The Project Gutenberg eBook 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 ofSouth Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into acrime whose assured retribution was to leave them either at themercy of the nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they hadsummoned but could not control, when no thoughtful Americanopened his morning paper without dreading to find that he had nolonger a country to love and honor. Whatever the result of theconvulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, therewould still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; butthat ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinctand tradition, which swells every man’s heart and shapes histhought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, wouldbe gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Menmight gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of pricelessassociations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sentup messages of courage and security from every sod of it wouldhave evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut offfrom our past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our livesupon whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.

We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotismof our people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace theproportions of national peril. We felt an only too natural distrust ofimmense public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.

That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with whichthe war was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that theslackening of public spirit should be proportionate to the previousover-tension, might well be foreseen by all who had studied humannature or history. Men acting gregariously are always in extremes;as they are one moment capable of higher courage, so they areliable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a matter ofchance whether numbers shall multiply confidence ordiscouragement. Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust ofmen, than self-deception to suspicion of principles. The only faiththat wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which iswoven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the statesman needssomething more durable to work in,—must be able to rely on thedeliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people, withoutwhich that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral thanof material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment. Would thisfervor of the Free States hold out? Was it kindled by a just feelingof the value of constitutional liberty? Had it body enough towithstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our population intelligence enough to comprehend that thechoice was between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium ofa government by law and the tussle of misrule bypronunciamiento?Could a war be maintained without theordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and with the impersonalloyalty of principle? These were serious questions, and with noprecedent to aid in answering them.

At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for themost anxious apprehension. A President known to be infected withthe political heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason,of the Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we willnot say of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as therepresentative of a party whose leaders, with long training inopposition, had none in the conduct of affairs; an empty treasurywas called on to supply resources beyond precedent in the historyof finance; the trees were yet growing and the iron unmined withwhich a navy was to be built and armored; officers withoutdiscipline were to make a mob into an army; and, above all, thepublic opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced with every vaguehint and every specious argument of despondency by a powerfulfaction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or activelyhostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latterelement of disintegration and discouragement among a peoplewhere every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is areader of newspapers. The peddlers of rumor in the North were themost effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to nomore insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourlyits electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of thecommunity, till the excited imagination makes every real dangerloom heightened with its unreal double.

And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problemto be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediaterelations and its future consequences; the conditions of its solutionwere so intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable anduncontrollable contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hopeor fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of arrangement underany of the categories of historical precedent, that there weremoments of crisis when the firmest believer in the strength andsufficiency of the democratic theory of government might well holdhis breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers ofpolitical philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of somepetty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods ofaristocracy were broken now and then by awkward parentheses ofmob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable of thesentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, offar-reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatientof regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no naturalnucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were alwayson the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the naturalalmshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knewdemocracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merelyfrom books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton,who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, hadwritten to The Timesdemanding redress, and drawing amournful inference of democratic instability. Nor were menwanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains inLondon literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European culture,and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view,and who, owing all they had and all they were to democracy, thoughtit had an air of high-breeding to join in the shallow epicedium thatour bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timidor the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravityagainst any over-confidence of hope. A war—which, whether weconsider the expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought intothe field, or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly bereckoned the most momentous of modern times—was to be wagedby 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 ajealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing withunheard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile neutralityabroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All this was to bedone without warning and without preparation, while at the sametime a social revolution was to be accomplished in the politicalcondition of four millions of people, by softening the prejudices,allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the cooperation, of theirunwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion whenthe heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny visiblyintervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by socontinuous and searching a strain as ours during the last threeyears; never has any shown itself stronger; and never could thatstrength be so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of thepeople,—to that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency ofpublic opinion possible only under the influence of a politicalframework like our own. We find it hard to understand how even aforeigner should be blind to the grandeur of the combat of ideasthat has been going on here,—to the heroic energy, persistency, andself-reliance of a nation proving that it knows how much dearergreatness is than mere power; and we own that it is impossible forus to conceive the mental and moral condition of the American whodoes not feel his spirit braced and heightened by being even aspectator of such qualities and achievements. That a steadypurpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forceswhich, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in thediscussion of schemes which could only become operative, if at all,after the war was over; that a popular excitement has been slowlyintensified into an earnest national will; that a somewhatimpracticable moral sentiment has been made the unconsciousinstrument of a practical moral end; that the treason of covertenemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have beenmade not only useless for mischief, but even useful for good; thatthe conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civilconflict has been prevented from complicating a domestic with aforeign war;—all these results, any one of which might suffice toprove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense,the good-humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness, and theunselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as itseemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous anddifficult eminence of modern times. It is by presence of mind inuntried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested; it is bythe sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever oftruth there may be in an adverse opinion, in order moreconvincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that areasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a fact the force ofargument; it is by a wise forecast which allows hostile combinationsto go so far as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of hisown power, that a politician proves his genius for state-craft; andespecially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment that he seemsto follow it, by so yielding doubtful points that he can be firmwithout seeming obstinate in essential ones, and thus gain theadvantages of compromise without the weakness of concession; byso instinctively comprehending the temper and prejudices of apeople as to make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdomof his freedom from temper and prejudice,—it is by qualities such asthese that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief in acommonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such as these thatwe firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the mostprudent of statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we wishto appreciate him, we have only to conceive the inevitable chaos inwhich we should now be weltering, had a weak man or an unwiseone 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. Thehereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on theinexhaustible resources of prestige,of sentiment, of superstition,of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfullycreate all these out of the unwilling material around him, bysuperiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, bysagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctivesympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln’s task was oneof peculiar and exceptional difficulty. Long habit had accustomedthe American people to the notion of a party in power, and of aPresident as its creature and organ, while the more vital fact, thatthe executive for the time being represents the abstract idea ofgovernment as a permanent principle superior to all party and allprivate interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They had so longseen the public policy more or less directed by views of party, andoften even of personal advantage, as to be ready to suspect themotives of a chief magistrate compelled, for the first time in ourhistory, to feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and toact upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, thatthe first duty of a government is to defend and maintain its ownexistence. Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put intothe hands of the opposition by the necessity under which theadministration found itself of applying this old truth to newrelations. Nor were the opposition his only nor his most dangerousopponents.

The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in whichethics were more directly and visibly mingled with politics thanusual. Their leaders were trained to a method of oratory whichrelied for its effect rather on the moral sense than theunderstanding. Their arguments were drawn, not so much fromexperience as from general principles of right and wrong. When thewar came, their system continued to be applicable and effective, forhere again the reason of the people was to be reached and kindledthrough their sentiments. It was one of those periods ofexcitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last,exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere wordscountry, human rights, democracy,a meaning and a force beyondthat of sober and logical argument. They were convictions,maintained and defended by the supreme logic of passion. Thatpenetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that maketheir lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called thegreat popular heart was awakened, that indefinable somethingwhich may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason orthe most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never bewarmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, whenonce the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power hasebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enablesthem to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among the lessons taughtby the French Revolution there is none sadder or more striking thanthis, that you may make everything else out of the passions of menexcept a political system that will work, and that there is nothing sopitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated intodogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain of sentimentover questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction; and perhapsthe severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a tendency ofhis own supporters which chimed with his own private desires,while wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be wisepolicy.

The change which three years have brought about is too remarkableto be passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not tobe laid to heart. Never did a President enter upon office with lessmeans at his command, outside his own strength of heart andsteadiness of understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people,and so winning it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was knownof him was that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for hisavailability,—that is, because he had no history,—and chosen by aparty with whose more extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that a man past fifty, against whom theingenuity of hostile partisans could rake up no accusation, must belacking in manliness of character, in decision of principle, instrength of will; that a man who was at best only the representativeof a party, and who yet did not fairly represent even that, would failof political, much more of popular, support. And certainly no oneever entered upon office with so few resources of power in thepast, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as Mr.Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him asPresident, there was a large, and at that time dangerous, minority,that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and even in the partythat elected him there was also a large minority that suspected himof being secretly a communicant with the church of Laodicea. ¹All he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side; allthat he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness andbacksliding by the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a trulycolossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the countryfrom diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbedby the help or the hindrance of either, and to win from the crowningdangers of his administration, in the confidence of the people, themeans of his safety and their own. He has contrived to do it, andperhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so firmin the confidence of the people as he does after three years ofstormy administration.

Mr. Lincoln’s policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laiddown no programme which must compel him to be eitherinconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to whichcircumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless to hisends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin’s motto, Le temps etmoi. ²The moi,to be sure, was not very prominent at first;but it has grown more and more so, till the world is beginning to bepersuaded that it stands for a character of marked individuality andcapacity for affairs. Time was his prime-minister, and, we began tothink, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At first he was soslow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress butin blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took thebreath away from those who think there is no getting on safetywhile there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the onlybeing who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how toseize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as heneeds. 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 momentbrought up all his reserves. Semper nocuit differre paratis, ³isa sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure toknow when he is notready, and be firm against all persuasionand reproach till he is.

One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made onMr. Lincoln’s course by those who mainly agree with him inprinciple, that the chief object of a statesman should be rather toproclaim his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve theirtriumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there isno more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire,nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme ofpolicy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is apopular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands thesubmissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whosecommanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the gracefulpliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the menwho control circumstances, as it is called, are those who havelearned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerveto turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln’s periloustask has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids,making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, andthe country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty torun straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with hissetting-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 surenessof eye will bring him out right at last.

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be drawnbetween Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modernhistory,—Henry IV. of France. The career of the latter may be morepicturesque, as that of a daring captain always is; but in all itsvicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that suddenchange, as by a rub of Aladdin’s lamp, from the attorney’s office in acountry town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times likethese. The analogy between the characters and circumstances ofthe two men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to arebellion rather than a crown, Henry’s chief material dependencewas the Huguenot party, whose doctrines sat upon him with alooseness distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the morefanatical among them. King only in name over the greater part ofFrance, and with his capital barred against him, it yet graduallybecame clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party thathe was the only centre of order and legitimate authority roundwhich France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held thedivine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring withdeclamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to theheretic dog of Bearnois, ⁴—much as our soi-disantDemocratshave lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, anddenouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Independence,—Henrybore both parties in hand till he was convinced that only onecourse of action could possibly combine his own interests and thoseof France. Meanwhile the Protestants believed somewhatdoubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhatdoubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned asideremonstrance, advice and curiosity alike with a jest or a proverb (ifa little high,he liked them none the worse), joking continually ashis manner was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuouslycompared to Sancho Panza by persons incapable of appreciatingone of the deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romanceever written; namely, that, while Don Quixote was incomparable intheoretic and ideal statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock ofproverbs, the ready money of human experience, made the bestpossible practical governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws andmodern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was thethoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly earnest man, aroundwhom the fragments of France were to gather themselves till shetook her place again as a planet of the first magnitude in theEuropean system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunatethan Henry. However some may think him wanting in zeal, themost fanatical can find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his,nor can the most bitter charge him with being influenced by motivesof personal interest. The leading distinction between the policies ofthe two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to the nation;Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation over to him. One left aunited France; the other, we hope and believe, will leave a reunitedAmerica. We leave our readers to trace the further points ofdifference and resemblance for themselves, merely suggesting ageneral similarity which has often occurred to us. One only point ofmelancholy interest we will allow ourselves to touch upon. ThatMr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from certainEnglish tourists who would consider similar revelations in regard toQueen Victoria as thoroughly American in the want ofbienseance.It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitnessfor the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is certainly asfortunate as Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trustcontemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached withAmericanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with alldeference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, orsee in it any reason why he should govern Americans the lesswisely.

People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we areglad that in this our true war of independence, which is to free usforever from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairsa man whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the veryearth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us how muchtruth, how much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await thecall of opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justiceof God and the worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well intheir proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of nature likestubble in the fire. The genius that sways a nation by its arbitrarywill seems less august to us than that which multiplies andreinforces 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 improvedstatesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude andgreat powers, at least demands the long and steady application ofthe best powers of such men as it can command to master even itsfirst principles. It is curious, that, in a country which boasts of itsintelligence the theory should be so generally held that the mostcomplicated of human contrivances, and one which every daybecomes more complicated, can be worked at sight by any man ableto talk for an hour or two without stopping to think.

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-maderuler. But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that hewas a man of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material ofwisdom, he had in his profession a training precisely the opposite ofthat to which a partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyercompelled him not only to see that there is a principle underlyingevery phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always twosides to every question, both of which must be fully understood inorder to understand either, and that it is of greater advantage to anadvocate to appreciate the strength than the weakness of hisantagonist’s position. Nothing is more remarkable than the unerringtact with which, in his debate with Mr. Douglas, he went straight tothe reason of the question; nor have we ever had a more strikinglesson in political tactics than the fact, that opposed to a manexceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice and bigotry to hispurpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to those basermotives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of barbarians, heshould yet have won his case before a jury of the people. Mr.Lincoln was as far as possible from an impromptu politician. Hiswisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as of men;his sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honestacknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that theonly durable triumph of political opinion is based, not on anyabstract right, but upon so much of justice, the highest attainable atany given moment in human affairs, as may be had in the balance ofmutual concession. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it was the idealof a practical statesman,—to aim at the best, and to take the nextbest, if he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow, but singularlymasculine, intelligence taught him that precedent is only anothername for embodied experience, and that it counts for even more inthe guidance of communities of men than in that of the individuallife. He was not a man who held it good public economy to pulldown on the mere chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln’s faithin God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdomof man. Perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that more thananything else won him the unlimited confidence of the people, forthey felt that there would be no need of retreat from any position hehad deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance of hispolicy during the war was like that of a Roman army. He leftbehind him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; hetook America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied,and his advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness ofhis genius was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by itsworkday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so littleconscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of thepeople. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadnesstouched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, therewas no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems tohave had one rule of conduct, always that of practical andsuccessful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when theywere sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by whatseemed to unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp atthe desirable, a longer road.

Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees toaccommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and tosubordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher andmore permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and noton the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based. Voltaire’s saying, that “a consideration of petty circumstances is thetomb of great things,” may be true of individual men, but it certainlyis not true of governments. It is by a multitude of suchconsiderations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, thatthe framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable andtherefore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to whichevery sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or latersubject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change theiropinion. The course of a great statesman resembles that ofnavigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends ofconcession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which mensoonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almostimperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming atdirect advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, andsometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful humancommerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It isloyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small andopposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is theanchored cling to solid principles of duty and action, which knowshow to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it,—that wedemand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or aconscientious persistency in what is impracticable. For theimpracticable, however theoretically enticing, is always politicallyunwise, sound statesmanship being the application of that prudenceto the public business which is the safest guide in that of privatemen.

No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrassing questionwith which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, and it was one whichno man in his position, whatever his opinions, could evade; for,though he might withstand the clamor of partisans, he must sooneror later yield to the persistent importunacy of circumstances, whichthrust the problem upon him at every turn and in every shape.

It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, andrepeated here by people who measure their country rather by whatis thought of it than by what is, that our war has not been distinctlyand avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for thepreservation of our national power and greatness, in which theemancipation of the negro has been forced upon us bycircumstances and accepted as a necessity. We are very far fromdenying this; nay, we admit that it is so far true that we were slowto renounce our constitutional obligations even toward those whohad absolved us by their own act from the letter of our duty. Weare speaking of the government which, legally installed for thewhole country, was bound, so long as it was possible, not tooverstep the limits of orderly prescription, and could not, withoutabnegating its own very nature, take the lead off a Virginia reel. They forgot, what should be forgotten least of all in a system likeours, that the administration for the time being represents not onlythe majority which elects it, but the minority as well,—a minority inthis case powerful, and so little ready for emancipation that it wasopposed even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as generalagent of the an anti-slavery society, but President of the UnitedStates, to perform certain functions exactly defined by law. Whatever were his wishes, it was no less duty than policy to markout for himself a line of action that would not further distract thecountry, by raising before their time questions which plainly wouldsoon enough compel attention, and for which every day was makingthe answer more easy.

Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or bedevoured. Though Mr. Lincoln’s policy in this critical affair has notbeen such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment foreven the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coataccording to their cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors ofAtropos, ⁵it has been at least not unworthy of the long-headedking of Ithaca. ⁶Mr. Lincoln had the choice of Bassanio ⁷offered him. Which of the three caskets held the prize that was toredeem the fortunes of the country? There was the golden onewhose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain man; thesilver of compromise, which might have decided the choice of amerely acute one; and the leaden,—dull and homely-looking, asprudence always is,—yet with something about it sure to attract theeye of practical wisdom. Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decisionperhaps longer than seemed needful to those on whom its awfulresponsibility was not to rest, but when he made it, it was worthy ofhis cautious but sure-footed understanding. The moral of theSphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in the childish simplicity ofthe solution. Those who fail in guessing it, fail because they areover-ingenious, and cast about for an answer that shall suit theirown 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 inregard to which the ferment of prejudice and passion on both sideshas not yet subsided to that equilibrium of compromise from whichalone a sound public opinion can result, it is proper enough for theprivate citizen to press his own convictions with all possible forceof argument and persuasion; but the popular magistrate, whosejudgment must become action, and whose action involves the wholecountry, is bound to wait till the sentiment of the people is so faradvanced toward his own point of view, that what he does shall findsupport in it, instead of merely confusing it with new elements ofdivision. It was not unnatural that men earnestly devoted to thesaving of their country, and profoundly convinced that slavery wasits only real enemy, should demand a decided policy round which allpatriots might rally,—and this might have been the wisest course foran 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 regardthe Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to the South their ownjudgment as to policy and instinct as to right, that they were indoubt at first whether their loyalty were due to the country or toslavery; and with a respectable body of honest and influential menwho still believed in the possibility of conciliation,—Mr. Lincolnjudged wisely, that, in laying down a policy in deference to oneparty, he should be giving to the other the very fulcrum for whichtheir disloyalty had been waiting.

It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not to yield so far toan honest indignation against the brokers of treason in the North asto lose sight of the materials for misleading which were their stockin trade, and to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry whichis to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with it to make itspecious,—that it is not the knavery of the leaders so much as thehonesty of the followers they may seduce, that gives them powerfor evil. It was especially his duty to do nothing which might helpthe people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless disputesabout its inevitable consequences.

The doctrine of State rights can be so handled by an adroitdemagogue as easily to confound the distinction between libertyand lawlessness in the minds of ignorant persons, accustomedalways to be influenced by the sound of certain words, rather thanto reflect upon the principles which give them meaning. For,though Secession involves the manifest absurdity of denying to theState the right of making war against any foreign power whilepermitting it against the United States; though it supposes acompact of mutual concessions and guaranties among Stateswithout any arbiter in case of dissension; though it contradictscommon-sense in assuming that the men who framed ourgovernment did not know what they meant when they substitutedUnion for confederation; though it falsifies history, which showsthat the main opposition to the adoption of the Constitution wasbased on the argument that it did not allow that independence in theseveral States which alone would justify them in seceding;—yet, asslavery was universally admitted to be a reserved right, an inferencecould be drawn from any direct attack upon it (though only inself-defence) to a natural right of resistance, logical enough to satisfyminds untrained to detect fallacy, as the majority of men always are,and now too much disturbed by the disorder of the times, toconsider that the order of events had any legitimate bearing on theargument. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give theNorthern allies of the Rebels the occasion they desired and evenstrove to provoke, yet from the beginning of the war the mostpersistent efforts have been made to confuse the public mind as toits origin and motives, and to drag the people of the loyal Statesdown from the national position they had instinctively taken to theold level of party squabbles and antipathies. The whollyunprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaiming negro slavery thecorner-stone of free institutions, and in the first flush of over-hastyconfidence venturing to parade the logical sequence of their leadingdogma, “that slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to do withdifference of complexion,” has been represented as a legitimate andgallant attempt to maintain the true principles of democracy. Therightful endeavor of an established government, the least onerousthat ever existed, to defend itself against a treacherous attack on itsvery existence, has been cunningly made to seem the wicked effortof a fanatical clique to force its doctrines on an oppressedpopulation.

Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet convinced of thedanger and magnitude of the crisis, was endeavoring to persuadehimself of Union majorities at the South, and to carry on a war thatwas half peace in the hope of a peace that would have been allwar,—while he was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, under sometheory that Secession, however it might absolve States from theirobligations, could not escheat them of their claims under theConstitution, and that slaveholders in rebellion had alone amongmortals the privilege of having their cake and eating it at the sametime,—the enemies of free government were striving to persuade thepeople that the war was an Abolition crusade. To rebel withoutreason was proclaimed as one of the rights of man, while it wascarefully kept out of sight that to suppress rebellion is the first dutyof government. All the evils that have come upon the country havebeen attributed to the Abolitionists, though it is hard to see how anyparty can become permanently powerful except in one of two ways,either by the greater truth of its principles, or the extravagance ofthe party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, riding safe ather constitutional moorings, suddenly engulfed by a huge kraken ofAbolitionism, rising from unknown depths and grasping it withslimy tentacles, is to look at the natural history of the matter withthe eyes of Pontoppidan. ⁸To believe that the leaders in theSouthern treason feared any danger from Abolitionism, would be todeny them ordinary intelligence, though there can be little doubtthat they made use of it to stir the passions and excite the fears oftheir deluded accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thoughtslavery weak, but because they believed it strong enough, not tooverthrow the government, but to get possession of it; for itbecomes daily clearer that they used rebellion only as a means ofrevolution, and if they got revolution, though not in the shape theylooked for, is the American people to save them from itsconsequences at the cost of its own existence? The election of Mr.Lincoln, which it was clearly in their power to prevent had theywished, was the occasion merely, and not the cause of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within a year or two, was the despised heresy of afew earnest persons, without political weight enough to carry theelection of a parish constable; and their cardinal principle wasdisunion, because they were convinced that within the Union theposition of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, greateffects do not follow from small causes,—that is, disproportionatelysmall,—but from adequate causes acting under certain requiredconditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parentacorn, 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 thatdivine league which bound all the forces of nature to the service ofthe tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at workfor the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison andPhillips have been far less successful propagandists than theslaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance oftheir pretensions and encroachments. They have forced thequestion upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, bydefiantly putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But,even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire onthe part of the North to commit aggressions, though there was agrowing determination to resist them. The popular unanimity infavor of the war three years ago was but in small measure the resultof anti-slavery sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. Butevery month of the war, every movement of the allies of slavery inthe Free States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little movedby abstract principles of humanity and justice, until those principlesare interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of someinfringement upon their own rights, and then their instincts andpassions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculablereinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas,those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force tillthey are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong orimminent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin to fightagainst Sisera. Had any one doubted before that the rights ofhuman nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the worldover, no matter what the color of the oppressed,—had any onefailed to see what the real essence of the contest was,—the efforts ofthe advocates of slavery among ourselves to throw discredit uponthe fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence and theradical doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharpen his eyes.

While every day was bringing the people nearer to the conclusionwhich all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, itwas wise in Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this country, where the rough and ready understanding of thepeople is sure at last to be the controlling power, a profoundcommon-sense is the best genius for statesmanship. Hitherto thewisdom of the President’s measures has been justified by the factthat they have always resulted in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances ofPresident Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, whileit is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also nodoubtful indication of personal character. There must be somethingessentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level ofconfidential ease without losing respect, something very manly inone who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rankand trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who haveelected him. No higher compliment was ever paid to a nation thanthe simple confidence, the fireside plainness, with which Mr.Lincoln always addresses himself to the reason of the Americanpeople. This was, indeed, a true democrat, who grounded himselfon the assumption that a democracy can think. “Come, let usreason together about this matter,” has been the tone of all hisaddresses to the people; and accordingly we have never had a chiefmagistrate who so won to himself the love and at the same time thejudgment of his countrymen. To us, that simple confidence of his inthe right-mindedness of his fellowmen is very touching, and itssuccess is as strong an argument as we have ever seen in favor ofthe theory that men can govern themselves. He never appeals toany vulgar sentiment, he never alludes to the humbleness of hisorigin; it probably never occurred to him, indeed, that there wasanything higher to start from than manhood; and he put himself on alevel with those he addressed, not by going down to them, but onlyby taking it for granted that they had brains and would come up toa common ground of reason. In an article lately printed in TheNation,Mr. Bayard Taylor mentions the striking fact, that in thefoulest dens of the Five Points he found the portrait of Lincoln. The wretched population that makes its hive there threw all itsvotes and more against him, and yet paid this instinctive tribute tothe sweet humanity of his nature. Their ignorance sold its vote andtook its money, but all that was left of manhood in them recognizedits saint and martyr.

Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, “This is myopinion, ormytheory,” but “This is the conclusion to which, in myjudgment, the time has come, and to which, accordingly, the soonerwe come the better for us.” His policy has been the policy of publicopinion based on adequate discussion and on a timely recognitionof the influence of passing events in shaping the features of eventsto come.

One secret of Mr. Lincoln’s remarkable success in captivating thepopular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self whichenables him, though under the necessity of constantly using thecapital I, to do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is nosingle vowel which men’s mouths can pronounce with suchdifference 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 whathe says, another shall make an offensive challenge to theself-satisfaction of all his hearers, and an unwarranted intrusion uponeach man’s sense of personal importance, irritating every pore of hisvanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a goose-flesh of opposition andhostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied Quintilian; ⁹but he has, inthe earnest simplicity and unaffected Americanism of his owncharacter, one art of oratory worth all the rest. He forgets himselfso entirely in his object as to give his Ithe sympathetic andpersuasive effect of Wewith the great body of his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process of histhought as it goes along, yet arriving at his conclusions with anhonest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently ourrepresentative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the peoplewere listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of histhought owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to themanly movement that comes of settled purpose and an energy ofreason that knows not what rhetoric means. There has beennothing of Cleon, still less of Strepsiades ¹⁰striving to underbidhim in demagogism, to be found in the public utterances of Mr.Lincoln. He has always addressed the intelligence of men, nevertheir prejudice, their passion, or their ignorance.

On the day of his death, this simple Western attorney, whoaccording to one party was a vulgar joker, and whom thedoctrinairesamong his own supporters accused of wanting everyelement of statesmanship, was the most absolute ruler inChristendom, and this solely by the hold his good-humored sagacityhad laid on the hearts and understandings of his countrymen. Norwas 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. Sostrong and so persuasive is honest manliness without a singlequality of romance or unreal sentiment to help it! A civilian duringtimes of the most captivating military achievement, awkward, withno skill in the lower technicalities of manners, he left behind him afame beyond that of any conqueror, the memory of a grace higherthan that of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper thanmere breeding. Never before that startled April morning did suchmultitudes of men shed tears for the death of one they had neverseen, as if with him a friendly presence had been taken away fromtheir lives, leaving them colder and darker. Never was funeralpanegyric so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy whichstrangers exchanged when they met on that day. Their commonmanhood had lost a kinsman.

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