be a mighty migration. Till then
our eyes had been more often in the East than in the West. Not only
were foreign questions to be settled and our standing among the
nations to be made good, but we still remained acutely conscious
and deliberately conservative of our Old-World connections. For all
we were so new a people and lived so simple and separate a life, we
had still the sobriety and the circumspect fashions of action that
belong to an old society. We were, in government and manners, but a
disconnected part of the world beyond the seas. Its thought and habit
still set us our standards of speech and action. And this, not because
of imitation, but because of actual and long abiding political and
social connection with the mother country. Our statesmen,--strike but
the names of Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry from the list, together
with all like untutored spirits, who stood for the new, unreverencing
ardor of a young democracy,--our statesmen were such men as might
have taken their places in the House of Commons or in the Cabinet at
home as naturally and with as easy an adjustment to their place and
task as in the Continental Congress or in the immortal Constitutional
Convention. Think of the stately ways and the grand air and the
authoritative social understandings of the generation that set the new
government afoot,--the generation of Washington and John Adams. Think,
too, of the conservative tradition that guided all the early history
of that government: that early line of gentlemen Presidents: that
steady “cabinet succession to the Presidency” which came at length to
seem almost like an oligarchy to the impatient men who were shut out
from it. The line ended, with a sort of chill, in stiff John Quincy
Adams, too cold a man to be a people’s prince after the old order of
Presidents; and the year 1829, which saw Jackson come in, saw the old
order go out.
The date is significant. Since the war of 1812, undertaken as if to
set us free to move westward, seven States had been admitted to the
Union: and the whole number of States was advanced to twenty-four.
Eleven new States had come into partnership with the old thirteen. The
voice of the West rang through all our counsels; and, in Jackson, the
new partners took possession of the Government. It is worth while to
remember how men stood amazed at the change: how startled, chagrined,
dismayed the conservative States of the East were at the revolution
they saw effected, the riot of change they saw set in; and no man who
has once read the singular story can forget how the eight years Jackson
reigned saw the Government, and politics themselves, transformed. For
long,--the story being written in the regions where the shock and
surprise of the change was greatest,--the period of this momentous
revolution was spoken of amongst us as a period of degeneration, the
birth-time of a deep and permanent demoralization in our politics.
But we see it differently now. Whether we have any taste or stomach
for that rough age or not, however much we may wish that the old
order might have stood, the generation of Madison and Adams have been
prolonged, and the good tradition of the early days handed on unbroken
and unsullied, we now know that what the nation underwent in that day
of change was not degeneration, great and perilous as were the errors
of the time, but regeneration. The old order was changed, once and for
all. A new nation stepped, with a touch of swagger, upon the stage,--a
nation which had broken alike with the traditions and with the wisely
wrought experience of the Old World, and which, with all the haste and
rashness of youth, was minded to work out a separate policy and destiny
of its own. It was a day of hazards, but there was nothing sinister
at the heart of the new plan. It was a wasteful experiment, to fling
out, without wise guides, upon untried ways; but an abounding continent
afforded enough and to spare even for the wasteful. It was sure to
be so with a nation that came out of the secluded vales of a virgin
continent. It was the bold frontier voice of the West sounding in
affairs. The timid shivered, but the robust waxed strong and rejoiced,
in the tonic air of the new day.
It was then we swung out into the main paths of our history. The new
voices that called us were first silvery, like the voice of Henry
Clay, and spoke old familiar words of eloquence. The first spokesmen
of the West even tried to con the classics, and spoke incongruously
in the phrases of politics long dead and gone to dust, as Benton did.
But presently the tone changed, and it was the truculent and masterful
accents of the real frontiersman that rang dominant above the rest,
harsh, impatient, and with an evident dash of temper. The East slowly
accustomed itself to the change; caught the movement, though it
grumbled and even trembled at the pace; and managed most of the time
to keep in the running. But it was always henceforth to be the West
that set the pace. There is no mistaking the questions that have ruled
our spirits as a nation during the present century. The public land
question, the tariff question, and the question of slavery,--these
dominate from first to last. It was the West that made each one of
these the question that it was. Without the free lands to which every
man who chose might go, there would not have been that easy prosperity
of life and that high standard of abundance which seemed to render
it necessary that, if we were to have manufactures and a diversified
industry at all, we should foster new undertakings by a system of
protection which would make the profits of the factory as certain and
as abundant as the profits of the farm. It was the constant movement
of the population, the constant march of wagon trains into the West,
that made it so cardinal a matter of policy whether the great national
domain should _be_ free land or not: and that was the land question.
It was the settlement of the West that transformed slavery from an
accepted institution into passionate matter of controversy.
Slavery within the States of the Union stood sufficiently protected
by every solemn sanction the Constitution could afford. No man could
touch it there, think, or hope, or purpose what he might. But where new
States were to be made it was not so. There at every step choice must
be made: slavery or no slavery?--a new choice for every new State: a
fresh act of origination to go with every fresh act of organization.
Had there been no Territories, there could have been no slavery
question, except by revolution and contempt of fundamental law. But
with a continent to be peopled, the choice thrust itself insistently
forward at every step and upon every hand. This was the slavery
question: not what should be done to reverse the past, but what should
be done to redeem the future. It was so men of that day saw it,--and
so also must historians see it. We must not mistake the programme of
the Anti-Slavery Society for the platform of the Republican party, or
forget that the very war itself was begun ere any purpose of abolition
took shape amongst those who were statesmen and in authority. It was
a question, not of freeing men, but of preserving a Free Soil. Kansas
showed us what the problem was, not South Carolina: and it was the
Supreme Court, not the slave-owners, who formulated the matter for our
thought and purpose.
And so, upon every hand and throughout every national question, was
the commerce between East and West made up: that commerce and exchange
of ideas, inclinations, purposes, and principles which has constituted
the moving force of our life as a nation. Men illustrate the operation
of these singular forces better than questions can: and no man
illustrates it better than Abraham Lincoln.
“Great captains with their guns and drums
Disturb our judgment for the hour;
But at last silence comes:
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
It is a poet’s verdict; but it rings in the authentic tone of the
seer. It must be also the verdict of history. He would be a rash man
who should say he understood Abraham Lincoln. No doubt natures deep
as his, and various almost to the point of self-contradiction, can
be sounded only by the judgment of men of a like sort,--if any such
there be. But some things we all may see and judge concerning him.
You have in him the type and flower of our growth. It is as if Nature
had made a typical American, and then had added with liberal hand the
royal quality of genius, to show us what the type could be. Lincoln
owed nothing to his birth, everything to his growth: had no training
save what he gave himself; no nurture, but only a wild and native
strength. His life was his schooling, and every day of it gave to his
character a new touch of development. His manhood not only, but his
perception also, expanded with his life. His eyes, as they looked more
and more abroad, beheld the national life, and comprehended it: and
the lad who had been so rough-cut a provincial became, when grown to
manhood, the one leader in all the nation who held the whole people
singly in his heart:--held even the Southern people there, and would
have won them back. And so we have in him what we must call the perfect
development of native strength, the rounding out and nationalization of
the provincial. Andrew Jackson was a type, not of the nation, but of
the West. For all the tenderness there was in the stormy heart of the
masterful man, and staunch and simple loyalty to all who loved him, he
learned nothing in the East; kept always the flavor of the rough school
in which he had been bred; was never more than a frontier soldier and
gentleman. Lincoln differed from Jackson by all the length of his
unmatched capacity to learn. Jackson could understand only men of his
own kind; Lincoln could understand men of all sorts and from every
region of the land: seemed himself, indeed, to be all men by turns, as
mood succeeded mood in his strange nature. He never ceased to stand, in
his bony angles, the express image of the ungainly frontiersman. His
mind never lost the vein of coarseness that had marked him grossly
when a youth. And yet how he grew and strengthened in the real stuff
of dignity and greatness: how nobly he could bear himself without the
aid of grace! He kept always the shrewd and seeing eye of the woodsman
and the hunter, and the flavor of wild life never left him: and yet
how easily his view widened to great affairs; how surely he perceived
the value and the significance of whatever touched him and made him
neighbor to itself!
Lincoln’s marvelous capacity to extend his comprehension to the measure
of what he had in hand is the one distinguishing mark of the man: and
to study the development of that capacity in him is little less than to
study, where it is as it were perfectly registered, the national life
itself. This boy lived his youth in Illinois when it was a frontier
State. The youth of the State was coincident with his own: and man
and State kept equal pace in their striding advance to maturity. The
frontier population was an intensely political population. It felt
to the quick the throb of the nation’s life,--for the nation’s life
ran through it, going its eager way to the westward. The West was not
separate from the East. Its communities were every day receiving fresh
members from the East, and the fresh impulse of direct suggestion.
Their blood flowed to them straight from the warmest veins of the
older communities. More than that, elements which were separated in the
East were mingled in the West: which displayed to the eye as it were a
sort of epitome of the most active and permanent forces of the national
life. In such communities as these Lincoln mixed daily from the first
with men of every sort and from every quarter of the country. With them
he discussed neighborhood politics, the politics of the State, the
politics of the nation,--and his mind became traveled as he talked.
How plainly amongst such neighbors, there in Illinois, must it have
become evident that national questions were centring more and more in
the West as the years went by: coming as it were to meet them. Lincoln
went twice down the Mississippi, upon the slow rafts that carried wares
to its mouth, and saw with his own eyes, so used to look directly and
point-blank upon men and affairs, characteristic regions of the South.
He worked his way slowly and sagaciously, with that larger sort of
sagacity which so marked him all his life, into the active business
of state politics; sat twice in the state legislature, and then for a
term in Congress,--his sensitive and seeing mind open all the while to
every turn of fortune and every touch of nature in the moving affairs
he looked upon. All the while, too, he continued to canvass, piece
by piece, every item of politics, as of old, with his neighbors,
familiarly around the stove, or upon the corners of the street, or
more formally upon the stump; and kept always in direct contact with
the ordinary views of ordinary men. Meanwhile he read, as nobody else
around him read, and sought to gain a complete mastery over speech,
with the conscious purpose to prevail in its use; derived zest from the
curious study of mathematical proof, and amusement as well as strength
from the practice of clean and naked statements of truth. It was all
irregularly done, but strenuously, with the same instinct throughout,
and with a steady access of facility and power. There was no sudden
leap for this man, any more than for other men, from crudeness to
finished power, from an understanding of the people of Illinois to an
understanding of the people of the United States. And thus he came
at last, with infinite pains and a wonder of endurance, to his great
national task with a self-trained capacity which no man could match,
and made upon a scale as liberal as the life of the people. You could
not then set this athlete a pace in learning or in perceiving that was
too hard for him. He knew the people and their life as no other man did
or could: and now stands in his place singular in all the annals of
mankind, the “brave, sagacious, foreseeing, patient man” of the people,
“new birth of our new soil, the first American.”
We have here a national man presiding over sectional men. Lincoln
understood the East better than the East understood him or the
people from whom he sprung: and this is every way a very noteworthy
circumstance. For my part, I read a lesson in the singular career of
this great man. Is it possible the East remains sectional while the
West broadens to a wider view?
“Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines;
By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs,”
is an inspiring programme for the woodsman and the pioneer; but how
are you to be brown-handed in a city office? What if you never see
the upright pines? How are you to have so big a purpose on so small a
part of the hemisphere? As it has grown old, unquestionably, the East
has grown sectional. There is no suggestion of the prairie in its city
streets, or of the embrowned ranchman and farmer in its well-dressed
men. Its ports teem with shipping from Europe and the Indies. Its
newspapers run upon the themes of an Old World. It hears of the great
plains of the continent as of foreign parts, which it may never think
to see except from a car window. Its life is self-centred and selfish.
The West, save where special interests centre (as in those pockets of
silver where men’s eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very
ore itself): the West is in less danger of sectionalization. Who shall
say in that wide country where one region ends and another begins, or,
in that free and changing society, where one class ends and another
begins?
This, surely, is the moral of our history. The East has spent and been
spent for the West: has given forth her energy, her young men and
her substance, for the new regions that have been a-making all the
century through. But has she learned as much as she has taught, or
taken as much as she has given? Look what it is that has now at last
taken place. The westward march has stopped, upon the final slopes of
the Pacific; and now the plot thickens. Populations turn upon their
old paths; fill in the spaces they passed by neglected in their first
journey in search of a land of promise; settle to a life such as the
East knows as well as the West,--nay, much better. With the change, the
pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face
to face, to know each other and be known: and the time has come for the
East to learn in her turn; to broaden her understanding of political
and economic conditions to the scale of a hemisphere, as her own poet
bade. Let us be sure that we get the national temperament; send our
minds abroad upon the continent, become neighbors to all the people
that live upon it, and lovers of them all, as Lincoln was.