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