Abraham Lincoln

By James Russell Lowell
THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient
vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths
into a crime whose assured retribution was to leave them
either at the mercy of the nation they had wronged, or of the
anarchy they had summoned but could not control, when no
thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading
to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor.
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were
beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square
miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment
made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which
swells every man's heart and shapes his thought, though
perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be gone
from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might
gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of
priceless associations would be reaped no longer; that fine
virtue which sent up messages of courage and security from
every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We
should be irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to
splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new
conditions chance might leave dangling for us. We confess
that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of our
people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the
proportions of national peril. We felt an only too natural
distrust of immense public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with
which the war was entered on, that it should follow soon, and
that the slackening of public spirit should be proportionate
to the previous over-tension, might well be foreseen by all
who had studied human nature or history. Men acting
gregariously are always in extremes; as they are one moment
capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to
baser depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether
numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor
does deception lead more surely to distrust of men, than
self-deception to suspicion of principles. The only faith
that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that
which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant
of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator,
but the statesman needs something more durable to work
in,--must be able to rely on the deliberate reason and
consequent firmness of the people, without which that
presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral than of
material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment.
Would this fervor of the Free States hold out? Was it
kindled by a just feeling of the value of constitutional
liberty? Had it body enough to withstand the inevitable
dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our population
intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was between
order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government by
law and the tussle of misrule by *pronunciamiento?* Could a
war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and
plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty of principle? These
were serious questions, and with no precedent to aid in
answering them. At the beginning of the war there was,
indeed, occasion for the most anxious apprehension. A
President known to be infected with the political heresies,
and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the Southern
conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not say
of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the
representative of a party whose leaders, with long training
in opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs; an empty
treasury was called on to supply resources beyond precedent
in the history of finance; the trees were yet growing and the
iron unmined with which a navy was to be built and armored;
officers without discipline were to make a mob into an army;
and, above all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and
reinforced with every vague hint and every specious argument
of despondency by a powerful faction at home, was either
contemptuously sceptical or actively hostile. It would be
hard to over-estimate the force of this latter element of
disintegration and discouragement among a people where every
citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a reader
of newspapers. The peddlers of rumor in the North were the
most effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be
liable to no more insidious treachery than that of the
telegraph, sending hourly its electric thrill of panic along
the remotest nerves of the community, till the excited
imagination makes every real danger loom heightened with its
unreal double. And even if we look only at more palpable
difficulties, the problem to be solved by our civil war was
so vast, both in its immediate relations and its future
consequences; the conditions of its solution were so
intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and
uncontrollable contingencies; so many of the data, whether
for hope or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of
arrangement under any of the categories of historical
precedent, that there were moments of crisis when the firmest
believer in the strength and sufficiency of the democratic
theory of government might well hold his breath in vague
apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of political
philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of some petty
Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods of
aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward parentheses
of mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable
of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged
effort, of far- reaching conceptions; were absorbed in
material interests; impatient of regular, and much more of
exceptional restraint; had no natural nucleus of gravitation,
nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on the verge of
civil war, and slunk at last into the natural almshouse of
bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was
indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democracy, not
by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from books,
and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who,
having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had
written to *The Times* demanding redress, and drawing a
mournful inference of democratic instability. Nor were men
wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in
London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European
culture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan
breadth of view, and who, owing all they had an all they were
to democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to join
in the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst. But
beside any disheartening influences which might affect the
timid or the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled
gravity against any over-confidence of hope. A war--which,
whether we consider the expanse of the territory at stake,
the hosts brought into the field, or the reach of the
principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most
momentous of modern times--was to be waged by a people
divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of peace, under a
chief magistrate without experience and without reputation,
whose every measure was sure to be cunningly hampered by a
jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing
with unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile
neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All
this was to be done without warning and without preparation,
while at the same time a social revolution was to be
accomplished in the political condition of four millions of
people, by softening the prejudices, allaying the fears, and
gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their unwilling
liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion when the
heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny
visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy
of her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government
tried by so continuous and searching a strain as ours during
the last three years; never has any shown itself stronger;
and never could that strength be so directly traced to the
virtue and intelligence of the people,--to that general
enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political framework
like our own. We find it hard to understand how even a
foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the combat of
ideas that has been going on here,--to the heroic energy,
persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving that it
knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we
own that it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and
moral condition of the American who does not feel his spirit
braced and heightened by being even a spectator of such
qualities and achievements. That a steady purpose and a
definite aim have been given to the jarring forces which, at
the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the discussion
of schemes which could only become operative, if at all,
after the war was over; that a popular excitement has been
slowly intensified into an earnest national will; that a
somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has been made the
unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that the
treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise
zeal of friends, have been made not only useless for
mischief, but even useful for good; that the conscientious
sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil conflict has
been prevented from complicating a domestic with a foreign
war;--all these results, any one of which might suffice to
prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good
sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness,
and the unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind
fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most
dangerous and difficult eminence of modern times. It is by
presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal
of a man is tested; it is by the sagacity to see, and the
fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth there may be in
an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to expose the
fallacy that lurks behind it, that a reasoner at length gains
for his mere statement of a fact the force of argument; it is
by a wise forecast which allows hostile combinations to go so
far as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of his
own power, that a politician proves his genius for
state-craft; and especially it is by so gently guiding public
sentiment that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful
points that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in
essential ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise
without the weakness of concession; by so instinctively
comprehending the temper and prejudices of a people as to
make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom of his
freedom from temper and prejudice,--it is by qualities such
as these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief
in a commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such
as these that we firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln
among the most prudent of statesmen and the most successful
of rulers. If we wish to appreciate him, we have only to
conceive the inevitable chaos in which we should now be
weltering, had a weak man or an unwise one been chosen in his
stead. "Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without
brother behind it;" and this is, by analogy, true of an
elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical
emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of
*prestige,* of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent
interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create
all these out of the unwilling material around him, by
superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose,
by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and
instinctive sympathy with the national character. Mr.
Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and exceptional
difficulty. Long habit had accustomed the American people to
the notion of a party in power, and of a President as its
creature and organ, while the more vital fact, that the
executive for the time being represents the abstract idea of
government as a permanent principle superior to all party and
all private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They
had so long seen the public policy more or less directed by
views of party, and often even of personal advantage, as to
be ready to suspect the motives of a chief magistrate
compelled, for the first time in our history, to feel himself
the head and hand of a great nation, and to act upon the
fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that the
first duty of a government is to depend and maintain its own
existence. Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put
into the hands of the opposition by the necessity under which
the administration found itself of applying this old truth to
new relations. Nor were the opposition his only nor his most
dangerous opponents. The Republicans had carried the country
upon an issue in which ethics were more directly and visibly
mingled with politics than usual. Their leaders were trained
to a method of oratory which relied for its effect rather on
the moral sense than the understanding. Their arguments were
drawn, not so much from experience as from general principles
of right and wrong. When the war came, their system
continued to be applicable and effective, for here again the
reason of the people was to be reached and kindled through
their sentiments. It was one of those periods of excitement,
gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last,
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
*country, human rights, democracy,* a meaning and a force
beyond that of sober and logical argument. They were
convictions, maintained and defended by the supreme logic of
passion. That penetrating fire ran in and roused those
primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and
caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart
was awakened, that indefinable something which may be,
according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most
brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be
warmed over into anything better than cant,--and phrases,
when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent
power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning
which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among
the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none
sadder or more striking than this, that you may make
everything else out of the passions of men except a political
system that will work, and that there is nothing so
pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated
into dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain of
sentiment over questions where it has no legitimate
jurisdiction; and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr.
Lincoln was in resisting a tendency of his own supporters
which chimed with his own private desires, while wholly
opposed to his convictions of what would be wise policy. The
change which three years have brought about is too remarkable
to be passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson
not to be laid to heart. Never did a President enter upon
office with less means at his command, outside his own
strength of heart and steadiness of understanding, for
inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning it for
himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was
that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his
*availability,*--that is, because he had no history,--and
chosen by a party with whose more extreme opinions he was not
in sympathy. It might well be feared that a man past fifty,
against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could rake up
no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who
was at best only the representative of a party, and who yet
did not fairly represent even that, would fail of political,
much more of popular, support. And certainly no one ever
entered upon office with so few resources of power in the
past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as
Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which
acknowledged him as President, there was a large, and at that
time dangerous, minority, that hardly admitted his claim to
the office, and even in the party that elected him there was
also a large minority that suspected him of being secretly a
communicant with the church of Laodicea.(1) All he did was
sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side; all that
he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness
and backsliding by the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a
truly colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the
country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril
undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to
win from the crowning dangers of his administration, in the
confidence of the people, the means of his safety and their
own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our
Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in the
confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration. (1) See *Revelation,* chapter 3,
verse 15. Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and
rightly so. He laid down no programme which must compel him
to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to
which circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be
useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's
motto, *Le temps et moi.*(1) The *moi,* to be sure, was not
very prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so,
till the world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands
for a character of marked individuality and capacity for
affairs. Time was his prime-minister, and, we began to
think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At first he
was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence
of progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so
fast, that he took the breath away from those who think there
is no getting on safety while there is a spark of fire under
the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough; but
a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly
make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it
seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes
in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a
wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his
reserves. *Semper nocuit differre paratis,*(2) is a sound
axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure to
know when he is *not* ready, and be firm against all
persuasion and reproach till he is. (1) Time and I.
Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis XIV. of France.
Time, Mazarin said, was his prime-minister. (2) It is always
bad for those who are ready to put off action. One would be
apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in
principle, that the chief object of a statesman should be
rather to proclaim his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to
achieve their triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In
our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a
conscientiously rigid *doctrinaire,* nothing more sure to end
in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of
no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular
image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose
commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the
graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly
find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of
their eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account at
the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to
carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast the
unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country
is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to
run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself
with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep
steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have
faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out
right at last. A curious, and, as we think, not inapt
parallel, might be drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the
most striking figures in modern history,--Henry IV. of
France. The career of the latter may be more picturesque, as
that of a daring captain always is; but in all its
vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that sudden
change, as by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the attorney's
office in a country town of Illinois to the helm of a great
nation in times like these. The analogy between the
characters and circumstances of the two men is in many
respects singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion rather
than a crown, Henry's chief material dependence was the
Huguenot party, whose doctrines sat upon him with a looseness
distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the more
fanatical among them. King only in name over the greater
part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it
yet gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the
Catholic party that he was the only centre of order and
legitimate authority round which France could reorganize
itself. While preachers who held the divine right of kings
made the churches of Paris ring with declamations in favor of
democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog of
Bearnois,(1)--much as our *soi-disant* Democrats have lately
been preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing
the heresies of the Declaration of Independence,-- Henry bore
both parties in hand till he was convinced that only one
course of action could possibly combine his own interests and
those of France. Meanwhile the Protestants believed somewhat
doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat
doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned
aside remonstrance, advice and curiosity alike with a jest or
a proverb (if a little *high,* he liked them none the worse),
joking continually as his manner was. We have seen Mr.
Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho Panza by persons
incapable of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of wisdom
in the profoundest romance ever written; namely, that, while
Don Quixote was incomparable in theoretic and ideal
statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock of proverbs, the ready
money of human experience, made the best possible practical
governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws and modern
instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the
thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly earnest man,
around whom the fragments of France were to gather themselves
till she took her place again as a planet of the first
magnitude in the European system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln
was more fortunate than Henry. However some may think him
wanting in zeal, the most fanatical can find no taint of
apostasy in any measure of his, nor can the most bitter
charge him with being influenced by motives of personal
interest. The leading distinction between the policies of
the two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to the
nation; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation over to
him. One left a united France; the other, we hope and
believe, will leave a reunited America. We leave our readers
to trace the further points of difference and resemblance for
themselves, merely suggesting a general similarity which has
often occurred to us. One only point of melancholy interest
we will allow ourselves to touch upon. That Mr. Lincoln is
not handsome nor elegant, we learn from certain English
tourists who would consider similar revelations in regard to
Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in the want of
*bienseance.* It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect
his fitness for the high place he so worthily occupies; but
he is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the matter of good
looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln
has also been reproached with Americanism by some not
unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we
cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or see in
it any reason why he should govern Americans the less wisely.
(1) One of Henry's titles was Prince of Bearn, that being
the old province of France from which he came. People of
more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are glad
that in this our true war of independence, which is to free
us forever from the Old World, we have had at the head of our
affairs a man whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the
very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us
how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much statecraft
await the call of opportunity in simple manhood when it
believes in the justice of God and the worth of man.
Conventionalities are all very well in their proper place,
but they shrivel at the touch of nature like stubble in the
fire. The genius that sways a nation by its arbitrary will
seems less august to us than that which multiplies and
reinforces itself in the instincts and convictions of an
entire people. Autocracy may have something in it more
melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it in human
value and interest. Experience would have bred in us a
rooted distrust of improved statesmanship, even if we did not
believe politics to be a science, which, if it cannot always
command men of special aptitude and great powers, at least
demands the long and steady application of the best powers of
such men as it can command to master even its first
principles. It is curious, that, in a country which boasts
of its intelligence the theory should be so generally held
that the most complicated of human contrivances, and one
which every day becomes more complicated, can be worked at
sight by any man able to talk for an hour or two without
stopping to think. Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an
example of a ready-made ruler. But no case could well be
less in point; for, besides that he was a man of such
fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he
had in his profession a training precisely the opposite of
that to which a partisan is subjected. His experience as a
lawyer compelled him not only to see that there is a
principle underlying every phenomenon in human affairs, but
that there are always two sides to every question, both of
which must be fully understood in order to understand either,
and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate to
appreciate the strength than the weakness of his antagonist's
position. Nothing is more remarkable than the unerring tact
with which, in his debate with Mr. Douglas, he went straight
to the reason of the question; nor have we ever had a more
striking lesson in political tactics than the fact, that
opposed to a man exceptionally adroit in using popular
prejudice and bigotry to his purpose, exceptionally
unscrupulous in appealing to those baser motives that turn a
meeting of citizens into a mob of barbarians, he should yet
have won his case before a jury of the people. Mr. Lincoln
was as far as possible from an impromptu politician. His
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as of
men; his sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honest
acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that
the only durable triumph of political opinion is based, not
on any abstract right, but upon so much of justice, the
highest attainable at any given moment in human affairs, as
may be had in the balance of mutual concession. Doubtless he
had an ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical
statesman,--to aim at the best, and to take the next best, if
he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow, but
singularly masculine, intelligence taught him that precedent
is only another name for embodied experience, and that it
counts for even more in the guidance of communities of men
than in that of the individual life. He was not a man who
held it good public economy to pull down on the mere chance
of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in God was
qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom of
man. perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that more
than anything else won him the unlimited confidence of the
people, for they felt that there would be no need of retreat
from any position he had deliberately taken. The cautious,
but steady, advance of his policy during the war was like
that of a Roman army. He left behind him a firm road on
which public confidence could follow; he took America with
him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of his
genius was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by
its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor
so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate
common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of
nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with
something of its own pathos, there was no trace of
sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to have had
one rule of conduct, always that of practical and successful
politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were
sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by what
seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the possible to
grasp at the desirable, a longer road. Undoubtedly the
highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and
to subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to
higher and more permanent concerns. But it is on the
understanding, and not on the sentiment, of a nation that all
safe legislation must be based. Voltaire's saying, that "a
consideration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great
things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly is
not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such
considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together
weighty, that the framers of policy can alone divine what is
practicable and therefore wise. The imputation of
inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and
every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable
rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of
concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men
soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the
almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always
aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources
nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress
and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal
barriers of both. It is loyalty to great ends, even though
forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish
men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to solid
principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with
the tide, but is never carried away by it,--that we demand in
public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious
persistency in what is impracticable. For the impracticable,
however theoretically enticing, is always politically unwise,
sound statesmanship being the application of that prudence to
the public business which is the safest guide in that of
private men. No doubt slavery was the most delicate and
embarrassing question with which Mr. Lincoln was called on to
deal, and it was one which no man in his position, whatever
his opinions, could evade; for, though he might withstand the
clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to the
persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the
problem upon him at every turn and in every shape. It has
been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and repeated
here by people who measure their country rather by what is
thought of it than by what is, that our war has not been
distinctly and avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a
war rather for the preservation of our national power and
greatness, in which the emancipation of the negro has been
forced upon us by circumstances and accepted as a necessity.
We are very far from denying this; nay, we admit that it is
so far true that we were slow to renounce our constitutional
obligations even toward those who had absolved us by their
own act from the letter of our duty. We are speaking of the
government which, legally installed for the whole country,
was bound, so long as it was possible, not to overstep the
limits of orderly prescription, and could not, without
abnegating its own very nature, take the lead off a Virginia
reel. They forgot, what should be forgotten least of all in
a system like ours, that the administration for the time
being represents not only the majority which elects it, but
the minority as well,--a minority in this case powerful, and
so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed even to
war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as general agent of the
an anti-slavery society, but President of the United States,
to perform certain functions exactly defined by law.
Whatever were his wishes, it was no less duty than policy to
mark out for himself a line of action that would not further
distract the country, by raising before their time questions
which plainly would soon enough compel attention, and for
which every day was making the answer more easy. Meanwhile
he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be devoured.
Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not
been such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment
for even the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut
their coat according to their cloth, unless they can borrow
the scissors of Atropos,(1) it has been at least not unworthy
of the long-headed king of Ithaca.(2) Mr. Lincoln had the
choice of Bassanio(3) offered him. Which of the three
caskets held the prize that was to redeem the fortunes of the
country? There was the golden one whose showy speciousness
might have tempted a vain man; the silver of compromise,
which might have decided the choice of a merely acute one;
and the leaden,--dull and homely-looking, as prudence always
is,--yet with something about it sure to attract the eye of
practical wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision
perhaps longer than seemed needful to those on whom its awful
responsibility was not to rest, but when he made it, it was
worthy of his cautious but sure-footed understanding. The
moral of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in the
childish simplicity of the solution. Those who fail in
guessing it, fail because they are over-ingenious, and cast
about for an answer that shall suit their own notion of the
gravity of the occasion and of their own dignity, rather than
the occasion itself. In a matter which must be finally
settled by public opinion, and in regard to which the ferment
of prejudice and passion on both sides has not yet subsided
to that equilibrium of compromise from which alone a sound
public opinion can result, it is proper enough for the
private citizen to press his own convictions with all
possible force of argument and persuasion; but the popular
magistrate, whose judgment must become action, and whose
action involves the whole country, is bound to wait till the
sentiment of the people is so far advanced toward his own
point of view, that what he does shall find support in it,
instead of merely confusing it with new elements of division.
It was not unnatural that men earnestly devoted to the
saving of their country, and profoundly convinced that
slavery was its only real enemy, should demand a decided
policy round which all patriots might rally,--and this might
have been the wisest course for an absolute ruler. But in
the then unsettled state of the public mind, with a large
party decrying even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion
as not only unwise, but even unlawful; with a majority,
perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long accustomed to
regard the Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to the
South their own judgment as to policy and instinct as to
right, that they were in doubt at first whether their loyalty
were due to the country or to slavery; and with a respectable
body of honest and influential men who still believed in the
possibility of conciliation,--Mr. Lincoln judged wisely,
that, in laying down a policy in deference to one party, he
should be giving to the other the very fulcrum for which
their disloyalty had been waiting. (1) One of the three
Fates. (2) Odysseus, or Ulysses, the hero of Homer's Odyssey.
(3) See Shakespeare's *Merchant of Venice.* It behooved a
clear-headed man in his position not to yield so far to an
honest indignation against the brokers of treason in the
North as to lose sight of the materials for misleading which
were their stock in trade, and to forget that it is not the
falsehood of sophistry which is to be feared, but the grain
of truth mingled with it to make it specious,--that it is not
the knavery of the leaders so much as the honesty of the
followers they may seduce, that gives them power for evil.
It was especially his duty to do nothing which might help the
people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless
disputes about its inevitable consequences. The doctrine of
State rights can be so handled by an adroit demagogue as
easily to confound the distinction between liberty and
lawlessness in the minds of ignorant persons, accustomed
always to be influenced by the sound of certain words, rather
than to reflect upon the principles which give them meaning.
For, though Secession involves the manifest absurdity of
denying to the State the right of making war against any
foreign power while permitting it against the United States;
though it supposes a compact of mutual concessions and
guaranties among States without any arbiter in case of
dissension; though it contradicts common-sense in assuming
that the men who framed our government did not know what they
meant when they substituted Union for confederation; though
it falsifies history, which shows that the main opposition to
the adoption of the Constitution was based on the argument
that it did not allow that independence in the several States
which alone would justify them in seceding;--yet, as slavery
was universally admitted to be a reserved right, an inference
could be drawn from any direct attack upon it (though only in
self- defence) to a natural right of resistance, logical
enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as the
majority of men always are, and now too much disturbed by the
disorder of the times, to consider that the order of events
had any legitimate bearing on the argument. Though Mr.
Lincoln was too sagacious to give the Northern allies of the
Rebels the occasion they desired and even strove to provoke,
yet from the beginning of the war the most persistent efforts
have been made to confuse the public mind as to its origin
and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down
from the national position they had instinctively taken to
the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The wholly
unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro
slavery the corner-stone of free institutions, and in the
first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing to parade the
logical sequence of their leading dogma, "that slavery is
right in principle, and has nothing to do with difference of
complexion," has been represented as a legitimate and gallant
attempt to maintain the true principles of democracy. The
rightful endeavor of an established government, the least
onerous that ever existed, to defend itself against a
treacherous attack on its very existence, has been cunningly
made to seem the wicked effort of a fanatical clique to force
its doctrines on an oppressed population. Even so long ago
as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of the danger and
magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuade himself
of Union majorities at the South, and to carry on a war that
was half peace in the hope of a peace that would have been
all war,- -while he was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave
Law, under some theory that Secession, however it might
absolve States from their obligations, could not escheat them
of their claims under the Constitution, and that slaveholders
in rebellion had alone among mortals the privilege of having
their cake and eating it at the same time,--the enemies of
free government were striving to persuade the people that the
war was an Abolition crusade. To rebel without reason was
proclaimed as one of the rights of man, while it was
carefully kept out of sight that to suppress rebellion is the
first duty of government. All the evils that have come upon
the country have been attributed to the Abolitionists, though
it is hard to see how any party can become permanently
powerful except in one of two ways, either by the greater
truth of its principles, or the extravagance of the party
opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, riding safe at
her constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge
kraken of Abolitionism, rising from unknown depths and
grasping it with slimy tentacles, is to look at the natural
history of the matter with the eyes of Pontoppidan.(1) To
believe that the leaders in the Southern treason feared any
danger from Abolitionism, would be to deny them ordinary
intelligence, though there can be little doubt that they made
use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears of their
deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought
slavery weak, but because they believed it strong enough, not
to overthrow the government, but to get possession of it; for
it becomes daily clearer that they used rebellion only as a
means of revolution, and if they got revolution, though not
in the shape they looked for, is the American people to save
them from its consequences at the cost of its own existence?
The election of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their
power to prevent had they wished, was the occasion merely,
and not the cause of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within
a year or two, was the despised heresy of a few earnest
persons, without political weight enough to carry the
election of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle
was disunion, because they were convinced that within the
Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of
the proverb, great effects do not follow from small
causes,--that is, disproportionately small,--but from
adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To
contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn,
as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender
strong- box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real
miracle lies in that divine league which bound all the forces
of nature to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its
destiny. Everything has been at work for the past ten years
in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison and Phillips have
been far less successful propagandists than the slaveholders
themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance of their
pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the question
upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by
defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the defensive.
But, even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread
desire on the part of the North to commit aggressions, though
there was a growing determination to resist them. The
popular unanimity in favor of the war three years ago was but
in small measure the result of anti-slavery sentiment, far
less of any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war,
every movement of the allies of slavery in the Free States,
has been making Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses of
any people, however intelligent, are very little moved by
abstract principles of humanity and justice, until those
principles are interpreted for them by the stinging
commentary of some infringement upon their own rights, and
then their instincts and passions, once aroused, do indeed
derive an incalculable reinforcement of impulse and intensity
from those higher ideas, those sublime traditions, which have
no motive political force till they are allied with a sense
of immediate personal wrong or imminent peril. Then at last
the stars in their courses begin to fight against Sisera.
Had any one doubted before that the rights of human nature
are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world over, no
matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one failed
to see what the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts
of the advocates of slavery among ourselves to throw
discredit upon the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of
Independence and the radical doctrines of Christianity, could
not fail to sharpen his eyes. (1) A Danish antiquary and
theologian. While every day was bringing the people nearer
to the conclusion which all thinking men saw to be inevitable
from the beginning, it was wise in Mr. Lincoln to leave the
shaping of his policy to events. In this country, where the
rough and ready understanding of the people is sure at last
to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the
best genius for statesmanship. Hitherto the wisdom of the
President's measures has been justified by the fact that they
have always resulted in more firmly uniting public opinion.
One of the things particularly admirable in the public
utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar
dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult
attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of
personal character. There must be something essentially
noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of
confidential ease without losing respect, something very
manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his
conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and
intelligence of those who have elected him. No higher
compliment was ever paid to a nation than the simple
confidence, the fireside plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln
always addresses himself to the reason of the American
people. This was, indeed, a true democrat, who grounded
himself on the assumption that a democracy can think. "Come,
let us reason together about this matter," has been the tone
of all his addresses to the people; and accordingly we have
never had a chief magistrate who so won to himself the love
and at the same time the judgment of his countrymen. To us,
that simple confidence of his in the right-mindedness of his
fellowmen is very touching, and its success is as strong an
argument as we have ever seen in favor of the theory that men
can govern themselves. He never appeals to any vulgar
sentiment, he never alludes to the humbleness of his origin;
it probably never occurred to him, indeed, that there was
anything higher to start from than manhood; and he put
himself on a level with those he addressed, not by going down
to them, but only by taking it for granted that they had
brains and would come up to a common ground of reason. In an
article lately printed in *The Nation,* Mr. Bayard Taylor
mentions the striking fact, that in the foulest dens of the
Five Points he found the portrait of Lincoln. The wretched
population that makes its hive there threw all its votes and
more against him, and yet paid this instinctive tribute to
the sweet humanity of his nature. Their ignorance sold its
vote and took its money, but all that was left of manhood in
them recognized its saint and martyr. Mr. Lincoln is not in
the habit of saying, "This is *my* opinion, or *my* theory,"
but "This is the conclusion to which, in my judgment, the
time has come, and to which, accordingly, the sooner we come
the better for us." His policy has been the policy of public
opinion based on adequate discussion and on a timely
recognition of the influence of passing events in shaping the
features of events to come. One secret of Mr. Lincoln's
remarkable success in captivating the popular mind is
undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which enables him,
though under the necessity of constantly using the capital
*I*, to do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no
single vowel which men's mouths can pronounce with such
difference of effect. That which one shall hide away, as it
were, behind the substance of his discourse, or, if he bring
it to the front, shall use merely to give an agreeable accent
of individuality to what he says, another shall make an
offensive challenge to the self- satisfaction of all his
hearers, and an unwarranted intrusion upon each man's sense
of personal importance, irritating every pore of his vanity,
like a dry northeast wind, to a goose-flesh of opposition and
hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied Quintilian;(1) but
he has, in the earnest simplicity and unaffected Americanism
of his own character, one art of oratory worth all the rest.
He forgets himself so entirely in his object as to give his
*I* the sympathetic and persuasive effect of *We* with the
great body of his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing
all the rough-edged process of his thought as it goes along,
yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of
every-day logic, he is so eminently our representative man,
that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people were
listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his
thought owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to
the manly movement that comes of settled purpose and an
energy of reason that knows not what rhetoric means. There
has been nothing of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades(2)
striving to underbid him in demagogism, to be found in the
public utterances of Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed
the intelligence of men, never their prejudice, their
passion, or their ignorance. (1) A famous Latin writer on
the *Art of Oratory.* (2) Two Athenian demagogues, satirized
by the dramatist Aristophanes.
__________________________ On the day of his death, this
simple Western attorney, who according to one party was a
vulgar joker, and whom the *doctrinaires* among his own
supporters accused of wanting every element of statesmanship,
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this solely
by the hold his good-humored sagacity had laid on the hearts
and understandings of his countrymen. Nor was this all, for
it appeared that he had drawn the great majority, not only of
his fellow-citizens, but of mankind also, to his side. So
strong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a single
quality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A
civilian during times of the most captivating military
achievement, awkward, with no skill in the lower
technicalities of manners, he left behind him a fame beyond
that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that
of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than mere
breeding. Never before that startled April morning did such
multitudes of men shed tears for the death of one they had
never seen, as if with him a friendly presence had been taken
away from their lives, leaving them colder and darker. Never
was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent look of
sympathy which strangers exchanged when they met on that day.
Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.