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ABRAHAM LINCOLN
ABRAHAM LINCOLN 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
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