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Abraham Lincoln
by James Russell Lowell
May, 1997 [Etext #906]
The Project Gutenberg Etext of Abraham Lincoln, by James Lowell
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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.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Abraham Lincoln, by James Lowell
