Produced by Al Haines
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
BY LORD CHARNWOOD
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1917
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
Statesmen—even the greatest—have rarely won the same unquestioning recognition that falls to the great warriors or those supreme in science, art or literature. Not in their own lifetime and hardly to this day have the claims to supremacy of our own Oliver Cromwell, William III. and Lord Chatham rested on so sure a foundation as those of a Marlborough or a Nelson, a Newton, a Milton or a Hogarth. This is only natural. A warrior, a man of science, an artist or a poet are judged in the main by definite achievements, by the victories they have won over foreign enemies or over ignorance and prejudice, by the joy and enlightenment they have brought to the consciousness of their own and succeeding generations. For the statesman there is no such exact measure of greatness. The greater he is, the less likely is his work to be marked by decisive achievement which can be recalled by anniversaries or signalised by some outstanding event: the chief work of a great statesman rests in a gradual change of direction given to the policy of his people, still more in a change of the spirit within them. Again, the statesman must work with a rough and ready instrument. The soldier finds or makes his army ready to yield unhesitating obedience to his commands, the sailor animates his fleet with his own personal touch, and the great man in art, literature or science is master of his material, if he can master himself. The statesman cannot mould a heterogeneous people, as the men of a well-disciplined army or navy can be moulded, to respond to his call and his alone. He has to do all his work in a society of which a large part cannot see his object and another large part, as far as they do see it, oppose it. Hence his work at the best is often incomplete and he has to be satisfied with a rough average rather than with his ideal.
Lincoln, one of the few supreme statesmen of the last three centuries, was no exception to this rule. He was misunderstood and underrated in his lifetime, and even yet has hardly come to his own. For his place is among the great men of the earth. To them he belongs by right of his immense power of hard work, his unfaltering pursuit of what seemed to him right, and above all by that childlike directness and simplicity of vision which none but the greatest carry beyond their earliest years. It is fit that the first considered attempt by an Englishman to give a picture of Lincoln, the great hero of America's struggle for the noblest cause, should come at a time when we in England are passing through as fiery a trial for a cause we feel to be as noble. It is a time when we may learn much from Lincoln's failures and success, from his patience, his modesty, his serene optimism and his eloquence, so simple and so magnificent.
BASIL WILLIAMS.
BISCOT CAMP,
LUTON,
March, 1916.
CONTENTS
GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE
CHAP.
I. BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN
II. THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION 1. The Formation of a National Government 2. Territorial Expansion 3. The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government 4. The Missouri Compromise 5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth 6. Slavery and Southern Society 7. Intellectual Development
III. LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER 1. Life at New Salem 2. In the Illinois Legislature 3. Marriage
IV. LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT 1. The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress 2. California and the Compromise of 1850 3. Lincoln in Retirement 4. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise
V. THE RISE OF LINCOLN 1. Lincoln's Return to Public Life 2. The Principles and the Oratory of Lincoln 3. Lincoln against Douglas 4. John Brown 5. The Election of Lincoln as President
VI. SECESSION
1. The Case of the South against the Union
2. The Progress of Secession
3. The Inauguration of Lincoln
4. The Outbreak of War
VII. THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR
VIII. THE OPENING OF THE WAR AND LINCOLN'S ADMINISTRATION
1. Preliminary Stages of the War
2. Bull Run
3. Lincoln's Administration Generally
4. Foreign Policy and England
5. The Great Questions of Domestic Policy
IX. THE DISASTERS OF THE NORTH 1. Military Policy of the North 2. The War in the West up to May, 1862 3. The War in the East up to May, 1863
X. EMANCIPATION
XI. THE APPROACH OF VICTORY 1. The War to the End of 1863 2. Conscription and the Politics of 1863 3. The War in 1864 4. The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864
XII. THE END
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
INDEX
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN
The subject of this memoir is revered by multitudes of his countrymen as the preserver of their commonwealth. This reverence has grown with the lapse of time and the accumulation of evidence. It is blended with a peculiar affection, seldom bestowed upon the memory of statesmen. It is shared to-day by many who remember with no less affection how their own fathers fought against him. He died with every circumstance of tragedy, yet it is not the accident of his death but the purpose of his life that is remembered.
Readers of history in another country cannot doubt that the praise so given is rightly given; yet any bare record of the American Civil War may leave them wondering why it has been so unquestioningly accorded. The position and task of the American President in that crisis cannot be understood from those of other historic rulers or historic leaders of a people; and it may seem as if, after that tremendous conflict in which there was no lack of heroes, some perverse whim had made men single out for glory the puzzled civil magistrate who sat by. Thus when an English writer tells again this tale, which has been well told already and in which there can remain no important new facts to disclose, he must endeavour to make clear to Englishmen circumstances and conditions which are familiar to Americans. He will incur the certainty that here and there his own perspective of American affairs and persons will be false, or his own touch unsympathetic. He had better do this than chronicle sayings and doings which to him and to those for whom he writes have no significance. Nor should the writer shrink too timidly from the display of a partisanship which, on one side or the other, it would be insensate not to feel. The true obligation of impartiality is that he should conceal no fact which, in his own mind, tells against his views.
Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States of America, was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on a barren farm in the backwoods of Kentucky, about three miles west of a place called Hodgensville in what is now La Rue County.
Fifty years later when he had been nominated for the Presidency he was asked for material for an account of his early life. "Why," he said, "it is a great folly to attempt to make anything out of me or my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence; and that sentence you will find in Gray's 'Elegy':—
"'The short and simple annals of the poor.'
That's my life, and that's all you or anyone else can make out of it." His other references to early days were rare. He would repeat queer reminiscences of the backwoods to illustrate questions of state; but of his own part in that old life he spoke reluctantly and sadly. Nevertheless there was once extracted from him an awkward autobiographical fragment, and his friends have collected and recorded concerning his earlier years quite as much as is common in great men's biographies or can as a rule be reproduced with its true associations. Thus there are tales enough of the untaught student's perseverance, and of the boy giant's gentleness and prowess; tales, too, more than enough in proportion, of the fun which varied but did not pervade his existence, and of the young rustic's occasional and somewhat oafish pranks. But, in any conception we may form as to the growth of his mind and character, this fact must have its place, that to the man himself the thought of his early life was unattractive, void of self-content over the difficulties which he had conquered, and void of romantic fondness for vanished joys of youth.
Much the same may be said of his ancestry and family connections. Contempt for lowly beginnings, abhorrent as it is to any honest mind, would to Lincoln's mind have probably been inconceivable, but he lacked that interest in ancestry which is generally marked in his countrymen, and from talk of his nearer progenitors he seems to have shrunk with a positive sadness of which some causes will soon be apparent. Since his death it has been ascertained that in 1638 one Samuel Lincoln of Norwich emigrated to Massachusetts. Descent from him could be claimed by a prosperous family in Virginia, several of whom fought on the Southern side in the Civil War. One Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the President and apparently a grandson of Samuel, crossed the mountains from Virginia in 1780 and settled his family in Kentucky, of which the nearer portions had recently been explored. One morning four years later he was at work near his cabin with Mordecai, Josiah, and Thomas, his sons, when a shot from the bushes near by brought him down. Mordecai ran to the house, Josiah to a fort, which was close to them. Thomas, aged six, stayed by his father's body. Mordecai seized a gun and, looking through the window, saw an Indian in war paint stooping to pick up Thomas. He fired and killed the savage, and, when Thomas had run into the cabin, continued firing at others who appeared among the bushes. Shortly Josiah returned with soldiers from the fort, and the Indians ran off, leaving Abraham the elder dead. Mordecai, his heir-at-law, prospered. We hear of him long after as an old man of substance and repute in Western Illinois. He had decided views about Indians. The sight of a redskin would move him to strange excitement; he would disappear into the bushes with his gun, and his conscience as a son and a sportsman would not be satisfied till he had stalked and shot him. We are further informed that he was a "good old man." Josiah also moved to Illinois, and it is pleasant to learn that he also was a good old man, and, as became a good old man, prospered pretty well. But President Lincoln and his sister knew neither these excellent elders nor any other of their father's kin.
And those with whom the story of his own first twenty-one years is bound up invite almost as summary treatment. Thomas Lincoln never prospered like Mordecai and Josiah, and never seems to have left the impress of his goodness or of anything else on any man. But, while learning to carpenter under one Joseph Hanks, he married his employer's niece Nancy, and by her became the father first of a daughter Sarah, and four years later, at the farm near Hodgensville aforesaid, of Abraham, the future President. In 1816, after several migrations, he transported his household down the Ohio to a spot on the Indiana shore, near which the village of Gentryville soon sprang up. There he abode till Abraham was nearly twenty-one. When the boy was eight his mother died, leaving him in his sister's care; but after a year or so Thomas went back alone to Kentucky and, after brief wooing, brought back a wife, Sarah, the widow of one Mr. Johnston, whom he had courted vainly before her first marriage. He brought with her some useful additions to his household gear, and her rather useless son John Johnston. Relatives of Abraham's mother and other old neighbours—in particular John and Dennis Hanks—accompanied all the family's migrations. Ultimately, in 1830, they all moved further west into Illinois. Meanwhile Abraham from an early age did such various tasks for his father or for neighbouring farmers as from time to time suited the father. When an older lad he was put for a while in charge of a ferry boat, and this led to the two great adventures of his early days, voyages with a cargo boat; and two mates down by river to New Orleans. The second and more memorable of these voyages was just after the migration to Illinois. He returned from it to a place called New Salem, in Illinois, some distance from his father's new farm, in expectation of work in a store which was about to be opened. Abraham, by this time, was of age, and in accordance with custom had been set free to shift for himself.
Each of these migrations was effected with great labour in transportation of baggage (sometimes in home-made boats), clearing of timber, and building; and Thomas Lincoln cannot have been wanting in the capacity for great exertions. But historians have been inclined to be hard on him. He seems to have been without sustained industry; in any case he had not much money sense and could not turn his industry to much account. Some hint that he drank, but it is admitted that most Kentucky men drank more. There are indications that he was a dutiful but ineffective father, chastising not too often or too much, but generally on the wrong occasion. He was no scholar and did not encourage his son that way; but he had a great liking for stories. He was of a peaceable and inoffensive temper, but on great provocation would turn on a bully with surprising and dire consequences. Old Thomas, after Abraham was turned loose, continued a migrant, always towards a supposed better farm further west, always with a mortgage on him. Abraham, when he was a struggling professional man, helped him with money as well as he could. We have his letter to the old man on his death-bed, a letter of genuine but mild affection with due words of piety. He explains that illness in his own household makes it impossible for him to pay a last visit to his father, and then, with that curious directness which is common in the families of the poor and has as a rule no sting, he remarks that an interview, if it had been possible, might have given more pain than pleasure to both. Everybody has insisted from the first how little Abraham took after his father, but more than one of the traits attributed to Thomas will certainly reappear.
Abraham, as a man, when for once he spoke of his mother, whom he very seldom mentioned, spoke with intense feeling for her motherly care. "I owe," he said, "everything that I am to her." It pleased him in this talk to explain by inheritance from her the mental qualities which distinguished him from the house of Lincoln, and from others of the house of Hanks. She was, he said, the illegitimate daughter of a Virginian gentleman, whose name he did not know, but from whom as he guessed the peculiar gifts, of which he could not fail to be conscious, were derived.
Sarah his sister was married at Gentryville to one Mr. Grigsby. The Grigsbys were rather great people, as people went in Gentryville. It is said to have become fixed in the boy's mind that the Grigsbys had not treated Sarah well; and this was the beginning of certain woes.
Sarah Bush Lincoln, his stepmother, was good to him and he to her. Above all she encouraged him in his early studies, to which a fretful housewife could have opposed such terrible obstacles. She lived to hope that he might not be elected President for fear that enemies should kill him, and she lived to have her fear fulfilled. His affectionate care over her continued to the end. She lived latterly with her son John Johnston. Abraham's later letters to this companion of his youth deserve to be looked up in the eight large volumes called his Works, for it is hard to see how a man could speak or act better to an impecunious friend who would not face his own troubles squarely. It is sad that the "ever your affectionate brother" of the earlier letters declines to "yours sincerely" in the last; but it is an honest decline of affection, for the man had proved to be cheating his mother, and Abraham had had to stop it.
Two of the cousinhood, Dennis Hanks, a character of comedy, and John Hanks, the serious and steady character of the connection, deserve mention. They and John Johnston make momentary reappearances again. Otherwise the whole of Abraham Lincoln's kindred are now out of the story. They have been disposed of thus hastily at the outset, not because they were discreditable or slight people, but because Lincoln himself when he began to find his footing in the world seems to have felt sadly that his family was just so much to him and no more. The dearest of his recollections attached to premature death; the next to chronic failure. Rightly or wrongly (and we know enough about heredity now to expect any guess as to its working in a particular case to be wrong) he attributed the best that he had inherited to a licentious connection and a nameless progenitor. Quite early he must have been intensely ambitious, and discovered in himself intellectual power; but from his twelfth year to his twenty-first there was hardly a soul to comprehend that side of him. This chill upon his memory unmistakably influenced the particular complexion of his melancholy. Unmistakably too he early learnt to think that he was odd, that his oddity was connected with his strength, that he might be destined to stand alone and capable of so standing.
The life of the farming pioneer in what was then the Far West afforded a fair prospect of laborious independence. But at least till Lincoln was grown up, when a time of rapid growth and change set in, it offered no hope of quickly gotten wealth, and it imposed severe hardship on all. The country was thickly wooded; the settler had before him at the outset heavy toil in clearing the ground and in building some rude shelter,—a house or just a "half-faced camp," that is, a shed with one side open to the weather such as that in which the Lincoln family passed their first winter near Gentryville. The site once chosen and the clearing once made, there was no such ease of cultivation or such certain fertility as later settlers found yet further west when the development of railways, of agricultural machinery, and of Eastern or European markets had opened out to cultivation the enormous stretches of level grass plain beyond the Mississippi.
Till population had grown a good deal, pioneer families were largely occupied in producing for themselves with their own hands what, in their hardy if not always frugal view, were the necessities and comforts of life. They had no Eastern market for their produce, for railways did not begin to be made till 1840, and it was many years before they crossed the Eastern mountains. An occasional cargo was taken on a flat-bottomed boat down the nearest creek, as a stream is called in America, into the Ohio and so by the innumerable windings of the Mississippi to New Orleans; but no return cargo could be brought up stream. Knives and axes were the most precious objects to be gained by trade; woollen fabrics were rare in the West, when Lincoln was born, and the white man and woman, like the red whom they had displaced, were chiefly dressed in deer skins. The woods abounded in game, and in the early stages of the development of the West a man could largely support himself by his gun. The cold of every winter is there great, and an occasional winter made itself long remembered, like the "winter of the deep snow" in Illinois, by the havoc of its sudden onset and the suffering of its long duration. The settling of a forest country was accompanied here as elsewhere by the occasional ravages of strange and destructive pestilences and the constant presence of malaria. Population was soon thick enough for occasional gatherings, convivial or religious, and in either case apt to be wild, but for long it was not thick enough for the life of most settlers to be other than lonely as well as hard.
Abraham Lincoln in his teens grew very fast, and by nineteen he was nearly six foot four. His weight was never quite proportionate to this. His ungainly figure, with long arms and large hands and relatively small development of chest, and the strange deep-cut lineaments of his face were perhaps the evidence of unfit (sometimes insufficient) food in these years of growth. But his muscular strength was great, and startling statistical tales are told of the weight he could lift and the force of his blows with a mallet or an axe. To a gentle and thoughtful boy with secret ambition in him such strength is a great gift, and in such surroundings most obviously so. Lincoln as a lad was a valuable workman at the varied tasks that came his way, without needing that intense application to manual pursuits which the bent of his mind made irksome to him. And he was a person of high consideration among the lads of his age and company. The manners of the people then settling in Indiana and Illinois had not the extreme ferocity for which Kentucky had earlier been famous, and which crops up here and there in frontier life elsewhere. All the same, as might naturally be supposed, they shared Plato's opinion that youths and men in the prime of life should settle their differences with their fists. Young Lincoln's few serious combats were satisfactorily decisive, and neither they nor his friendly wrestling bouts ended in the quarrels which were too common among his neighbours. Thus, for all his originality and oddity, he early grew accustomed to mix in the sort of company he was likely to meet, without either inward shrinking or the need of conscious self-assertion.
In one thing he stood aloof from the sports of his fellows. Most backwoodsmen were bred to the gun; he has told us that he shot a turkey when he was eight and never afterwards shot at all. There is an early tale of his protests against an aimless slaughter of mud turtles; and it may be guessed that the dislike of all killing, which gave him sore trouble later, began when he was young. Tales survive of his kindness to helpless men and animals. It marks the real hardness of his surroundings, and their hardening effect on many, that his exertions in saving a drunken man from death in the snow are related with apparent surprise. Some tales of his helping a pig stuck in a bog or a dog on an ice floe and the like seem to indicate a curious and lasting trait. These things seem not to have been done spontaneously, but on mature reflection after he had passed unheeding by. He grew to be a man of prompt action in circumstances of certain kinds; but generally his impulse was slow and not very sure. Taste and the minor sensibilities were a little deficient in him. As a lady once candidly explained to him, he was not ready with little gracious acts. But rare occasions, such as can arouse a passionate sense of justice, would kindle his slow, kind nature with a sudden fire.
The total amount of his schooling, at the several brief periods for which there happened to have been a school accessible and facility to get to it, was afterwards computed by himself at something under twelve months. With this slight help distributed over the years from his eighth to his fifteenth birthday he taught himself to read, write, and do sums. The stories of the effort and painful shifts, by which great men accomplish this initial labour almost unhelped, have in all cases the same pathos, and have a certain sameness in detail. Having learnt to read he had the following books within his reach: the Bible, "Aesop's Fables," "Robinson Crusoe," the "Pilgrim's Progress," a "History of the United States," and Weems' "Life of Washington." Later on the fancy took him to learn the laws of his State, and he obtained the "Laws of Indiana." These books he did read, and read again, and pondered, not with any dreamy or purely intellectual interest, but like one who desires the weapon of learning for practical ends, and desires also to have patterns of what life should be. As already said, his service as a labourer could be considerable, and when something stirred his ambition to do a task quickly his energy could be prodigious. But "bone idle is what I called him," was the verdict long after of one, perhaps too critical, employer. "I found him," he said, "cocked up on a haystack with a book. 'What are you reading?' I said. 'I'm not reading, I'm studying,' says he. 'What are you studying?' says I. 'Law,' says he, as proud as Cicero. 'Great God Almighty!' said I." The boy's correction, "studying" for "reading," was impertinent, but probably sound. To be equally sound, we must reckon among his educational facilities the abundant stories which came his way in a community which, however unlettered, was certainly not dull-spirited; the occasional newspaper; the rare lectures or political meetings; the much more frequent religious meetings, with preachers who taught a grim doctrine, but who preached with vigour and sometimes with the deepest sincerity; the hymns often of great emotional power over a simple congregation—Cowper's "There is a fountain filled with blood," is one recorded favourite among them; the songs, far other than hymns, which Dennis Hanks and his other mates would pick up or compose; and the practice in rhetoric and the art of exposition, which he unblushingly afforded himself before audiences of fellow labourers who welcomed the jest and the excuse for stopping work. The achievement of the self-taught man remains wonderful, but, if he surmounts his difficulties at all, some of his limitations may turn to sheer advantage. There is some advantage merely in being driven to make the most of few books; great advantage in having one's choice restricted by circumstances to good books; great advantage too in the consciousness of untrained faculty which leaves a man capable in mature life of deliberately undertaking mental discipline.
Along with the legends and authentic records of his self-training, signs of an ambition which showed itself early and which was from the first a clean and a high ambition, there are also other legends showing Lincoln as a naughty boy among naughty boys. The selection here made from these lacks refinement, and the reader must note that this was literally a big, naughty boy, not a man who had grown stiff in coarseness and ill-nature. First it must be recalled that Abraham bore a grudge against the Grigsbys, an honourable grudge in its origin and perhaps the only grudge he ever bore. There had arisen from this a combat, of which the details might displease the fastidious, but which was noble in so far that Abraham rescued a weaker combatant who was over-matched. But there ensued something more displeasing, a series of lampoons by Abraham, in prose and a kind of verse. These were gross and silly enough, though probably to the taste of the public which he then addressed, but it is the sequel that matters. In a work called "The First Chronicles of Reuben," it is related how Reuben and Josiah, the sons of Reuben Grigsby the elder, took to themselves wives on the same day. By local custom the bridal feast took place and the two young couples began their married careers under the roof of the bridegrooms' father. Moreover, it was the custom that, at a certain stage in the celebrations, the brides should be escorted to their chambers by hired attendants who shortly after conducted the bridegrooms thither. On this occasion some sense of mischief afoot disturbed the heart of Mrs. Reuben Grigsby the elder, and, hastening upstairs, just after the attendants had returned, she cried out in a loud voice and to the great consternation of all concerned, "Why, Reuben, you're in bed with the wrong wife!" The historian who, to the manifest annoyance of Lincoln's other biographers, has preserved this and much other priceless information, infers that Abraham, who was not invited to the feast, had plotted this domestic catastrophe and won over the attendants to his evil purpose. This is not a certain inference, nor is it absolutely beyond doubt that the event recorded in "The First Chronicles of Reuben" ever happened at all. What is certain is that these Chronicles themselves, composed in what purports to be the style of Scripture, were circulated for the joint edification of the proud race of Grigsby and of their envious neighbours in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, then between seventeen and eighteen. Not without reason does an earlier manuscript of the same author conclude, after several correct exercises in compound subtraction, with the distich:—
"Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,
He will be good, but God knows when."
Not to be too solemn about a tale which has here been told for the whimsical fancy of its unseemliness and because it is probably the worst that there is to tell, we may here look forward and face the well-known fact that the unseemliness in talk of rough, rustic boys flavoured the great President's conversation through life. It is well to be plain about this. Lincoln was quite without any elegant and sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed. His life was austere and seems to have been so from the start. He had that shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily maintained. The testimony of his early companions, along with some fragments of the boy's feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that he acquired it young. But a large part of the stories and pithy sayings for which he was famous wherever he went, but of which when their setting is lost it is impossible to recover the enjoyment, were undeniably coarse, and naturally enough this fact was jarring to some of those in America who most revered him. It should not really be hard, in any comprehensive view of his character and the circumstances in which it unfolded itself, to trace in this bent of his humour something not discordant with the widening sympathy and deepening tenderness of his nature. The words of his political associate in Illinois, Mr. Leonard Swett, afterwards Attorney-General of the United States, may suffice. He writes: "Almost any man, who will tell a very vulgar story, has, in a degree, a vulgar mind. But it was not so with him; with all his purity of character and exalted morality and sensibility, which no man can doubt, when hunting for wit he had no ability to discriminate between the vulgar and refined substances from which he extracted it. It was the wit he was after, the pure jewel, and he would pick it up out of the mud or dirt just as readily as from a parlour table." In any case his best remembered utterances of this order, when least fit for print, were both wise and incomparably witty, and in any case they did not prevent grave gentlemen, who marvelled at them rather uncomfortably, from receiving the deep impression of what they called his pure-mindedness.
One last recollection of Lincoln's boyhood has appealed, beyond any other, to some of his friends as prophetic of things to come. Mention has already been made of his two long trips down the Mississippi. With the novel responsibilities which they threw on him, and the novel sights and company which he met all the way to the strange, distant city of New Orleans, they must have been great experiences. Only two incidents of them are recorded. In the first voyage he and his mates had been disturbed at night by a band of negro marauders and had had a sharp fight in repelling them, but in the second voyage he met with the negro in a way that to him was more memorable. He and the young fellows with him saw, among the sights of New Orleans, negroes chained, maltreated, whipped and scourged; they came in their rambles upon a slave auction where a fine mulatto girl was being pinched and prodded and trotted up and down the room like a horse to show how she moved, that "bidders might satisfy themselves," as the auctioneer said, of the soundness of the article to be sold. John Johnston and John Hanks and Abraham Lincoln saw these sights with the unsophisticated eyes of honest country lads from a free State. In their home circle it seems that slavery was always spoken of with horror. One of them had a tenacious memory and a tenacious will. "Lincoln saw it," John Hanks said long after, and other men's recollections of Lincoln's talk confirmed him—"Lincoln saw it; his heart bled; said nothing much, was silent. I can say, knowing it, that it was on this trip that he formed his opinion of slavery. It ran its iron into him then and there, May, 1831. I have heard him say so often." Perhaps in other talks old John Hanks dramatised his early remembrances a little; he related how at the slave auction Lincoln said, "By God, boys, let's get away from this. If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard."
The youth, who probably did not express his indignation in these prophetic words, was in fact chosen to deal "that thing" a blow from which it seems unlikely to recover as a permitted institution among civilised men, and it is certain that from this early time the thought of slavery never ceased to be hateful to him. Yet it is not in the light of a crusader against this special evil that we are to regard him. When he came back from this voyage to his new home in Illinois he was simply a youth ambitious of an honourable part in the life of the young country of which he was proud. We may regard, and he himself regarded, the liberation of the slaves, which will always be associated with his name, as a part of a larger work, the restoration of his country to its earliest and noblest tradition, which alone gave permanence or worth to its existence as a nation.
CHAPTER II
THE GROWTH OF THE AMERICAN NATION
1. The Formation of a National Government.
It is of course impossible to understand the life of a politician in another country without study of its conditions and its past. In the case of America this study is especially necessary, not only because the many points of comparison between that country and our own are apt to conceal profound differences of customs and institutions, but because the broader difference between a new country and an old is in many respects more important than we conceive. But in the case of Lincoln there is peculiar reason for carrying such a study far back. He himself appealed unceasingly to a tradition of the past. In tracing the causes which up to his time had tended to conjoin the United States more closely and the cause which more recently had begun to threaten them with disruption, we shall be examining the elements of the problem with which it was his work in life to deal.
The "Thirteen United States of America" which in 1776 declared their independence of Great Britain were so many distinct Colonies distributed unevenly along 1,300 miles of the Atlantic coast. These thirteen Colonies can easily be identified on the map when it is explained that Maine in the extreme north was then an unsettled forest tract claimed by the Colony of Massachusetts, that Florida in the extreme south belonged to Spain, and that Vermont, which soon after asserted its separate existence, was a part of the State of New York. Almost every one of these Colonies had its marked peculiarities and its points of antagonism as against its nearest neighbours; but they fell into three groups. We may broadly contrast the five southernmost, which included those which were the richest and of which in many ways the leading State was Virginia, with the four (or later six) northernmost States known collectively as New England. Both groups had at first been colonised by the same class, the smaller landed gentry of England with a sprinkling of well-to-do traders, though the South received later a larger number of poor and shiftless immigrants than the North, and the North attracted a larger number of artisans. The physical conditions of the South led to the growth of large farms, or "plantations" as they were called, and of a class of large proprietors; negro slaves thrived there and were useful in the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, rice, and later of cotton. The North continued to be a country of small farms, but its people turned also to fishery and to commerce, and the sea carrying trade became early its predominant interest, yielding place later on to manufacturing industries. The South was attached in the main, though by no means altogether, to the Church of England; New England owed its origin to successive immigrations of Puritans often belonging to the Congregational or Independent body; with the honourable exception of Rhode Island these communities showed none of the liberal and tolerant Spirit which the Independents of the old country often developed; they manifested, however, the frequent virtues as well as the occasional defects of the Puritan character. The middle group of Colonies were of more mixed origin; New York and New Jersey had been Dutch possessions, Delaware was partly Swedish, Pennsylvania had begun as a Quaker settlement but included many different elements; in physical and economic conditions they resembled on the whole New England, but they lacked, some of them conspicuously, the Puritan discipline, and had a certain cosmopolitan character. Though there were sharp antagonisms among the northern settlements, and the southern settlements were kept distinct by the great distances between them, the tendency of events was to soften these minor differences. But it greatly intensified one broad distinction which marked off the southern group from the middle and the northern groups equally.
Nevertheless, before independence was thought of there were common characteristics distinguishing Americans from English people. They are the better worth an attempt to note them because, as a historian of America wrote some years ago, "the typical American of 1900 is on the whole more like his ancestor of 1775 than is the typical Englishman." In all the Colonies alike the conditions of life encouraged personal independence. In all alike they also encouraged a special kind of ability which may be called practical rather than thorough—that of a workman who must be competent at many tasks and has neither opportunity nor inducement to become perfect at one; that of the scientific man irresistibly drawn to inventions which shall make life less hard; that of the scholar or philosopher who must supply the new community's need of lawyers and politicians.
On the other hand, many of the colonists' forefathers had come to their new home with distinct aspirations for a better ordering of human life than the old world allowed, and it has frequently been noticed that Americans from the first have been more prone than their kinsmen in England to pay homage to large ideal conceptions. This is a disposition not entirely favourable to painstaking and sure-footed reform. The idealist American is perhaps too ready to pay himself with fine words, which the subtler and shyer Englishman avoids and rather too readily sets down as insincere in others. Moreover, this tendency is quite consistent with the peculiar conservatism characteristic of America. New conditions in which tradition gave no guidance called forth great inventive powers and bred a certain pride in novelty. An American economist has written in a sanguine humour, "The process of transplanting removes many of the shackles of custom and tradition which retard the progress of older countries. In a new country things cannot be done in the old way, and therefore they are probably done in the best way." But a new country is always apt to cling with tenacity to those old things for which it still has use; and a remote and undeveloped country does not fully share the continual commerce in ideas which brings about change (and, in the main, advance) in the old world. The conservatism which these causes tend to produce has in any case been marked in America. Thus, as readers of Lowell are aware, in spite of the ceaseless efflorescence of the modern slang of America, the language of America is in many respects that of an older England than ours, and the like has all along been true of important literature, and still more of oratory, in America. Moreover, as the sentences which have just been quoted may suggest, the maxim that has once hit the occasion, or the new practice or expedient once necessitated by the conditions of the moment, has been readily hallowed as expressing the wisdom of the ages. An Englishman will quote Burke as he would quote Demosthenes or Plato, but Americans have been apt to quote their elder statesmen as they would quote the Bible. In like manner political practices of accidental origin—for instance, that a representative should be an inhabitant of the place he represents—acquire in America something like the force of constitutional law.
In this connection we must recall the period at which the earliest settlers came from England, and the political heritage which they consequently brought with them. This heritage included a certain aptitude for local government, which was fostered in the south by the rise of a class of large landowners and in the north by the Congregational Church system. It included also a great tenacity of the subject's rights as against the State—the spirit of Hampden refusing payment of ship-money—and a disposition to look on the law and the Courts as the bulwarks of such rights against Government. But it did not include—and this explains the real meaning of the War of Independence—any sort of feeling of allegiance to a Parliament which represented Great Britain only, and which had gained its position even in Great Britain since the fathers of Virginia and Massachusetts left home. Nor did it include—and this was of great importance in its influence on the form of the Constitution—any real understanding of or any aptitude for the English Parliamentary Government, under which the leaders of the legislative body and the advisers of the Crown in its executive functions are the same men, and under which the elected persons, presumed for the moment to represent the people, are allowed for that moment an almost unfettered supremacy.
Thus there was much that made it easy for the Colonies to combine in the single act of repudiating British sovereignty, yet the characteristics which may be ascribed to them in common were not such as inclined them or fitted them to build up a great new unity.
The Colonies, however, backed up by the British Government with the vigour which Chatham imparted to it, had acted together against a common danger from the French. When the States, as we must now call them, acted together against the British Government they did so in name as "United States," and they shortly proceeded to draw up "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union." But it was union of a feeble kind. The separate government of each State, in its internal affairs, was easy to provide for; representative institutions always existed, and no more change was needed than to substitute elected officers for the Governors and Councillors formerly appointed by the Crown. For the Union a Congress was provided which was to represent all the States in dealings with the outside world, but it was a Government with no effective powers except such as each separate State might independently choose to lend it. It might wage war with England, but it could not effectually control or regularly pay the military service of its own citizens; it might make a treaty of peace with England, but it could not enforce on its citizens distasteful obligations of that treaty. Such an ill-devised machine would have worked well enough for a time, if the Union Government could have attached to itself popular sentiments of honour and loyalty. But the sentiments were not there; and it worked badly.
When once we were reconciled to a defeat which proved good for us, it became a tradition among English writers to venerate the American Revolution. Later English historians have revolted from this indiscriminate veneration. They insist on another side of the facts: on the hopelessness of the American cause but for the commanding genius of Washington and his moral authority, and for the command which France and Spain obtained of the seas; on the petty quarrelsomeness with which the rights of the Colonists were urged, and the meanly skilful agitation which forced on the final rupture; on the lack of sustained patriotic effort during the war; on the base cruelty and dishonesty with which the loyal minority were persecuted and the private rights guaranteed by the peace ignored. It does not concern us to ascertain the precise justice in this displeasing picture; no man now regrets the main result of the Revolution, and we know that a new country is a new country, and that there was much in the circumstances of the war to encourage indiscipline and ferocity. But the fact that there is cause for such an indictment bears in two ways upon our present subject.
In the first place, there has been a tendency both in England and in America to look at this history upside down. The epoch of the Revolution and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age—wherein lived the elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest—to be followed by almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline. A more pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth. The faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many influences that favoured decay. The nobility of the Revolution in the eighteenth century may be rated higher or lower, but in the Civil War, in which the elder brothers of so many men now living bore their part, the people of the North and of the South alike displayed far more heroic qualities.
In the second place, the War of Independence and of the Revolution lacked some of the characteristics of other national uprisings. It was not a revolt against grievous oppression or against a wholly foreign domination, but against a political system which the people mildly resented and which only statesmen felt to be pernicious and found to be past cure. The cause appealed to far-seeing political aspiration and appealed also to turbulent and ambitious spirits and to whatever was present of a merely revolutionary temper, but the ordinary law-abiding man who minded his own business was not greatly moved one way or the other in his heart.
The subsequent movement which, in a few years after independence was secured, gave the United States a national and a working Constitution was altogether the work of a few, to which popular movement contributed nothing. Of popular aspiration for unity there was none. Statesmen knew that the new nation or group of nations lay helpless between pressing dangers from abroad and its own financial difficulties. They saw clearly that they must create a Government of the Union which could exercise directly upon the individual American citizen an authority like that of the Government of his own State. They did this, but with a reluctant and half-convinced public opinion behind them.
The makers of the Constitution earned in a manner the full praise that has ever since been bestowed on them. But they did not, as it has often been suggested they did, create a sort of archetype and pattern for all Governments that may hereafter partake of a federal character. Nor has the curious machine which they devised—with its balanced opposition between two legislative chambers, between the whole Legislature and the independent executive power of the President, between the governing power of the moment and the permanent expression of the people's will embodied in certain almost unalterable laws—worked conspicuously better than other political constitutions. The American Constitution owes its peculiarities partly to the form which the State Governments had naturally taken, and partly to sheer misunderstanding of the British Constitution, but much more to the want at the time of any strong sense of national unity and to the existence of a good deal of dislike to all government whatsoever. The sufficient merit of its founders was that of patient and skilful diplomatists, who, undeterred by difficulties, found out the most satisfactory settlement that had a chance of being accepted by the States.
So the Colonies, which in 1776 had declared their independence of Great Britain under the name of the United States of America, entered in 1789 into the possession of machinery of government under which their unity and independence could be maintained.
It will be well at once to describe those features of the Constitution which it will be necessary for us later to bear in mind. It is generally known that the President of the United States is an elected officer—elected by what operates, though intended to act otherwise, as a popular vote. During the four years of his office he might roughly be said to combine the functions of the King in this country and those of a Prime Minister whose cabinet is in due subjection to him. But that description needs one very important qualification. He wields, with certain slight restrictions, the whole executive power of government, but neither he nor any of his ministers can, like the ministers of our King, sit or speak in the Legislature, nor can he, like our King, dissolve that Legislature. He has indeed a veto on Acts of Congress, which can only be overridden by a large majority in both Houses. But the executive and the legislative powers in America were purposely so constituted as to be independent of each other to a degree which is unknown in this country.
It is perhaps not very commonly understood that President and Congress alike are as strictly fettered in their action by the Constitution as a limited liability company is by its Memorandum of Association. This Constitution, which defines both the form of government and certain liberties of the subject, is not unalterable, but it can be altered only by a process which requires both the consent of a great majority in Congress or alternatively of a great majority of the legislatures of the distinct States composing the Union, and also ratification of amendments by three-fourths of the several States. Thus we shall have to notice later that a "Constitutional Amendment" abolishing slavery became a terror of the future to many people in the slave States, but remained all the time an impossibility in the view of most people in the free States.
We have, above all things, to dismiss from our minds any idea that the Legislature of a State is subordinate to the Congress of the United States, or that a State Governor is an officer under the President. The Constitution of the Union was the product of a half-developed sense of nationality. Under it the State authority (in the American sense of "State") and the Union or Federal authority go on side by side working in separate spheres, each subject to Constitutional restrictions, but each in its own sphere supreme. Thus the State authority is powerless to make peace or war or to impose customs duties, for those are Federal matters. But the Union authority is equally powerless, wherever a State authority has been constituted, to punish ordinary crime, to promote education, or to regulate factories. In particular, by the Constitution as it stood till after the Civil War, the Union authority was able to prohibit the importation of slaves from abroad after the end of 1807, but had no power to abolish slavery itself in any of the States.
Further, Congress had to be constituted in such a manner as to be agreeable to the smaller States which did not wish to enter into a Union in which their influence would be swamped by their more populous neighbours. Their interest was secured by providing that in the Senate each State should have two members and no more, while in the House of Representatives the people of the whole Union are represented according to population. Thus legislation through Congress requires the concurrence of two forces which may easily be opposed, that of the majority of American citizens and that of the majority of the several States. Of the two chambers, the Senate, whose members are elected for six years, and to secure continuity do not all retire at the same time, became as time went on, though not at first, attractive to statesmen of position, and acquired therefore additional influence.
Lastly, the Union was and is still the possessor of Territories not included in any State, and in the Territories, whatever subordinate self-government they might be allowed, the Federal authority has always been supreme and uncontrolled in all matters. But as these Territories have become more settled and more populated, portions of them have steadily from the first been organised as States and admitted to the Union. It is for Congress to settle the time of their admission and to make any conditions in regard to their Constitutions as States. But when once admitted as States they have thenceforward the full rights of the original States. Within all the Territories, while they remained under its jurisdiction it lay with Congress to determine whether slavery should be lawful or not, and, when any portion of them was ripe for admission to the Union as a State, Congress could insist that the new State's Constitution should or should not prohibit slavery. When the Constitution of the Union was being settled, slavery was the subject of most careful compromise; but in any union formed between slave States and free, a bitter root of controversy must have remained, and the opening through which controversy actually returned was provided by the Territories.
On all other matters the makers of the Constitution had in the highest temper of statesmanship found a way round seemingly insuperable difficulties. The whole attitude of "the fathers" towards slavery is a question of some consequence to a biographer of Lincoln, and we shall return to it in a little while.
2. Territorial Expansion.
A machine of government had been created, and we are shortly to consider how it was got to work. But the large dominion to be governed had to be settled, and its area was about to undergo an enormous expansion. It will be convenient at this point to mark the stages of this development.
The thirteen Colonies had, when they first revolted, definite western boundaries, the westernmost of them reaching back from the sea-board to a frontier in the Alleghany Mountains. But at the close of the war Great Britain ceded to the United States the whole of the inland country up to the Mississippi River. Virginia had in the meantime effectively colonised Kentucky to the west of her, and for a time this was treated as within her borders. In a similar way Tennessee had been settled from North and South Carolina and was treated as part of the former. Virginia had also established claims by conquest north of the Ohio River in what was called the North-West Territory, but these claims and all similar claims of particular States in unsettled or half-settled territory were shortly before or shortly after the adoption of the Constitution ceded to the Union Government. But the dominions of that Government soon received a vast accession. In 1803, by a brave exercise of the Constitutional powers which he was otherwise disposed to restrict jealously, President Jefferson bought from Napoleon I. the great expanse of country west of the Mississippi called Louisiana. This region in the extreme south was no wider than the present State of Louisiana, but further north it widened out so as to take in the whole watershed of the Missouri and its tributaries, including in the extreme north nearly all the present State of Montana. In 1819 Florida was purchased from Spain, and that country at the same time abandoned its claims to a strip of coastland which now forms the sea-board of Alabama and Mississippi.
Such was the extent of the United States when Lincoln began his political life. In the movement of population by which this domain was being settled up, different streams may be roughly distinguished. First, there was from 1780 onwards a constant movement of the poorer class and of younger sons of rich men from the great State of Virginia and to some extent from the Carolinas into Kentucky and Tennessee, whence they often shifted further north into Indiana and Illinois, or sometimes further west into Missouri. It was mainly a movement of single families or groups of families of adventurous pioneers, very sturdy, and very turbulent. Then there came the expansion of the great plantation interest in the further South, carrying with it as it spread, not occasional slaves as in Kentucky and Tennessee, but the whole plantation system. This movement went not only directly westward, but still more by the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, into the State of Louisiana, where a considerable French population had settled, the State of Mississippi, and later into Missouri. Later still came the westward movement from the Northern States. The energies of the people in these States had at first been to great extent absorbed by sea-going pursuits and the subjugation of their own rugged soil, so that they reached western regions like Illinois rather later than did the settlers from States further south. Ultimately, as their manufactures grew, immigration from Europe began its steady flow to these States, and the great westward stream, which continuing in our days has filled up the rich lands of the far North-West, grew in volume. But want of natural timber and other causes hindered the development of the fertile prairie soil in the regions beyond the upper Mississippi, till the period of railway development, which began about 1840, was far advanced. Illinois was Far West in 1830, Iowa and Minnesota continued to be so in 1860. The Northerners, when they began to move westward, came in comparatively large numbers, bringing comparatively ordered habits and the full machinery of outward civilisation with them. Thus a great social change followed upon their arrival in the regions to which only scattered pioneers such as the Lincolns had previously penetrated. In Illinois, with which so much of our story is bound up, the rapidity of that change may be estimated from the fact that the population of that State multiplied sevenfold between the time when Lincoln settled there and the day when he left it as President.
The concluding stages by which the dominions of the United States came to be as we know them were: the annexation by agreement in 1846 of the Republic of Texas, which had separated itself from Mexico and which claimed besides the great State of Texas a considerable territory reaching north-west to the upper portions of the Arkansas River; the apportionment to the Union by a delimitation treaty with Great Britain in 1846 of the Oregon Territory, including roughly the State of that name and the rest of the basin of the Columbia River up to the present frontier—British Columbia being at the same time apportioned to Great Britain; the conquest from Mexico in 1848 of California and a vast mountainous tract at the back of it; the purchase from Mexico of a small frontier strip in 1853; and the acquisition at several later times of various outlying dependencies which will in no way concern us.
3. The Growth of the Practice and Traditions of the Union Government.
We must turn back to the internal growth of the new united nation. When the Constitution had been formed and the question of its acceptance by the States had been at last settled, and when Washington had been inaugurated as the first President under it, a wholly new conflict arose between two parties, led by two Ministers in the President's Cabinet, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Both were potent and remarkable men, Hamilton in all senses a great man. These two men, for all their antagonism, did services to their country, without which the vigorous growth of the new nation would not have been possible.
The figure of Alexander Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury (ranked by Talleyrand with Fox and Napoleon as one of the three great men he had known), must fascinate any English student of the period. If his name is not celebrated in the same way in the country which he so eminently served, it is perhaps because in his ideas, as in his origin, he was not strictly American. As a boy, half Scotch, half French Huguenot, from the English West Indian island of Nevis, he had been at school in New York when his speeches had some real effect in attaching that city to the cause of Independence. He had served brilliantly in the war, on Washington's staff and with his regiment. He had chivalrously defended, as an advocate and in other ways, the Englishmen and loyalists against whose cause he fought. He had induced the great central State of New York to accept the Constitution, when the strongest local party would have rejected it and made the Union impossible. As Washington's Secretary of the Treasury he organised the machinery of government, helped his chief to preserve a strong, upright and cautious foreign policy at the critical point of the young Republic's infancy, and performed perhaps the greatest and most difficult service of all in setting the disordered finances of the country upon a sound footing. In early middle age he ended a life, not flawless but admirable and lovable, in a duel, murderously forced upon him by one Aaron Burr. This man, who was an elegant profligate, with many graces but no public principle, was a claimant to the Presidency in opposition to Hamilton's greatest opponent, Jefferson; Hamilton knowingly incurred a feud which must at the best have been dangerous to him, by unhesitatingly throwing his weight upon the side of Jefferson, his own ungenerous rival. The details of his policy do not concern us, but the United States could hardly have endured for many years without the passionate sense of the need of government and the genius for actual administration with which Hamilton set the new nation on its way. Nevertheless—so do gifts differ—the general spirit which has on the whole informed the American nation and held it together was neither respected nor understood by him. His party, called the Federalists, because they claimed to stand for a strong and an efficient Federal Government, did not survive him long. It is of interest to us here only because, with its early disappearance, there ceased for ever to be in America any party whatsoever which in any sense represented aristocratic principles or leanings.
The fate of Jefferson's party (at first called Republican but by no means to be confused with the Republican party which will concern us later) was far different, for the Democratic party, represented by the President of the United States at this moment, claims to descend from it in unbroken apostolic succession. But we need not pause to trace the connecting thread between them, real as it is, for parties are not to be regarded as individuals. Indeed the personality of Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet, impressed itself, during his life and long after, upon all America more than that of any other man. Democrats to-day have described Lincoln, who by no means belonged to their party, as Jefferson's spiritual heir; and Lincoln would have welcomed the description.
No biographer has achieved an understanding presentment of Jefferson's curious character, which as presented by unfriendly critics is an unpleasing combination of contrasting elements. A tall and active fellow, a good horseman and a good shot, living through seven years of civil war, which he had himself heralded in, without the inclination to strike a blow; a scholar, musician, and mathematician, without delicacy, elevation, or precision of thought or language; a man of intense ambition, without either administrative capacity or the courage to assert himself in counsel or in debate; a dealer in philanthropic sentiment, privately malignant and vindictive. This is not as a whole a credible portrait; it cannot stand for the man as his friends knew him; but there is evidence for each feature of it, and it remains impossible for a foreigner to think of Jefferson and not compare him to his disadvantage with the antagonist whom he eclipsed. By pertinacious industry, however, working chiefly through private correspondence, he constructed a great party, dominated a nation, and dominated it mainly for good. For the rapid and complete triumph of Jefferson's party over its opponents signifies a very definite and lasting conversion of the main stream of American public opinion to what may be called the sane element in the principles of the French Revolution. At the time when he set himself to counterwork Hamilton, American statesmanship was likely to be directed only to making Government strong and to ensuring the stability of the business world; for reaction against the bloody absurdities that had happened in France was strong in America, and in English thought, which still had influence in America, it was all-powerful. Against this he asserted an intense belief in the value of freedom, in the equal claim of men of all conditions to the consideration of government, and in the supreme importance to government of the consenting mind of the governed. And he made this sense so definitely a part of the national stock of ideas that, while the older-established principles of strong and sound government were not lost to sight, they were consciously rated as subordinate to the principles of liberty.
It must not be supposed that the ascendency thus early acquired by what may be called liberal opinions in America was a matter merely of setting some fine phrases in circulation, or of adopting, as was early done in most States, a wide franchise and other external marks of democracy. We may dwell a little longer on the unusual but curiously popular figure of Jefferson, for it illustrates the spirit with which the commonwealth became imbued under his leadership. He has sometimes been presented as a man of flabby character whose historical part was that of intermediary between impracticable French "philosophes" and the ruffians and swindlers that Martin Chuzzlewit encountered, who were all "children of liberty," and whose "boastful answer to the Despot and the Tyrant was that their bright home was in the Settin' Sun." He was nothing of the kind. His judgment was probably unsound on the questions of foreign policy on which as Secretary of State he differed from Washington, and he leaned, no doubt, to a jealous and too narrow insistence upon the limits set by the Constitution to the Government's power. But he and his party were emphatically right in the resistance which they offered to certain needless measures of coercion. As President, though he was not a great President, he suffered the sensible course of administration originated by his opponent to continue undisturbed, and America owed to one bold and far-seeing act of his the greatest of the steps by which her territory was enlarged. It is, however, in the field of domestic policy, which rested with the States and with which a President has often little to do, that the results of his principles must be sought. Jefferson was a man who had worked unwearyingly in Virginia at sound, and what we should now call conservative, reforms, establishing religious toleration, reforming a preposterous land law, seeking to provide education for the poor, striving unsuccessfully for a sensible scheme of gradual emancipation of the slaves. In like manner his disciples after him, in their several States, devoted themselves to the kind of work in removing manifest abuses and providing for manifest new social needs in which English reformers like Romilly and Bentham, and the leaders of the first reformed Parliament, were to be successful somewhat later. The Americans who so exasperated Dickens vainly supposed themselves to be far ahead of England in much that we now consider essential to a well-ordered nation. But there could have been no answer to Americans of Jefferson's generation if they had made the same claim.
It is with this fact in mind that we should approach the famous words of Jefferson which echoed so long with triumphant or reproachful sound in the ears of Americans and to which long after Lincoln was to make a memorable appeal. The propaganda which he carried on when the Constitution had been adopted was on behalf of a principle which he had enunciated as a younger man when he drafted the Declaration of Independence. That document is mainly a rehearsal of the colonists' grievances, and is as strictly lawyerlike and about as fair or unfair as the arguments of a Parliamentarian under Charles I. But the argumentation is prefaced with these sounding words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Few propositions outside the Bible have offered so easy a mark to the shafts of unintelligently clever criticism.
Jefferson, when he said that "all men are created equal," and the Tory Dr. Johnson, when he spoke of "the natural equality of man," used a curious eighteenth century phrase, of which a Greek scholar can see the origin; but it did not mean anything absurd, nor, on the other hand, did it convey a mere platitude. It should not be necessary to explain, as Lincoln did long after, that Jefferson did not suppose all men to be of equal height or weight or equally wise or equally good. He did, however, contend for a principle of which one elementary application is the law which makes murder the same crime whatever be the relative positions of the murderer and the murdered man. Such a law was indeed firmly rooted in England before Jefferson talked of equality, but it amazed the rest of Europe when the House of Lords hanged a peer for the murder of his servant. There are indefinitely many further ways in which men who are utterly unequal had best be treated as creatures equally entitled to the consideration of government and of their neighbours. It is safer to carry this principle too far than not to carry it far enough. If Jefferson had expressed this and his cognate principle of liberty with scientific precision, or with the full personal sincerity with which a greater man like Lincoln expressed it, he would have said little from which any Englishman to-day would dissent. None the less he would have enunciated a doctrine which most Governments then existing set at naught or proscribed, and for which Hamilton and the prosperous champions of independence who supported him had no use.
The Declaration of Independence was not a very candid State paper, and the popularity Jefferson afterwards created for its sentiments was not wholly free from humbug. Many men were more ready to think themselves the equals of Washington or Hamilton in the respects in which they were not so, than to think a negro their own equal in the respects in which he was. The boundless space and untrammelled conditions of the new world made liberty and equality in some directions highly attainable ideals, so much so that they seemed to demand little effort or discipline. The patriotic orators under whom Lincoln sat in his youth would ascribe to the political wisdom of their great democracy what was really the result of geography. They would regard the extent of forest and prairie as creditable to themselves, just as some few Englishmen have regarded our location upon an island.
This does not, however, do away with the value of that tradition of the new world which in its purest and sincerest form became part and parcel of Lincoln's mind. Jefferson was a great American patriot. In his case insistence on the rights of the several States sprang from no half-hearted desire for a great American nation; he regarded these provincial organisations as machinery by which government and the people could be brought nearer together; and he contributed that which was most needed for the evolution of a vigorous national life. He imparted to the very recent historical origin of his country, and his followers imparted to its material conditions, a certain element of poetry and the felt presence of a wholesome national ideal. The patriotism of an older country derives its glory and its pride from influences deep rooted in the past, creating a tradition of public and private action which needs no definite formula. The man who did more than any other to supply this lack in a new country, by imbuing its national consciousness—even its national cant—with high aspiration, did—it may well be—more than any strong administrator or constructive statesman to create a Union which should thereafter seem worth preserving.
4. The Missouri Compromise.
No sober critic, applying to the American statesmen of the first generation the standards which he would apply to their English contemporaries, can blame them in the least because they framed their Constitution as best they could and were not deterred by the scruples which they felt about slavery from effecting a Union between States which, on all other grounds except their latent difference upon slavery, seemed meant to be one. But many of these men had set their hands in the Declaration of Independence to the most unqualified claim of liberty and equality for all men and proceeded, in the Constitution, to give nineteen years' grace to "that most detestable sum of all villainies," as Wesley called it, the African slave trade, and to impose on the States which thought slavery wrong the dirty work of restoring escaped slaves to captivity. "Why," Dr. Johnson had asked, "do the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?" We are forced to recognise, upon any study of the facts, that they could not really have made the Union otherwise than as they did; yet a doubt presents itself as to the general soundness and sincerity of their boasted notions of liberty. Now, later on we shall have to understand the policy as to slavery on behalf of which Lincoln stepped forward as a leader. In his own constantly reiterated words it was a return to the position of "the fathers," and, though he was not a professional historian, it concerns us to know that there was sincerity at least in his intensely historical view of politics. We have, then, to see first how "the fathers"—that is, the most considerable men among those who won Independence and made the Constitution—set out with a very honest view on the subject of slavery, but with a too comfortable hope of its approaching end, which one or two lived to see frustrated; secondly, how the men who succeeded them were led to abandon such hopes and content themselves with a compromise as to slavery which they trusted would at least keep the American nation in being.
Among those who signed the Declaration of Independence there were presumably some of Dr. Johnson's "yelpers." It mattered more that there were sturdy people who had no idea of giving up slavery and probably did not relish having to join in protestations about equality. Men like Jefferson ought to have known well that their associates in South Carolina and Georgia in particular did not share their aspirations—the people of Georgia indeed were recent and ardent converts to the slave system. But these sincere and insincere believers in slavery were the exceptions; their views did not then seem to prevail even in the greatest of the slave States, Virginia. Broadly speaking, the American opinion on this matter in 1775 or in 1789 had gone as far ahead of English opinion, as English opinion had in turn gone ahead of American, when, in 1833, the year after the first Reform Bill, the English people put its hand into its pocket and bought out its own slave owners in the West Indies. The British Government had forced several of the American Colonies to permit slavery against their will, and only in 1769 it had vetoed, in the interest of British trade, a Colonial enactment for suppressing the slave trade. This was sincerely felt as a part, though a minor part, of the grievance against the mother country. So far did such views prevail on the surface that a Convention of all the Colonies in 1774 unanimously voted that "the abolition of domestic slavery is the greatest object of desire in those Colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the enfranchisement of the slaves in law, it is necessary to exclude all further importation from Africa." It was therefore very commonly assumed when, after an interval of war which suspended such reforms, Independence was achieved, that slavery was a doomed institution.
Those among the "fathers" whose names are best known in England, Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Hamilton, were all opponents of slavery. These include the first four Presidents, and the leaders of very different schools of thought. Some of them, Washington and Jefferson at least, had a few slaves of their own. Washington's attitude to his slaves is illustrated by a letter which he wrote to secure the return of a black attendant of Mrs. Washington's who had run away (a thing which he had boasted could never occur in his household); the runaway was to be brought back if she could be persuaded to return; her master's legal power to compel her was not to be used. She was in fact free, but had foolishly left a good place; and there is no reason to suppose that it was otherwise with Jefferson's slaves. Jefferson's theory was vehemently against slavery. In old age he gave up hope in the matter and was more solicitous for union than for liberty, but this was after the disappointment of many efforts. In these efforts he had no illusory notion of equality; he wrote in 1791, when he had been defeated in the attempt to carry a measure of gradual emancipation in Virginia: "Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that Nature has given to our black brothers talents equal to those of the other colours of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing mainly to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth, that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will permit."
When he felt at last that freedom was not making way, his letters, by which his influence was chiefly exercised, abounded in passionate regrets. "I tremble for my country," he wrote, "when I think of the negro and remember that God is just." But if he is judged not by his sentiments, or even by his efforts, but by what he accomplished, this rhetorical champion of freedom did accomplish one great act, the first link as it proved in the chain of events by which slavery was ultimately abolished. In 1784 the North-West Territory, as it was called, was ceded by Virginia to the old Congress of the days before the Union. Jefferson then endeavoured to pass an Ordinance by which slavery should be excluded from all territory that might ever belong to Congress. In this indeed he failed, for in part of the territory likely to be acquired slavery was already established, but the result was a famous Ordinance of 1787, by which slavery was for ever excluded from the soil of the North-West Territory itself, and thus, when they came into being, the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin found themselves congenitally incapable of becoming slave States.
The further achievements of that generation in this matter were considerable. It must of course be understood that the holding of slaves and the slave trade from Africa were regarded as two distinct questions. The new Congress abolished the slave trade on the first day on which the Constitution allowed it to do so, that is, on January 1, 1808. The mother country abolished it just about the same time. But already all but three of the States had for themselves abolished the slave trade in their own borders. As to slavery itself, seven of the original thirteen States and Vermont, the first of the added States, had abolished that before 1805. These indeed were Northern States, where slavery was not of importance, but in Virginia there was, or had been till lately, a growing opinion that slavery was not economical, and, with the ignorance common in one part of a country of the true conditions in another part, it was natural to look upon emancipation as a policy which would spread of itself. At any rate it is certain fact that the chief among the men who had made the Constitution had at that time so regarded it, and continued to do so. Under this belief and in the presence of many pressing subjects of interest the early movement for emancipation in America died down with its work half finished.
But before this happy belief expired an economic event had happened which riveted slavery upon the South. In 1793 Eli Whitney, a Yale student upon a holiday in the South, invented the first machine for cleaning cotton of its seeds. The export of cotton jumped from 192,000 lbs. in 1791 to 6,000,000 lbs. in 1795. Slave labour had been found, or was believed, to be especially economical in cotton growing. Slavery therefore rapidly became the mainstay of wealth and of the social system in South Carolina and throughout the far South; and in a little while the baser sort of planters in Virginia discovered that breeding slaves to sell down South was a very profitable form of stock-raising.
We may pass to the year 1820, when an enactment was passed by Congress which for thirty-four years thereafter might be regarded as hardly less fundamental than the Constitution itself. Up till then nine new States had been added to the original thirteen. It was repugnant to principles still strong in the North that these States should be admitted to the Union with State Constitutions which permitted slavery. On the other hand, it was for two reasons important to the chief slave States, that they should be. They would otherwise be closed to Southern planters who wished to migrate to unexhausted soil carrying with them the methods of industry and the ways of life which they understood. Furthermore, the North was bound to have before long a great preponderance of population, and if this were not neutralised by keeping the number of States on one side and the other equal there would be a future political danger to slavery. Up to a certain point the North could with good conscience yield to the South in this matter, for the soil of four of the new slave States had been ceded to the Union by old slave States and slave-holders had settled freely upon it; and in a fifth, Louisiana, slavery had been safeguarded by the express stipulations of the treaty with France, which applied to that portion, though no other, of the territory then ceded. Naturally, then, it had happened, though without any definite agreement, that for years past slave States and free States had been admitted to the Union in pairs. Now arose the question of a further portion of the old French territory, the present State of Missouri. A few slave-holders with their slaves had in fact settled there, but no distinct claims on behalf of slavery could be alleged. The Northern Senators and members of Congress demanded therefore that the Constitution of Missouri should provide for the gradual extinction of slavery there. Naturally there arose a controversy which sounded to the aged Jefferson like "a fire-bell in the night" and revealed for the first time to all America a deep rift in the Union. The Representatives of the South eventually carried their main point with the votes of several Northern men, known to history as the "Dough-faces," who all lost their seats at the next election. Missouri was admitted as a slave State, Maine about the same time as a free State; and it was enacted that thereafter in the remainder of the territory that had been bought from France slavery should be unlawful north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes, while by tacit agreement permitted south of it.
This was the Missouri Compromise. The North regarded it at first as a humiliation, but learnt to point to it later as a sort of Magna Carta for the Northern territories. The adoption of it marks a point from which it became for thirty-four years the express ambition of the principal American statesmen and the tacit object, of every party manager to keep the slavery question from ever becoming again a burning issue in politics. The collapse of it in 1854 was to prove the decisive event in the career of Abraham Lincoln, aged 11 when it was passed.
5. Leaders, Parties, and Tendencies in Lincoln's Youth.
Just about the year 1830, when Lincoln started life in Illinois, several distinct movements in national life began or culminated. They link themselves with several famous names.
The two leaders to whom, as a young politician, Lincoln owed some sort of allegiance were Webster and Clay, and they continued throughout his long political apprenticeship to be recognised in most of America as the great men of their time. Daniel Webster must have been nearly a great man. He was always passed over for the Presidency. That was not so much because of the private failings which marked his robust and generous character, as because in days of artificial party issues, when vital questions are dealt with by mere compromise, high office seems to belong of right to men of less originality. If he was never quite so great as all America took him to be, it was not for want of brains or of honesty, but because his consuming passion for the Union at all costs led him into the path of least apparent risk to it. Twice as Secretary of State (that is, chiefly, Foreign Minister) he showed himself a statesman, but above all he was an orator and one of those rare orators who accomplish a definite task by their oratory. In his style he carried on the tradition of English Parliamentary speaking, and developed its vices yet further; but the massive force of argument behind gave him his real power. That power he devoted to the education of the people in a feeling for the nation and for its greatness. As an advocate he had appeared in great cases in the Supreme Court. John Marshall, the Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, brought a great legal mind of the higher type to the settlement of doubtful points in the Constitution, and his statesmanlike judgments did much both to strengthen the United States Government and to gain public confidence for it. It was a memorable work, for the power of the Union Government, under its new Constitution, lay in the grip of the Courts. The pleading of the young Webster contributed much to this. Later on Webster, and a school of followers, of whom perhaps we may take "our Elijah Pogram" to have been one, used ceremonial occasions, on which Englishmen only suffer the speakers, for the purpose of inculcating their patriotic doctrine, and Webster at least was doing good. His greatest speech, upon an occasion to which we shall shortly come, was itself an event. Lincoln found in it as inspiring a political treatise as many Englishmen have discovered in the speeches and writings of Burke.
Henry Clay was a slighter but more attractive person. He was apparently the first American public man whom his countrymen styled "magnetic," but a sort of scheming instability caused him after one or two trials to be set down as an "impossible" candidate for the Presidency. As a dashing young man from the West he had the chief hand in forcing on the second war with Great Britain, from 1812 to 1814, which arose out of perhaps insufficient causes and ended in no clear result, but which, it is probable, marked a stage in the growth of loyalty to America. As an older man he was famed as an "architect of compromises," for though he strove for emancipation in his own State, Kentucky, and dreamed of a great scheme for colonising the slaves in Africa, he was supremely anxious to avert collision between North and South, and in this respect was typical of his generation. But about 1830 he was chiefly known as the apostle of what was called the "American policy." This was a policy which aimed at using the powers of the national Government for the development of the boundless resources of the country. Its methods comprised a national banking system, the use of the money of the Union on great public works, and a protective tariff, which it was hoped might chiefly operate to encourage promising but "infant" industries and to tax the luxuries of the rich. Whatever may have been the merits of this policy, which made some commotion for a few years, we can easily understand that it appealed to the imagination of young Lincoln at a time of keen political energy on his part of which we have but meagre details.
A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina. He enjoyed beyond all his contemporaries the fame of an intellectual person. Lincoln conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating phrases. An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who knew him, has described him as "embodied intellect." He had undoubtedly in full measure those negative tides to respect which have gone far in America to ensure praise from the public and the historians; for he was correct and austere, and, which is more, kindly among his family and his slaves. He is credited, too, with an observance of high principle in public life, which it might be difficult to illustrate from his recorded actions. But the warmer-blooded Andrew Jackson set him down as "heartless, selfish, and a physical coward," and Jackson could speak generously of an opponent whom he really knew. His intellect must have been powerful enough, but it was that of a man who delights in arguing, and delights in elaborate deductions from principles which he is too proud to revise; a man, too, who is fearless in accepting conclusions which startle or repel the vulgar mind; who is undisturbed in his logical processes by good sense, healthy sentiment, or any vigorous appetite for truth. Such men have disciples who reap the disgrace which their masters are apt somehow to avoid; they give the prestige of wisdom and high thought to causes which could not otherwise earn them. A Northern soldier came back wounded in 1865 and described to the next soldier in the hospital Calhoun's monument at Charleston. The other said: "What you saw is not the real monument, but I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined South. . . . That is Calhoun's real monument."
This man was a Radical, and known as the successor of Jefferson, but his Radicalism showed itself in drawing inspiration solely from the popular catchwords of his own locality. He adored the Union, but it was to be a Union directed by distinguished politicians from the South in a sectional Southern interest. He did not originate, but he secured the strength of orthodoxy and fashion to a tone of sentiment and opinion which for a generation held undisputed supremacy in the heart of the South. Americans might have seemed at this time to be united in a curiously exultant national self-consciousness, but though there was no sharp division of sections, the boasted glory of the one America meant to many planters in the South the glory of their own settled and free life with their dignified equals round them and their often contented dependents under them. Plain men among them doubtless took things as they were, and, without any particular wish to change them, did not pretend they were perfect. But it is evident that in a widening circle of clever young men in the South the claim of some peculiar virtue for Southern institutions became habitual in the first half of the nineteenth century. Their way of life was beautiful in their eyes. It rested upon slavery. Therefore slavery was a good thing. It was wicked even to criticise it, and it was weak to apologise for it or to pretend that it needed reformation. It was easy and it became apparently universal for the different Churches of the South to prostitute the Word of God in this cause. Later on crude notions of evolution began to get about in a few circles of advanced thought, and these lent themselves as easily to the same purpose. Loose, floating thoughts of this kind might have mattered little. Calhoun, as the recognised wise man of the old South, concentrated them and fastened them upon its people as a creed. Glorification of "our institution at the South" became the main principle of Southern politicians, and any conception that there may ever have been of a task for constructive statesmanship, in solving the negro problem, passed into oblivion under the influence of his revered reasoning faculty.
But, of his dark and dangerous sort, Calhoun was an able man. He foresaw early that the best weapon of the common interest of the slave States lay in the rights which might be claimed for each individual State against the Union. The idea that a discontented State might secede from the Union was not novel—it had been mooted in New England, during the last war against Great Britain, and, curiously enough, among the rump of the old Federalist party, but it was generally discounted. Calhoun first brought it into prominence, veiled in an elaborate form which some previous South Carolinian had devised. The occasion had nothing to do with slavery. It concerned Free Trade, a very respectable issue, but so clearly a minor issue that to break up a great country upon it would have gone beyond the limit of solemn frivolity, and Calhoun must be taken to have been forging an implement with which his own section of the States could claim and extort concessions from the Union. A protective tariff had been passed in 1828. The Southern States, which would have to pay the protective duties but did not profit by them, disliked it. Calhoun and others took the intelligible but too refined point, that the powers of Congress under the Constitution authorised a tariff for revenue but not a tariff for a protective purpose. Every State, Calhoun declared, must have the Constitutional right to protect itself against an Act of Congress which it deemed unconstitutional. Let such a State, in special Convention, "nullify" the Act of Congress. Let Congress then, unless it compromised the matter, submit its Act to the people in the form of an Amendment to the Constitution. It would then require a three-fourths majority of all the States to pass the obnoxious Act. Last but not least, if the Act was passed, the protesting State had, Calhoun claimed, the right to secede from the Union.
Controversy over this tariff raged for fully four years, and had a memorable issue. In the course of 1830 the doctrine of "nullification" and "secession" was discussed in the Senate, and the view of Calhoun was expounded by one Senator Hayne. Webster answered him in a speech which he meant should become a popular classic, and which did become so. He set forth his own doctrine of the Union and appealed to national against State loyalty in the most influential oration that was perhaps ever made. "His utterance," writes President Wilson, "sent a thrill through all the East and North which was unmistakably a thrill of triumph. Men were glad because of what he had said. He had touched the national self-consciousness, awakened it, and pleased it with a morning vision of its great tasks and certain destiny." Later there came in the President, the redoubtable Andrew Jackson, the most memorable President between Jefferson and Lincoln. He said very little—only, on Jefferson's birthday he gave the toast, "Our Federal Union; it must be preserved." But when in 1832, in spite of concessions by Congress, a Convention was summoned in South Carolina to "nullify" the tariff, he issued the appropriate orders to the United States Army, in case such action was carried out, and it is understood that he sent Calhoun private word that he would be the first man to be hanged for treason. Nullification quietly collapsed. The North was thrilled still more than by Webster's oratory, and as not a single other State showed signs of backing South Carolina, it became thenceforth the fixed belief of the North that the Union was recognised as in law indissoluble, as Webster contended it was. None the less the idea of secession had been planted, and planted in a fertile soil.
General Andrew Jackson, whose other great achievements must now be told, was not an intellectual person, but his ferocious and, in the literal sense, shocking character is refreshing to the student of this period. He had been in his day the typical product of the West—a far wilder West than that from which Lincoln later came. Originally a lawyer, he had won martial fame in fights with Indians and in the celebrated victory over the British forces at New Orleans. He was a sincere Puritan; and he had a courtly dignity of manner; but he was of arbitrary and passionate temper, and he was a sanguinary duellist. His most savage duels, it should be added, concerned the honour of a lady whom he married chivalrously, and loved devotedly to the end. The case that can be made for his many arbitrary acts shows them in some instances to have been justifiable, and shows him in general to have been honest.
When in 1824 Jackson had expected to become President, and, owing to proceedings which do not now matter, John Quincy Adams, son of a former President, and himself a remarkable man, was made President instead of him, Jackson resolved to overthrow the ruling class of Virginian country gentlemen and Boston city magnates which seemed to him to control Government, and to call into life a real democracy. To this end he created a new party, against which of course an opposition party arose.
Neither of the new parties was in any sense either aristocratic or democratic. "The Democracy," or Democratic party, has continued in existence ever since, and through most of Lincoln's life ruled America. In trying to fix the character of a party in a foreign country we cannot hope to be exact in our portraiture. At the first start, however, this party was engaged in combating certain tendencies to Government interference in business. It was more especially hostile to a National Bank, which Jackson himself regarded as a most dangerous form of alliance between the administration and the richest class. Of the growth of what may be called the money power in American politics he had an intense, indeed prophetic, dread. Martin Van Buren, his friend and successor, whatever else he may have been, was a sound economist of what is now called the old school, and on a financial issue he did what few men in his office have done, he deliberately sacrificed his popularity to his principles. Beyond this the party was and has continued prone, in a manner which we had better not too clearly define, to insist upon the restrictions of the Constitution, whether in the interest of individual liberty or of State rights. This tendency was disguised at the first by the arbitrary action of Jackson's own proceedings, for Jackson alone among Presidents displayed the sentiments of what may be called a popular despot. Its insistence upon State rights, aided perhaps by its dislike of Protection, attracted to it the leading politicians of the South, who in the main dominated its counsels, though later on they liked to do it through Northern instruments. But it must not in the least be imagined that either party was Northern or Southern; for there were many Whigs in the South, and very many Democrats in the North. Moreover, it should be clearly grasped, though it is hard, that among Northern Democrats insistence on State rights did not involve the faintest leaning towards the doctrine of secession; on the contrary a typical Democrat would believe that these limitations to the power of the Union were the very things that gave it endurance and strength. Slavery, moreover, had friends and foes in both parties. If we boldly attempted to define the prevailing tone of the Democrats we might say that, while they and their opponents expressed loyalty to the Union and the Constitution, the Democrats would be prone to lay the emphasis upon the Constitution. Whatever might be the case with an average Whig, a man like Lincoln would be stirred in his heart by the general spirit of the country's institutions, while the typical Democrat of that time would dwell affectionately on the legal instruments and formal maxims in which that spirit was embodied.
Of the Whigs it is a little harder to speak definitely, nor is it very necessary, for in two only out of seven Presidential elections did they elect their candidate, and in each case that candidate then died, and in 1854 they perished as a party utterly and for ever. Just for a time they were identified with the "American policy" of Clay. When that passed out of favour they never really attempted to formulate any platform, or to take permanently any very definite stand. They nevertheless had the adherence of the ablest men of the country, and, as an opposition party to a party in power which furnished much ground for criticism, they possessed an attraction for generous youth.
The Democrats at once, and the Whigs not long after them, created elaborate party machines, on the need of which Jackson insisted as the only means of really giving influence to the common people. The prevailing system and habit of local self-government made such organisation easy. Men of one party in a township or in a county assembled, formulated their opinions, and sent delegates with instructions, more or less precise, to party conventions for larger areas, these would send delegates to the State Convention and these in turn to the National Convention of the Party. The party candidates for the Presidency, as well as for all other elective positions, were and are thus chosen, and the party "platform" or declaration of policy was and is thus formulated. Such machinery, which in England is likely always to play a less important part, has acquired an evil name. At the best there has always been a risk that a "platform" designed to detach voters from the opposite party will be an insincere and eviscerated document, by which active public opinion is rather muzzled than expressed. There has been a risk too that the "available" candidate should be some blameless nonentity, to whom no one objects, and whom therefore no one really wants. But it must be observed that the rapidity with which such organisation was taken up betokened the prevalence of a widespread and keen interest in political affairs.
The days of really great moneyed interests and of corruption of the gravest sort were as yet far distant, but one demoralising influence was imposed upon the new party system by its author at its birth. Jackson, in his perpetual fury, believed that office holders under the more or less imaginary ruling clique that had held sway were a corrupt gang, and he began to turn them out. He was encouraged to extend to the whole country a system which had prevailed in New York and with which Van Buren was too familiar. "To the victors belong the spoils," exclaimed a certain respectable Mr. Marcy. A wholesale dismissal of office holders large and small, and replacement of them by sound Democrats, soon took place. Once started, the "spoils system" could hardly be stopped. Thenceforward there was a standing danger that the party machine would be in the hands of a crew of jobbers and dingy hunters after petty offices. England, of course, has had and now has practices theoretically as indefensible, but none possessing any such sinister importance. It is hard, therefore, for us to conceive how little of really vicious intent was necessary to set this disastrous influence going. There was no trained Civil Service with its unpartisan traditions. In the case of offices corresponding to those of our permanent heads of departments it seemed reasonable that the official should, like his chief the Minister concerned, be a person in harmony with the President. As to the smaller offices—the thousands of village postmasterships and so forth—one man was likely to do the work as well as another; the dispossessed official could, in the then condition of the country, easily find another equally lucrative employment; "turn and turn about" seemed to be the rule of fair play.
There were now few genuine issues in politics. Compromise on vital questions was understood to be the highest statesmanship. The Constitution itself, with its curious system of checks and balances, rendered it difficult to bring anything to pass. Added to this was a party system with obvious natural weaknesses, infected from the first with a dangerous malady. The political life, which lay on the surface of the national life of America, thus began to assume an air of futility, and, it must be added, of squalor. Only, Englishmen, recollecting the feebleness and corruption which marked their aristocratic government through a great part of the eighteenth century, must not enlarge their phylacteries at the expense of American democracy. And it is yet more important to remember that the fittest machinery for popular government, the machinery through which the real judgment of the people will prevail, can only by degrees and after many failures be devised. Popular government was then young, and it is young still.
So much for the great world of politics in those days. But in or about 1830 a Quaker named Lundy had, as Quakers used to say, "a concern" to walk 125 miles through the snow of a New England winter and speak his mind to William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison was a poor man who, like Franklin, had raised himself as a working printer, and was now occupied in philanthropy. Stirred up by Lundy, he succeeded after many painful experiences, in gaol and among mobs, in publishing in Boston on January 1, 1831, the first number of the Liberator. In it he said: "I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. I will be as hard as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard." This was the beginning of the new Abolitionist movement. The Abolitionists, in the main, were impracticable people; Garrison in the end proved otherwise. Under the existing Constitution, they had nothing to propose but that the free States should withdraw from "their covenant with death and agreement with hell"—in other words, from the Union,—whereby they would not have liberated one slave. They included possibly too many of that sort who would seek salvation by repenting of other men's sins. But even these did not indulge this propensity at their ease, for by this time the politicians, the polite world, the mass of the people, the churches (even in Boston), not merely avoided the dangerous topic; they angrily proscribed it. The Abolitionists took their lives in their hands, and sometimes lost them. Only two men of standing helped them: Channing, the great preacher, who sacrificed thereby a fashionable congregation; and Adams, the sour, upright, able ex-President, the only ex-President who ever made for himself an after-career in Congress. In 1852 a still more potent ally came to their help, a poor lady, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who in that year published "Uncle Tom's Cabin," often said to have influenced opinion more than any other book of modern times. Broadly speaking, they accomplished two things. If they did not gain love in quarters where they might have looked for it, they gained the very valuable hatred of their enemies; for they goaded Southern politicians to fury and madness, of which the first symptom was their effort to suppress Abolitionist petitions to Congress. But above all they educated in their labour of thirty years a school of opinion, not entirely in agreement with them but ready one day to revolt with decision from continued complicity in wrong.
6. Slavery and Southern Society.
In the midst of this growing America, a portion, by no means sharply marked off, and accustomed to the end to think itself intensely American, was distinguished by a peculiar institution. What was the character of that institution as it presented itself in 1830 and onwards?
Granting, as many slave holders did, though their leaders always denied it, that slavery originated in foul wrongs and rested legally upon a vile principle, what did it look like in its practical working? Most of us have received from two different sources two broad but vivid general impressions on this subject, which seem hard to reconcile but which are both in the main true. On the one hand, a visitor from England or the North, coming on a visit to the South, or in earlier days to the British West Indies, expecting perhaps to see all the horror of slavery at a glance, would be, as a young British officer once wrote home, "most agreeably undeceived as to the situation of these poor people." He would discern at once that a Southern gentleman had no more notion of using his legal privilege to be cruel to his slave than he himself had of overdriving his old horse. He might easily on the contrary find quite ordinary slave owners who had a very decided sense of responsibility in regard to their human chattels. Around his host's house, where the owner's children, petted by a black nurse, played with the little black children or with some beloved old negro, he might see that pretty aspect of "our institution at the South," which undoubtedly created in many young Southerners as they grew up a certain amount of genuine sentiment in favour of slavery. Riding wider afield he might be struck, as General Sherman was, with the contentment of the negroes whom he met on the plantations. On enquiry he would learn that the slave in old age was sure of food and shelter and free from work, and that as he approached old age his task was systematically diminished. As to excessive toil at any time of life, he would perhaps conclude that it was no easy thing to drive a gang of Africans really hard. He would be assured, quite incorrectly, that the slave's food and comfort generally were greater than those of factory workers in the North, and, perhaps only too truly, that his privations were less than those of the English agricultural labourer at that time. A wide and careful survey of the subject was made by Frederick Law Olmsted, a New York farmer, who wrote what but for their gloomy subject would be among the best books of travel. He presents to us the picture of a prevailingly sullen, sapless, brutish life, but certainly not of acute misery or habitual oppression. A Southerner old enough to remember slavery would probably not question the accuracy of his details, but would insist, very likely with truth, that there was more human happiness there than an investigator on such a quest would readily discover. Even on large plantations in the extreme South, where the owner only lived part of the year, and most things had to be left to an almost always unsatisfactory overseer, the verdict of the observer was apt to be "not so bad as I expected."
On the other hand, many of us know Longfellow's grim poem of the Hunted Negro. It is a true picture of the life led in the Dismal Swamps of Virginia by numbers of skulking fugitives, till the industry of negro-hunting, conducted with hounds of considerable value, ultimately made their lairs untenable. The scenes in the auction room where, perhaps on the death or failure of their owner, husbands and wives, parents and children, were constantly being severed, and negresses were habitually puffed as brood mares; the gentleman who had lately sold his half-brother, to be sent far south, because he was impudent; the devilish cruelty with which almost the only recorded slave insurrection was stamped out; the chase and capture and return in fetters of slaves who had escaped north, or, it might be, of free negroes in their place; the advertisements for such runaways, which Dickens collected, and which described each by his scars or mutilations; the systematic slave breeding, for the supply of the cotton States, which had become a staple industry of the once glorious Virginia; the demand arising for the restoration of the African slave trade—all these were realities. The Southern people, in the phrase of President Wilson, "knew that their lives were honourable, their relations with their slaves humane, their responsibility for the existence of slavery amongst them remote"; they burned with indignation when the whole South was held responsible for the occasional abuses of slavery. But the harsh philanthropist, who denounced them indiscriminately, merely dwelt on those aspects of slavery which came to his knowledge or which he actually saw on the border line. And the occasional abuses, however occasional, were made by the deliberate choice of Southern statesmanship an essential part of the institution. Honourable and humane men in the South scorned exceedingly the slave hunter and the slave dealer. A candid slave owner, discussing "Uncle Tom's Cabin," found one detail flagrantly unfair; the ruined master would have had to sell his slaves to the brute, Legree, but for the world he would not have shaken hands with him. "Your children," exclaimed Lincoln, "may play with the little black children, but they must not play with his"—the slave dealer's, or the slave driver's, or the slave hunter's. By that fact alone, as he bitingly but unanswerably insisted, the whole decent society of the South condemned the foundation on which it rested.
It is needless to discuss just how dark or how fair American slavery in its working should be painted. The moderate conclusions which are quite sufficient for our purpose are uncontested. First, this much must certainly be conceded to those who would defend the slave system, that in the case of the average slave it was very doubtful whether his happiness (apart from that of future generations) could be increased by suddenly turning him into a free man working for a wage; justice would certainly have demanded that the change should be accompanied by other provisions for his benefit. But, secondly, on the refractory negro, more vicious, or sometimes, one may suspect, more manly than his fellows, the system was likely to act barbarously. Thirdly, every slave family was exposed to the risk, on such occasions as the death or great impoverishment of its owner, of being ruthlessly torn asunder, and the fact that negroes often rebounded or seemed to rebound from sorrows of this sort with surprising levity does not much lessen the horror of it. Fourthly, it is inherent in slavery that its burden should be most felt precisely by the best minds and strongest characters among the slaves. And, though the capacity of the negroes for advancement could not then and cannot yet be truly measured, yet it existed, and the policy of the South shut the door upon it. Lastly, the system abounded in brutalising influences upon a large number of white people who were accessory to it, and notoriously it degraded the poor or "mean whites," for whom it left no industrial opening, and among whom it caused work to be despised.
There is thus no escape from Lincoln's judgment: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." It does not follow that the way to right the wrong was simple, or that instant and unmitigated emancipation was the best way. But it does follow that, failing this, it was for the statesmen of the South to devise a policy by which the most flagrant evils should be stopped, and, however cautiously and experimentally, the raising of the status of the slave should be proceeded with. It does not follow that the people who, on one pretext or another, shut their eyes to the evil of the system, while they tried to keep their personal dealing humane, can be sweepingly condemned by any man. But it does follow that a deliberate and sustained policy which, neglecting all reform, strove at all costs to perpetuate the system and extend it to wider regions, was as criminal a policy as ever lay at the door of any statesmen. And this, in fact, became the policy of the South.
"The South" meant, for political purposes, the owners of land and slaves in the greater part of the States in which slavery was lawful. The poor whites never acquired the political importance of the working classes in the North, and count for little in the story. Some of the more northerly slave States partook in a greater degree of the conditions and ideas of the North and were doubtfully to be reckoned with the South. Moreover, there is a tract of mountainous country, lying between the Atlantic sea-board and the basin of the Mississippi and extending southwards to the borders of Georgia and Alabama, of which the very vigorous and independent inhabitants were and are in many ways a people apart, often cherishing to this day family feuds which are prosecuted in the true spirit of the Icelandic Sagas.
The South, excluding these districts, was predominantly Democratic in politics, and its leaders owed some allegiance to the tradition of Radicals like Jefferson. But it was none the less proud of its aristocracy and of the permeating influence of aristocratic manners and traditions. A very large number of Southerners felt themselves to be ladies and gentlemen, and felt further that there were few or none like them among the "Yankee" traders of the North. A claim of that sort is likely to be aggressively made by those who have least title to make it, and, as strife between North and South grew hotter, the gentility of the latter infected with additional vulgarity the political controversy of private life and even of Congress. But, as observant Northerners were quite aware, these pretensions had a foundation of fact. An Englishman, then or now, in chance meetings with Americans of either section, would at once be aware of something indefinable in their bearing to which he was a stranger; but in the case of the Southerner the strangeness would often have a positive charm, such as may be found also among people of the Old World under southern latitudes and relatively primitive conditions. Newly-gotten and ill-carried wealth was in those days (Mr. Olmsted, of New York State, assures us) as offensive in the more recently developed and more prosperous parts of the South as in New York City itself; and throughout the South sound instruction and intellectual activity were markedly lacking—indeed, there is no serious Southern literature by which we can check these impressions of his. Comparing the masses of moderately well-to-do and educated people with whom he associated in the North and in the South, he finds them both free from the peculiar vulgarity which, we may be pained to know, he had discovered among us in England; he finds honesty and dishonesty in serious matters of conduct as prevalent in one section as in the other; he finds the Northerner better taught and more alert in mind; but he ascribes to him an objectionable quality of "smartness," a determination to show you that he is a stirring and pushing fellow, from which the Southerner is wholly free; and he finds that the Southerner has derived from home influences and from boarding schools in which the influence of many similar homes is concentrated, not indeed any great refinement, but a manner which is "more true, more quiet, more modestly self-assured, more dignified." This advantage, we are to understand, is diffused over a comparatively larger class than in England. Beyond this he discerns in a few parts of the South and notably in South Carolina a somewhat inaccessible, select society, of which the nucleus is formed by a few (incredibly few) old Colonial families which have not gone under, and which altogether is so small that some old gentlewomen can enumerate all the members of it. Few as they are, these form "unquestionably a wealthy and remarkably generous, refined, and accomplished first class, clinging with some pertinacity, although with too evident an effort, to the traditional manners and customs of an established gentry."
No doubt the sense of high breeding, which was common in the South, went beyond mere manners; it played its part in making the struggle of the Southern population, including the "mean whites," in the Civil War one of the most heroic, if one of the most mistaken, in which a whole population has ever been engaged; it went along with integrity and a high average of governing capacity among public men; and it fitted the gentry of the South to contribute, when they should choose, an element of great value to the common life of America. As it was, the South suffered to the full the political degeneration which threatens every powerful class which, with a distinct class interest of its own, is secluded from real contact with competing classes with other interests and other ideas. It is not to be assumed that all individual Southerners liked the policy which they learnt to support in docile masses. But their very qualities of loyalty made them the more ready, under accepted and respected leaders, to adopt political aims and methods which no man now recalls without regret.
The connection between slavery and politics was this; as population slowly grew in the South, and as the land in the older States became to some extent exhausted, the desire for fresh territory in which cultivation by slaves could flourish became stronger and stronger. This was the reason for which the South became increasingly aware of a sectional interest in politics. In all other respects the community of public interests, of business dealings, and of general intercourse was as great between North and South as between East and West. It is certain that throughout the South, with the doubtful exception of South Carolina, political instinct and patriotic pride would have made the idea of separation intolerable upon any ground except that of slavery. In regard to this matter of dispute a peculiar phenomenon is to be observed. The quarrel grew not out of any steady opposition between North and South, but out of the habitual domination of the country by the South and the long-continued submission of the North to that domination.
For the North had its full share of blame for the long course of proceedings which prepared the coming tragedy, and the most impassioned writers on the side of the Union during the Civil War have put that blame highest. The South became arrogant and wrong-headed, and no defence is possible for the chief acts of Southern policy which will be recorded later; but the North was abject. To its own best sons it seemed to have lost both its conscience and its manhood, and to be stifled in the coils of its own miserable political apparatus. Certainly the prevailing attitude of the Northern to the Southern politicians was that of truckling. And Southerners who went to Washington had a further reason for acquiring a fatal sense of superiority to the North. The tradition of popular government which maintained itself in the South caused men who were respected, in private life, and were up to a point capable leaders, who were, in short, representative, to be sent to Congress and to be kept there. The childish perversion of popular government which took hold of the newer and more unsettled population in the North led them to send to Congress an ever-changing succession of unmeritable and sometimes shady people. The eventual stirring of the mind of the North which so closely concerns this biography was a thing hard to bring about, and to the South it brought a great shock of surprise.
7. Intellectual Development.
No survey of the political movements of this period should conclude without directing attention to something more important, which cannot be examined here. In the years from 1830 till some time after the death of Lincoln, America made those contributions to the literature of our common language which, though neither her first nor her last, seemed likely to be most permanently valued. The learning and literature of America at that time centred round Boston and Harvard University in the adjacent city of Cambridge, and no invidious comparison is intended or will be felt if they, with their poets and historians and men of letters at that time, with their peculiar atmosphere, instinct then and now with a life athletic, learned, business-like and religious, are taken to show the dawning capacities of the new nation. No places in the United States exhibit more visibly the kinship of America with England, yet in none certainly can a stranger see more readily that America is independent of the Old World in something more than politics. Many of their streets and buildings would in England seem redolent of the past, yet no cities of the Eastern States played so large a part in the development, material and mental, of the raw and vigorous West. The limitations of their greatest writers are in a manner the sign of their achievement. It would have been contrary to all human analogy if a country, in such an early stage of creation out of such a chaos, had put forth books marked strongly as its own and yet as the products of a mature national mind. It would also have been surprising if since the Civil War the rush of still more appalling and more complex practical problems had not obstructed for a while the flow of imaginative or scientific production. But the growth of those relatively early years was great. Boston had been the home of a loveless Christianity; its insurrection in the War of Independence had been soiled by shifty dealing and mere acidity; but Boston from the days of Emerson to those of Phillips Brooks radiated a temper and a mental force that was manly, tender, and clean. The man among these writers about whose exact rank, neither low nor very high among poets, there can be least dispute was Longfellow. He might seem from his favourite subjects to be hardly American; it was his deliberately chosen task to bring to the new country some savour of things gentle and mellow caught from the literature of Europe. But, in the first place, no writer could in the detail of his work have been more racy of that New England countryside which lay round his home; and, in the second place, no writer could have spoken more unerringly to the ear of the whole wide America of which his home was a little part. It seems strange to couple the name of this mild and scholarly man with the thought of that crude Western world to which we must in a moment pass. But the connection is real and vital. It is well shown in the appreciation written of him and his fellows by the American writer who most violently contrasts with him, Walt Whitman.
A student of American history may feel something like the experience which is common among travellers in America. When they come home they cannot tell their friends what really interested them. Ugly things and very dull things are prominent in their story, as in the tales of American humorists. The general impression they convey is of something tiresomely extensive, distractingly miscellaneous, and yet insufferably monotonous. But that is not what they mean. They had better not seek to express themselves by too definite instances. They will be understood and believed when they say that to them America, with its vast spaces from ocean to ocean, does present itself as one country, not less worthy than any other of the love which it has actually inspired; a country which is the home of distinctive types of manhood and womanhood, bringing their own addition to the varying forms in which kindness and courage and truth make themselves admirable to mankind. The soul of a single people seems to be somewhere present in that great mass, no less than in some tiny city State of antiquity. Only it has to struggle, submerged evermore by a flood of newcomers, and defeated evermore by difficulties quite unlike those of other lands; and it struggles seemingly with undaunted and with rational hope.
Americans are fond of discussing Americanism. Very often they select as a pattern of it Abraham Lincoln, the man who kept the North together but has been pronounced to have been a Southerner in his inherited character. Whether he was so typical or not, it is the central fact of this biography that no man ever pondered more deeply in his own way, or answered more firmly the question whether there was indeed an American nationality worth preserving.
CHAPTER III
LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER
1. Life at New Salem.
From this talk of large political movements we have to recall ourselves to a young labouring man with hardly any schooling, naturally and incurably uncouth, but with a curious, quite modest, impulse to assert a kindly ascendency over the companions whom chance threw in his way, and with something of the gift, which odd, shy people often possess, for using their very oddity as a weapon in their struggles. In the conditions of real equality which still prevailed in a newly settled country it is not wonderful that he made his way into political life when he was twenty-five, but it was not till twenty years later that he played an important part in events of enduring significance.
Thus the many years of public activity with which we are concerned in this and the following chapter belong rather to his apprenticeship than to his life's work; and this apprenticeship at first sight contrasts more strongly with his fame afterwards than does his boyhood of poverty and comparatively romantic hardship. For many poor boys have lived to make a great mark on history, but as a rule they have entered early on a life either of learning or of adventure or of large business. But the affairs in which Lincoln early became immersed have an air of pettiness, and from the point of view of most educated men and women in the Eastern States or in Europe, many of the associates and competitors of his early manhood, to whom he had to look up as his superiors in knowledge, would certainly have seemed crude people with a narrow horizon. Indeed, till he was called upon to take supreme control of very great matters, Lincoln must have had singularly little intercourse either with men versed in great affairs or with men of approved intellectual distinction. But a mind too original to be subdued to its surroundings found much that was stimulating in this time when Illinois was beginning rapidly to fill up. There were plenty of men with shrewd wits and robust character to be met with, and the mental atmosphere which surrounded him was one of keen interest in life. Lincoln eventually stands out as a surprising figure from among the other lawyers and little politicians of Illinois, as any great man does from any crowd, but some tribute is due to the undistinguished and historically uninteresting men whose generous appreciation gave rapid way to the poor, queer youth, and ultimately pushed him into a greater arena as their selected champion.
In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Lincoln, returning from his New Orleans voyage, settled in New Salem to await the arrival of his patron, Denton Offutt, with the goods for a new store in which Lincoln was to be his assistant. The village itself was three years old. It never got much beyond a population of one hundred, and like many similar little towns of the West it has long since perished off the earth. But it was a busy place for a while, and, contrary to what its name might suggest, it aspired to be rather fast. It was a cock-fighting and whisky-drinking society into which Lincoln was launched. He managed to combine strict abstinence from liquor with keen participation in all its other diversions. One departure from total abstinence stands alleged among the feats of strength for which he became noted. He hoisted a whisky barrel, of unspecified but evidently considerable content, on to his knees in a squatting posture and drank from the bunghole. But this very arduous potation stood alone. Offutt was some time before he arrived with his goods, and Lincoln lived by odd jobs. At the very beginning one Mentor Graham, a schoolmaster officiating in some election, employed him as a clerk, and the clerk seized the occasion to make himself well known to New Salem as a story-teller. Then there was a heavy job at rail-splitting, and another job in navigating the Sangamon River. Offutt's store was at last set up, and for about a year the assistant in this important establishment had valuable opportunities of conversation with all New Salem. He had also leisure for study. He had mentioned to the aforesaid Mentor Graham his "notion to study English grammar," and had been introduced to a work called "Kirkham's Grammar," which by a walk of some miles he could borrow from a neighbour. This he would read, lying full length on the counter with his head on a parcel of calico. At other odd times he would work away at arithmetic. Offutt's kindly interest procured him distinction in another field. At Clary's Grove, near New Salem, lived a formidable set of young ruffians, over whose somewhat disguised chivalry of temper the staid historian of Lincoln's youth becomes rapturous. They were given to wrecking the store of any New Salem tradesman who offended them; so it shows some spirit in Mr. Denton Offutt that he backed his Abraham Lincoln to beat their Jack Armstrong in a wrestling match. He did beat him; moreover, some charm in the way he bore himself made him thenceforth not hated but beloved of Clary's Grove in general, and the Armstrongs in particular. Hannah Armstrong, Jack's wife, thereafter mended and patched his clothes for him, and, years later, he had the satisfaction, as their unfeed advocate, of securing the acquittal of their son from a charge of murder, of which there is some reason to hope he may not have been guilty. It is, by the way, a relief to tell that there once was a noted wrestling match in which Lincoln was beaten; it is characteristic of the country that his friends were sure there was foul play, and characteristic of him that he indignantly denied it.
Within a year Offutt's store, in the phrase of the time, "petered out," leaving Lincoln shiftless. But the victor of Clary's Grove, with his added mastery of "Kirkham's Grammar," was now ripe for public life. Moreover, his experience as a waterman gave him ideas on the question, which then agitated his neighbours, whether the Sangamon River could be made navigable. He had a scheme of his own for doing this; and in the spring of 1832 he wrote to the local paper a boyish but modest and sensible statement of his views and ambitions, announcing that he would be a candidate in the autumn elections for the State Legislature.
Meanwhile he had his one experience of soldiering. The Indian chief, Black Hawk, who had agreed to abide west of the Mississippi, broke the treaty and led his warriors back into their former haunts in Northern Illinois. The Governor of the State called for volunteers, and Lincoln became one. He obtained the elective rank of captain of his company, and contrived to maintain some sort of order in that, doubtless brave, but undisciplined body. He saw no fighting, but he could earn his living for some months, and stored up material for effective chaff in Congress long afterwards about the military glory which General Cass's supporters for the Presidency wished to attach to their candidate. His most glorious exploit consisted in saving from his own men a poor old friendly Indian who had fallen among them. A letter of credentials, which the helpless creature produced, was pronounced a forgery and he was about to be hanged as a spy, when Lincoln appeared on the scene, "swarthy with resolution and rage," and somehow terrified his disorderly company into dropping their prey.
The war ended in time for a brief candidature, and a supporter of his at the time preserved a record of one of his speeches. His last important speech will hereafter be given in full for other reasons; this may be so given too, for it is not a hundred words long: "Fellow Citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favour of a national bank. I am in favour of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same."
To this succinct declaration of policy may be added from his earlier letter that he advocated a law against usury, and laws for the improvement of education. The principles of the speech are those which the new Whig party was upholding against the Democrats under Jackson (the President) and Van Buren. Lincoln's neighbours, like the people of Illinois generally, were almost entirely on the side of the Democrats. It is interesting that however he came by his views, they were early and permanently fixed on the side then unpopular in Illinois; and it is interesting that though, naturally, not elected, he secured very nearly the whole of the votes of his immediate neighbourhood.
The penniless Lincoln was now hankering to become a lawyer, though with some thoughts of the more practicable career of a blacksmith. Unexpectedly, however, he was tempted into his one venture, singularly unsuccessful, in business. Two gentlemen named Herndon, cousins of a biographer of Lincoln's, started a store in New Salem and got tired of it. One sold his share to a Mr. Berry, the other sold his to Lincoln. The latter sale was entirely on credit—no money passed at the time, because there was no money. The vendor explained afterwards that he relied solely on Lincoln's honesty. He had to wait a long while for full payment, but what is known of storekeeping in New Salem shows that he did very well for himself in getting out of his venture as he did. Messrs. Berry and Lincoln next acquired, likewise for credit, the stock and goodwill of two other storekeepers, one of them the victim of a raid from Clary's Grove. The senior partner then applied himself diligently to personal consumption of the firm's liquid goods; the junior member of the firm was devoted in part to intellectual and humorous converse with the male customers, but a fatal shyness prevented him from talking to the ladles. For the rest, he walked long distances to borrow books, got through Gibbon and through Rollin's "History of the World," began his study of Blackstone, and acquired a settled habit of reading novels. So business languished. Early in 1833 Berry and Lincoln sold out to another adventurer. This also was a credit transaction. The purchaser without avoidable delay failed and disappeared. Berry then died of drink, leaving to Lincoln the sole responsibility for the debts of the partnership. Lincoln could with no difficulty and not much reproach have freed himself by bankruptcy. As a matter of fact, he ultimately paid everything, but it took him about fifteen years of striving and pinching himself.
Lincoln is one of the many public characters to whom the standing epithet "honest" became attached; in his case the claim to this rested originally on the only conclusive authority, that of his creditors. But there is equally good authority, that of his biographer, William Herndon, for many years his partner as a lawyer, that "he had no money sense." This must be understood with the large qualification that he meant to pay his way and, unlike the great statesmen of the eighteenth century in England, did pay it. But, though with much experience of poverty in his early career, he never developed even a reasonable desire to be rich. Wealth remained in his view "a superfluity of the things one does not want." He was always interested in mathematics, but mainly as a discipline in thinking, and partly, perhaps, in association with mechanical problems of which he was fond enough to have once in his life patented an invention. The interest never led him to take to accounts or to long-sighted financial provisions. In later days, when he received a payment for his fees, his partner's share would be paid then and there; and perhaps the rent would be paid, and the balance would be spent at once in groceries and other goods likely to be soon wanted, including at long intervals, when the need was very urgent, a new hat.
These are amiable personal traits, but they mark the limitations of his capacity as a statesman. The chief questions which agitated the Illinois Legislature were economic, and so at first were the issues between Whigs and Democrats in Federal policy. Lincoln, though he threw himself into these affairs with youthful fervour, would appear never to have had much grasp of such matters. "In this respect alone," writes an admirer, "I have always considered Mr. Lincoln a weak man." It is only when (rarely, at first) constitutional or moral issues emerge that his politics become interesting. We can guess the causes which attached him to the Whigs. As the party out of power, and in Illinois quite out of favour, they had doubtless some advantage in character. As we have seen, the greatest minds among American statesmen of that day, Webster and Clay, were Whigs. Lincoln's simple and quite reasonable, if inconclusive, argument for Protection, can be found among his speeches of some years later. And schemes of internal development certainly fired his imagination.
After his failure in business Lincoln subsisted for a while on odd jobs for farmers, but was soon employed as assistant surveyor by John Calhoun, then surveyor of the county. This gentleman, who had been educated as a lawyer but "taught school in preference," was a keen Democrat, and had to assure Lincoln that office as his assistant would not necessitate his desertion of his principles. He was a clever man, and Lincoln remembered him long after as the most formidable antagonist he ever met in debate. With the help, again, of Mentor Graham, Lincoln soon learned the surveyor's business. He continued at this work till he was able to start as a lawyer, and there is evidence that his surveys of property were done with extreme accuracy. Soon he further obtained the local Postmastership. This, the only position except the Presidency itself which he ever held in the Federal Government, was not onerous, for the mails were infrequent; he "carried the office around in his hat"; we are glad to be told that "his administration gave satisfaction." Once calamity threatened him; a creditor distrained on the horse and the instruments necessary to his surveyorship; but Lincoln was reputed to be a helpful fellow, and friends were ready to help him; they bought the horse and instruments back for him. To this time belongs his first acquaintance with some writers of unsettling tendency, Tom Paine, Voltaire, and Volney, who was then recognised as one of the dangerous authors. Cock-fights, strange feats of strength, or of usefulness with axe or hammer or scythe, and a passion for mimicry continue. In 1834 he became a candidate again. "Can't the party raise any better material than that?" asked a bystander before a speech of his; after it, he exclaimed that the speaker knew more than all the other candidates put together. This time he was elected, being then twenty-five, and thereafter he was returned for three further terms of two years. Shortly before his second election in 1836 the State capital was removed to Springfield, in his own county. There in 1837 Lincoln fixed his home. He had long been reading law in his curious, spasmodically concentrated way, and he had practised a little as a "pettifogger," that is, an unlicensed practitioner in the inferior courts. He had now obtained his license and was very shortly taken into partnership by an old friend in Springfield.
2. In the Illinois Legislature.
Here his youth may be said to end. Springfield was a different place from New Salem. There were carriages in it, and ladles who studied poetry and the fashions. There were families from Virginia and Kentucky who were conscious of ancestry, while graver, possibly more pushing, people from the North-eastern States, soon to outnumber them, were a little inclined to ridicule what they called their "illusory ascendency." There was a brisk competition of churches, and mutual improvement societies such as the "Young Men's Lyceum" had a rival claim to attention with races and cock-fights.
And it was an altered Abraham Lincoln that came to inhabit Springfield. Arriving a day or two before his first law partnership was settled he came into the shop of a thriving young tradesman, Mr. Joshua Speed, to ask about the price of the cheapest bedding and other necessary articles. The sum for which Lincoln, who had not one cent, would have had to ask, and would have been readily allowed, credit, was only seventeen dollars. But this huge prospect of debt so visibly depressed him that Speed instantly proposed an arrangement which involved no money debt. He took him upstairs and installed him—Western domestic arrangements were and are still simple—as the joint occupant of his own large bed. "Well, Speed, I'm moved," was the terse acknowledgment. Speed was to move him later by more precious charity. We are concerned for the moment with what moved Speed. "I looked up at him," said he, long after, "and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life." The struggle of ambition and poverty may well have been telling on Lincoln; but besides that a tragical love story (shortly to be told) had left a deep and permanent mark; but these influences worked, we may suppose, upon a disposition quite as prone to sadness as to mirth. His exceedingly gregarious habit, drawing him to almost any assembly of his own sex, continued all his life; but it alternated from the first with a habit of solitude or abstraction, the abstraction of a man who, when he does wish to read, will read intently in the midst of crowd or noise, or walking along the street. He was what might unkindly be called almost a professional humorist, the master of a thousand startling stories, delightful to the hearer, but possibly tiresome in written reminiscences, but we know too well that gifts of this kind are as compatible with sadness as they certainly are with deadly seriousness.
The Legislature of Illinois in the eight years from 1834 to 1842, in which Lincoln belonged to it, was, though not a wise, a vigorous body. In the conditions which then existed it was not likely to have been captured as the Legislatures of wilder and more thinly-peopled States have sometimes been by a disreputable element in the community, nor to have subsided into the hands of the dull mechanical class of professional politicians with which, rightly or wrongly, we have now been led to associate American State Government. The fact of Lincoln's own election suggests that dishonest adventurers might easily have got there, but equally suggests that a very different type of men prevailed. "The Legislature," we are told, "contained the youth and blood and fire of the frontier." Among the Democrats in the Legislature was Stephen Douglas, who was to become one of the most powerful men in the United States while Lincoln was still unknown; and several of Lincoln's Whig colleagues were afterwards to play distinguished or honourable parts in politics or war. We need not linger over them, but what we know of those with whom he had any special intimacy makes it entirely pleasant to associate him with them. After a short time in which, like any sensible young member of an assembly, he watched and hardly ever spoke, Lincoln soon made his way among these men, and in 1838 and 1840 the Whig members—though, being in a minority, they could not elect him—gave him their unanimous votes for the Speakership of the Assembly. The business which engrossed the Legislature, at least up to 1838, was the development of the natural resources of the State. These were great. It was natural that railways, canals and other public works to develop them should be pushed forward at the public cost. Other new countries since, with less excuse because with greater warning from experience, have plunged in this matter, and, though the Governor protested, the Illinois Legislature, Whigs and Democrats, Lincoln and every one else, plunged gaily, so that, during the collapse which followed, Illinois, though, like Lincoln himself, it paid its debts in the end, was driven in 1840 to suspend interest payments for several years.
Very little is recorded of Lincoln's legislative doings. What is related chiefly exhibits his delight in the game of negotiation and combination by which he and the other members for his county, together known as "the Long Nine," advanced the particular projects which pleased their constituents or struck their own fancy. Thus he early had a hand in the removal of the capital from Vandalia to Springfield in his own county. The map of Illinois suggests that Springfield was a better site for the purpose than Vandalia and at least as good as Jacksonville or Peoria or any of its other competitors. Of his few recorded speeches one concerns a proposed inquiry into some alleged impropriety in the allotment of shares in the State Bank. It is certainly the speech of a bold man; it argues with remarkable directness that whereas a committee of prominent citizens which had already inquired into this matter consisted of men of known honesty, the proposed committee of the Legislators, whom he was addressing, would consist of men who, for all he knew, might be honest, and, for all he knew, might not.
The Federal politics of this time, though Lincoln played an active local part in the campaigns of the Whig party, concern us little. The Whigs, to whom he did subordinate service, were, as has been said, an unlucky party. In 1840, in the reaction which extreme commercial depression created against the previously omnipotent Democrats, the Whig candidate for the Presidency was successful. This was General Harrison, a respected soldier of the last war, who was glorified as a sort of Cincinnatus and elected after an outburst of enthusiastic tomfoolery such as never before or since rejoiced the American people. But President Harrison had hardly been in office a month when he died. Some say he was worried to death by office seekers, but a more prosaic cause, pneumonia, can also be alleged. It is satisfactory that this good man's grandson worthily filled his office forty-eight years after, but his immediate successor was of course the Vice-President, Tyler, chosen as an influential opponent of the last Democrat Presidents, but not because he agreed with the Whigs. Cultivated but narrow-minded, highly independent and wholly perverse, he satisfied no aspiration of the Whigs and paved the way effectually for the Democrat who succeeded him.
Throughout these years Lincoln was of course working at law, which became, with the development of the country, a more arduous and a more learned profession. Sessions of the Legislature did not last long, and political canvasses were only occasional. If Lincoln was active in these matters he was in many other directions, too, a keen participator in the keen life of the society round him. Nevertheless politics as such, and apart from any large purpose to be achieved through them, had for many years a special fascination for him. For one thing he was argumentative in the best sense, with a passion for what the Greeks sometimes called "dialectic"; his rare capacity for solitary thought, the most marked and the greatest of his powers, went absolutely hand in hand with the desire to reduce his thoughts to a form which would carry logical conviction to others. Further, there can be no doubt—and such a combination of tastes, though it seems to be uncommon, is quite intelligible—that the somewhat unholy business of party management was at first attractive to him. To the end he showed no intuitive comprehension of individual men. His sincere friendly intention, the unanswerable force of an argument, the convincing analogy veiled in an unseemly story, must take their chance of suiting the particular taste of Senator Sherman or General McClellan; but any question of managing men in the mass—will a given candidate's influence with this section of people count for more than his unpopularity with that section? and so on—involved an element of subtle and long-sighted calculation which was vastly congenial to him. We are to see him hereafter applying this sort of science on a grand scale and for a great end. His early discipline in it is a dull subject, interesting only where it displays, as it sometimes does, the perfect fairness with which this ambitious man could treat his own claims as against those of a colleague and competitor.
In forming any judgment of Lincoln's career it must, further, be realised that, while he was growing up as a statesman, the prevailing conception of popular government was all the time becoming more unfavourable to leadership and to robust individuality. The new party machinery adopted by the Democrats under Jackson, as the proper mode of securing government by the people, induced a deadly uniformity of utterance; breach of that uniformity was not only rash, but improper. Once in early days it was demanded in a newspaper that "all candidates should show their hands." "Agreed," writes Lincoln, "here's mine"; and then follows a young man's avowal of advanced opinions; he would give the suffrage to "all whites who pay taxes or bear arms, by no means excluding females." Disraeli, who was Lincoln's contemporary, throve by exuberances quite as startling as this, nor has any English politician found it damaging to be bold. On this occasion indeed (in 1836) Lincoln was far from damaging himself; the Whigs had not till a few years later been induced, for self-preservation, to copy the Democratic machine. But it is striking that the admiring friend who reports this declaration, "too audacious and emphatic for the statesmen of a later day," must carefully explain how it could possibly suit the temper of a time which in a few years passed away. Very soon the question whether a proposal or even a sentiment was timely or premature came to bulk too large in the deliberations of Lincoln's friends. The reader will perhaps wonder later whether such considerations did not bulk too largely in Lincoln's own mind. Was there in his statesmanship, even in later days when he had great work to do, an element of that opportunism which, if not actually base, is at least cheap? Or did he come as near as a man with many human weaknesses could come to the wise and nobly calculated opportunism which is not merely the most beneficent statesmanship, but demands a heroic self-mastery?
The main interest of his doings in Illinois politics and in Congress is the help they may give in penetrating his later mind. On the one hand, it is certain that Lincoln trained himself to be a great student of the fitting opportunity. He evidently paid very serious attention to the counsels of friends who would check his rasher impulses. One of his closest associates insists that his impulsive judgment was bad, and he probably thought so himself. It will be seen later that the most momentous utterance he ever made was kept back through the whole space of two years of crisis at the instance of timid friends. It required not less courage and was certainly more effective when at last it did come out. The same great capacity for waiting marks any steps that he took for his own advancement. Indeed it was a happy thing for him and for his country that his character and the whole cast of his ideas and sympathies were of a kind to which the restraint imposed on an American politician was most congenial and to which therefore it could do least harm. He was to prove himself a patient man in other ways as well as this. On many things, perhaps on most, the thoughts he worked out in his own mind diverged very widely from those of his neighbours, but he was not in the least anxious either to conceal or to obtrude them. His social philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was one which contemplated great future reforms—abolition of slavery and a strict temperance policy were among them. But he looked for them with a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for them. "All such questions," he is reported to have said, "must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time they will be organised into law and thus woven into the fabric of our institutions." This seems a little cold-blooded, but perhaps we can already begin to recognise the man who, when the time had fully come, would be on the right side, and in whom the evil which he had deeply but restrainedly hated would find an appallingly wary foe.
But there were crucial instances which test sufficiently whether this wary politician was a true man or not. The soil of Illinois was free soil by the Ordinance of 1787, and Congress would only admit it to the Union as a free State. But it had been largely peopled from the South. There had been much agitation against this restriction; prevailing sentiment to a late date strongly approved of slavery; it was at Alton in Illinois that, in 1836, Elijah Lovejoy, an Abolitionist publisher, had been martyred by the mob which had failed to intimidate him. In 1837, when the bold agitation of the Abolitionists was exciting much disapproval, the Illinois Legislature passed resolutions condemning that agitation and declaring in soothing tones the constitutional powerlessness of Congress to interfere with slavery in the Southern States. Now Lincoln himself—whether for good reasons or bad must be considered later—thoroughly disapproved of the actual agitation of the Abolitionists; and the resolutions in question, but for one merely theoretical point of law and for an unctuous misuse of the adjective "sacred," contained nothing which he could not literally have accepted. The objection to them lay in the motive which made it worth while to pass them. Lincoln drew up and placed on the records of the House a protest against these resolutions. He defines in it his own quite conservative opinions; he deprecates the promulgation of Abolition doctrines; but he does so because it "tends rather to increase than abate the evils" of slavery; and he lays down "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy." One man alone could he induce to sign this protest with him, and that man was not seeking re-election.
By 1842 Lincoln had grown sensibly older, and a little less ready, we may take it, to provoke unnecessary antagonism. Probably very old members of Free Churches are the people best able to appreciate the daring of the following utterance. Speaking on Washington's birthday in a Presbyterian church to a temperance society formed among the rougher people of the town and including former drunkards who desired to reform themselves, he broke out in protest against the doctrine that respectable persons should shun the company of people tempted to intemperance. "If," he said, "they believe as they profess that Omnipotence condescended to take upon Himself the form of sinful man, and as such die an ignominious death, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal and perhaps eternal salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their fellow creatures! Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, that their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class." It proved, at a later day, very lucky for America that the virtuous Lincoln, who did not drink strong drink—nor, it is sad to say, smoke, nor, which is all to the good, chew—did feel like that about drunkenness; But there was great and loud wrath. "It's a shame," said one, "that he should be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord." It is certain that in this sort of way he did himself a good deal of injury as an aspiring politician. It is also the fact that he continued none the less persistently in a missionary work conceived in a spirit none the less Christian because it shocked many pious people.
3. Marriage.
The private life of Lincoln continued, and for many years increasingly, to be equally marked by indiscriminate sociability and brooding loneliness. Comfort and the various influences which may be associated with the old-fashioned American word "elegance" seem never to enter into it. What is more, little can be discerned of positive happiness in the background of his life, as the freakish elasticity of his youth disappeared and, after a certain measure of marked success, the further objects of his ambition though not dropped became unlikely of attainment and seemed, we may guess, of doubtful value. All along he was being moulded for endurance rather than for enjoyment.
Nor, though his children evidently brought him happiness, does what we know of his domesticities and dearest affections weaken this general impression. When he married he had gone through a saddening experience. He started on manhood with a sound and chivalrous outlook on women in general, and a nervous terror of actual women when he met them. In New Salem days he absented himself from meals for the whole time that some ladies were staying at his boarding house. His clothes and his lack of upbringing must have weighed with him, besides his natural disposition. None the less, of course he fell in love. Miss Ann Rutledge, the daughter of a store and tavern keeper from Kentucky with whom Lincoln was boarding in 1833, has been described as of exquisite beauty; some say this is over-stated, but speak strongly of her grace and charm. A lady who knew her gives these curiously collocated particulars: "Miss Rutledge had auburn hair, blue eyes, fair complexion. She was pretty, slightly slender, but in everything a good-hearted young woman. She was about five feet two inches high, and weighed in the neighbourhood of a hundred and twenty pounds. She was beloved by all who knew her. She died as it were of grief. In speaking of her death and her grave Lincoln once said to me, 'My heart lies buried there.'" The poor girl, when Lincoln first came courting to her, had passed through a grievous agitation. She had been engaged to a young man, who suddenly returned to his home in the Eastern States, after revealing to her, with some explanation which was more convincing to her than to her friends, that he had been passing under an assumed name. It seems that his absence was strangely prolonged, that for a long time she did not hear from him, that his letters when they did come puzzled her, that she clung to him long, but yielded at last to her friends, who urged their very natural suspicions upon her. It is further suggested that there was some good explanation of his conduct all the while, and that she learnt this too late when actually engaged to Lincoln. However that may be, shortly after her engagement to Lincoln she fell seriously ill, insisted, as she lay ill, on a long interview with Lincoln alone, and a day or two later died. This was in 1835, when he was twenty-six. It is perhaps right to say that one biographer throws doubt on the significance of this story in Lincoln's life. The details as to Ann Rutledge's earlier lover are vague and uncertain. The main facts of Lincoln's first engagement and almost immediate loss of his betrothed are quite certain; the blow would have been staggering enough to any ordinary young lover and we know nothing of Lincoln which would discredit Mr. Herndon's judgment that its effect on him was both acute and permanent. There can be no real doubt that his spells of melancholy were ever afterwards more intense, and politer biographers should not have suppressed the testimony that for a time that melancholy seemed to his friends to verge upon insanity. He always found good friends, and, as was to happen again later, one of them, Mr. Bowline Greene, carried him off to his own secluded home and watched him carefully. He said "the thought that the snows and rains fell upon her grave filled him with indescribable grief." Two years later he told a fellow-legislator that "although he seemed to others to enjoy life rapturously, yet when alone he was so overcome by mental depression, he never dared to carry a pocket-knife." Later still Greene, who had helped him, died, and Lincoln was to speak over his grave. For once in his life he broke down entirely; "the tears ran down his yellow and shrivelled cheeks. . . . After repeated efforts he found it impossible to speak and strode away sobbing."
The man whom a grief of this kind has affected not only intensely, but morbidly, is almost sure, before its influence has faded, to make love again, and is very likely to do so foolishly. Miss Mary Owens was slightly older than Lincoln. She was a handsome woman; commanding, but comfortable. In the tales of Lincoln's love stories, much else is doubtfully related, but the lady's weight is in each case stated with assurance, and when she visited her sister in New Salem in 1836 Mary Owens weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. There is nothing sad in her story; she was before long happily married—not to Lincoln—and she long outlived him. But Lincoln, who had seen her on a previous visit and partly remembered her, had been asked, perhaps in jest, by her sister to marry her if she returned, and had rashly announced half in jest that he would. Her sister promptly fetched her, and he lingered for some time in a half-engaged condition, writing her reasonable, conscientious, feeble letters, in which he put before her dispassionately the question whether she could patiently bear "to see without sharing . . . a lot of flourishing about in carriages, . . . to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty," and assuring her that "I should be much happier with you than the way I am, provided I saw no signs of discontent in you." Whether he rather wished to marry her but felt bound to hold her free, or distinctly wished not to marry her but felt bound not to hold himself free, he probably was never sure. The lady very wisely decided that he could not make her happy, and returned to Kentucky. She said he was deficient in the little courteous attentions which a woman's happiness requires of her husband. She gave instances long after to prove her point; but she always spoke of him with friendship and respect as "a man with a heart full of human kindness and a head full of common sense."
Rather unluckily, Lincoln, upon his rejection or release, relieved his feelings in a letter about Miss Owens to one of the somewhat older married ladies who were kind to him, the wife of one of his colleagues. She ought to have burnt his letter, but she preserved it to kindle mild gossip after his death. It is a burlesque account of his whole adventure, describing, with touches of very bad taste, his disillusionment with the now maturer charms of Miss Owens when her sister brought her back to New Salem, and making comedy of his own honest bewilderment and his mingled relief and mortification when she at last refused him. We may take it as evidence of the natural want of perception and right instinctive judgment in minor matters which some who knew and loved him attribute to him. But, besides that, the man who found relief in this ill-conceived exercise of humour was one in whom the prospect of marriage caused some strange and pitiful perturbation of mind.
This was in 1838, and a year later Mary Todd came from Kentucky to stay at Springfield with her brother-in-law Ninian Edwards, a legislator of Illinois and a close ally of Lincoln's. She was aged twenty-one, and her weight was one hundred and thirty pounds. She was well educated, and had family connections which were highly esteemed. She was pleasant in company, but somewhat imperious, and she was a vivacious talker. When among the young men who now became attentive in calling on the Edwards's Lincoln came and sat awkwardly gazing on Miss Todd, Mrs. Edwards appears to have remarked that the two were not suited to each other. But an engagement took place all the same. As to the details of what followed, whether he or she was the first to have doubts, and whether, as some say, the great Stephen Douglas appeared on the scene as a rival and withdrew rather generously but too late, is uncertain. But Lincoln composed a letter to break off his engagement. He showed it to Joshua Speed, who told him that if he had the courage of a man he would not write to her, but see her and speak. He did so. She cried. He kissed and tried to comfort her. After this Speed had to point out to him that he had really renewed his engagement. Again there may be some uncertainty whether on January 1, 1841, the bridal party had actually assembled and the bridegroom after long search was found by his friends wandering about in a state which made them watch day and night and keep knives from him. But it is quite certain from his letters that in some such way on "the fatal 1st of January, 1841," he broke down terribly. Some weeks later he wrote to his partner: "Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, as it appears to me." After a while Speed was able to remove him to his own parents' home in Kentucky, where he and his mother nursed him back to mental life.
Then in the course of 1841 Speed himself began to contemplate marriage, and Speed himself had painful searchings of heart, and Lincoln's turn came to show a sureness of perception in his friend's case that he wholly lacked in his own. "I know," he writes, "what the painful point with you is . . . it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should. What nonsense! How came you to court her? But you say you reasoned yourself into it. What do you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it? Did you not think, and partly form the purpose, of courting her the first time you ever saw or heard of her? What had reason to do with it at that early stage?" A little later the lady of Speed's love falls ill. Lincoln writes: "I hope and believe that your present anxiety about her health and her life must and will for ever banish those horrid doubts which I know you sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for her. . . . Perhaps this point is no longer a question with you, and my pertinacious dwelling upon it is a rude intrusion upon your feelings. If so, you must pardon me. You know the hell I have suffered upon that point, and how tender I am upon it." When he writes thus it is no surprise to hear from him that he has lost his hypochondria, but it may be that the keen recollection of it gives him excessive anxieties for Speed. On the eve of the wedding he writes: "You will always hereafter be on ground that I have never occupied, and consequently, if advice were needed, I might advise wrong. I do fondly hope, however, that you will never need comfort from abroad. I incline to think it probable that your nerves will occasionally fail you for a while; but once you get them firmly graded now, that trouble is over for ever. If you went through the ceremony calmly or even with sufficient composure not to excite alarm in any present, you are safe beyond question, and in two or three months, to say the most, will be the happiest of men." Soon he is reassured and can "feel somewhat jealous of both of you now. You will be so exclusively concerned with one another that I shall be forgotten entirely. I shall feel very lonesome without you." And a little later: "It cannot be told how it thrills me with joy to hear you say you are far happier than you ever expected to be. I know you too well to suppose your expectations were not at least sometimes extravagant, and if the reality exceeds them all, I say, 'Enough, dear Lord.'" And here follows what might perhaps have been foreseen: "Your last letter gave me more pleasure than the total sum of all that I have received since the fatal 1st of January, 1841. Since then it seems to me I should have been entirely happy but for the never absent idea that there is still one unhappy whom I have contributed to make so. That kills my soul. I cannot but reproach myself for even wishing to be happy while she is otherwise." Very significantly he has inquired of friends how that one enjoyed a trip on the new railway cars to Jacksonville, and—not being like Falkland in "The Rivals"—praises God that she has enjoyed it exceedingly.
This was in the spring of 1842. Some three months later he writes again to Speed: "I must gain confidence in my own ability to keep my resolves when they are made. In that ability I once prided myself as the only chief gem of my character. That gem I lost how and where you know too well. I have not regained it, and until I do I cannot trust myself in any matter of much importance. I believe now that, had you understood my case at the time as well as I understood yours afterwards, by the aid you would have given me I should have sailed through clear. . . . I always was superstitious. I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing Fanny and you together, which union I have no doubt He had fore-ordained. Whatever He designs for me He will do. 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,' is my text just now. If, as you say, you have told Fanny all, I should have no objection to her seeing this letter. I do not think I can come to Kentucky this season. I am so poor and make so little headway in the world that I drop back in a month of idleness as much as I gain in a year's sowing." At last in the autumn of that year Lincoln addresses to Speed a question at once so shrewd and so daringly intimate as perhaps no other man ever asked of his friend. "The immense sufferings you endured from the first days of September till the middle of February" (the date of Speed's wedding) "you never tried to conceal from me, and I well understood. You have now been the husband of a lovely woman nearly eight months. That you are happier now than the day you married her I well know. . . . But I want to ask a close question! 'Are you in feeling as well as in judgment glad you are married as you are?' From anybody but me this would be an impudent question, not to be tolerated, but I know you will pardon it in me. Please answer it quickly, as I am impatient to know."
Speed remained in Kentucky; Lincoln was too poor for visits of pleasure; and Speed was not a man who cared for political life; but the memorials, from which the above quotations have been taken, of Lincoln's lasting friendship with Speed and his kind mother, who gave Lincoln a treasured Bible, and his kind young wife, who made her husband's friend her own, and whose violet, dropped into her husband's letter to him just as he was sealing it, was among the few flowers that Lincoln ever appreciated, throw the clearest light that we can anywhere obtain on the inner mind of Lincoln.
As may have been foreseen, Mary Todd and he had met again on a friendly footing. A managing lady is credited with having brought about a meeting between them, but evidently she did not do it till Lincoln was at least getting desirous to be managed. He was much absorbed at this time in law business, to which since his breakdown he had applied himself more seriously. It was at this period too that his notable address on temperance was given. Soon after his meetings with Miss Todd began again he involved himself in a complication of a different kind. He had written, partly, it seems, for the young lady's amusement, some innocent if uninteresting political skits relating to some question about taxes. This brought on him an unexpected challenge from a fiery but diminutive revenue official, one Colonel Shields, a prominent Democratic politician. Lincoln availed himself of the right of the challenged to impose ridiculous conditions of combat, partly no doubt in fun, but with the sensible object also of making sure that he could disarm his antagonist with no risk of harm to the little man. The tangled controversy which ensued as to how and by whose fault the duel eventually fell through has nothing in it now, but the whole undignified business seems to have given Lincoln lasting chagrin, and worried him greatly at a time when it would have been well that he should be cheerful. At last on November 4, 1842, when Lincoln was nearly thirty-three, he was safely married. The wedding, held, according to the prevailing custom, in a private house, was an important function, for it was the first Episcopalian wedding that good society in Springfield had witnessed. Malicious fortune brought in a ludicrous incident at the last moment, for when in the lawyerlike verbiage of the then American Prayer-Book the bridegroom said, "With this ring I thee endow with all my goods, chattels, lands and tenements," old Judge Brown of the Illinois Supreme Court, who had never heard the like, impatiently broke in, "God Almighty, Lincoln! The statute fixes all that."
There is more than the conventional reason for apology for pressing the subject a little further. Nothing very illuminating can be said as to the course of Lincoln's married life, but much has already been made public about it which, though it cannot be taken as reaching to the heart of the matter, is not properly to be dismissed as mere gossip. Mrs. Lincoln, it is clear, had a high temper—the fact that, poor woman! after her husband had been murdered by her side, she developed clear symptoms of insanity, may or may not, for all we are entitled to know, be relevant in this regard. She was much younger than her husband, and had gone through a cruel experience for him. Moreover, she had proper ambitions and was accustomed to proper conventional refinements; so her husband's exterior roughness tried her sorely, not the less we may be sure because of her real pride in him. Wife and tailor combined could not, with any amount of money, have dressed him well. Once, though they kept a servant then, Lincoln thought it friendly to open the door himself in his shirt sleeves when two most elegant ladies came to call. On such occasions, and doubtless on other occasions of less provocation, Mrs. Lincoln's high temper was let loose. It seems pretty certain, too, that he met her with mere forbearance, sad patience, and avoidance of conflict. His fellow lawyers came to notice that he stayed away from home on circuit when all the rest of them could go home for a day or two. Fifteen years after his wedding he himself confessed to his trouble, not disloyally, but in a rather moving remonstrance with some one who had felt intolerably provoked by Mrs. Lincoln. There are slight indications that occasions of difficulty and pain to Lincoln happened up to the end of his life. On the other hand, there are slight indications that common love for their children helped to make the two happier, and there are no indications at all of any approach to a serious quarrel. All that is told us may be perfectly true and not by any means have justified the pity that some of Lincoln's friends were ready to feel for him. It is difficult to avoid suspecting that Lincoln's wife did not duly like his partner and biographer, Mr. Herndon, who felt it his duty to record so many painful facts and his own possibly too painful impression from them. On the other side, Mr. Herndon makes it clear that in some respects Mrs. Lincoln was an admirable wife for her husband. She faced the difficulties of their poverty with spirit and resolution. Testimony from other sources to her graceful hospitality abounds. More than this, from the very first she believed in his powers. It seems she had the discernment to know, when few others can have done so, how far greater he was than his rival Douglas. It was Herndon's belief, in days when he and Mrs. Lincoln were the two persons who saw most of him, that she sustained his just ambition, and that at the most critical moment of his personal career she had the courage to make him refuse an attractive appointment which must have ruined it. The worst that we are told with any certainty amounts to this, that like the very happily married writer of "Virginibus Puerisque," Lincoln discovered that marriage is "a field of battle and not a bed of roses"—a battle in which we are forced to suspect that he did not play his full part.
We should perhaps be right in associating his curious record, of right and high regard for women and inefficiency where a particular woman's happiness depended on him, with the belief in Woman Suffrage, which he early adopted and probably retained. Be that as it may, this part of his story points to something which runs through his whole character, something which perhaps may be expressed by saying that the natural bias of his qualities was towards the negative side. We hear, no doubt, of occasions when his vigour was instant and terrible—like that of Hamlet on the ship for England; but these were occasions when the right or the necessity of the case was obvious. We have seen him also firm and absolutely independent where his conviction had already been thought out. Where there was room for further reflection, for patiently waiting on events, or for taking counsel of wise friends, manly decision had not come easily to him. He had let a third person almost engage him to Miss Owens. Once in this relation to her, he had let it be the woman's part and not the man's to have decision enough for the two. Speed had to tell him that he must face Miss Todd and speak to her, and Speed again had to make clear to him what the effect of his speaking had been. In time he decided what he thought his own feelings were, but it was by inference from the feelings of Speed. Lastly, it seems, the troubles of his married life were met by mere patience and avoidance. All this, of course, concerned a side of life's affairs in regard to which his mind had suffered painful shocks; but it shows the direction of his possible weakness and his possible strength in other things. It falls in with a trait which he himself noted in one of the letters to Speed: "I have no doubt," he writes, "it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realise." All such men have to go through deep waters; but they do not necessarily miss either success or happiness in the end. Lincoln's life may be said to have tested him by the test which Mr. Kipling states in his lines about Washington:—
"If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim."
He was to prove that he could do this; it is for the following pages to show in how high a degree. Meanwhile one thing should already be clear about him. No shrewd judge of men could read his letters to Speed with care and not feel that, whatever mistakes this man might commit, fundamentally he was worthy of entire trust. That, as a matter of fact, is what, to the end of his life, Speed and all the men who knew him and an ever widening circle of men who had to judge by more casual impressions did feel about Lincoln. Whatever was questionable in his private or public acts, his own explanation, if he happened to give one, would be taken by them as the full and naked truth, and, if there was no known explanation, it remained to them an irrebuttable presumption that his main intention was right.
CHAPTER IV
LINCOLN IN CONGRESS AND IN RETIREMENT
1. The Mexican War and Lincoln's Work in Congress.
Lincoln had ceased before his marriage to sit in the Illinois Legislature. He had won sufficient standing for his ambition to aim higher; a former law partner of his was now in Congress, and he wished to follow. But he had to submit to a few years' delay of which the story is curious and honourable. His rivals for the representation of his own constituency were two fellow Whigs, Baker and Hardin, both of whom afterwards bore distinguished parts in the Mexican war and with both of whom he was friendly. Somewhat to his disgust at a party gathering in his own county in 1843, Baker was preferred to him. A letter of his gives a shrewd account of the manoeuvres among members of various Churches which brought this about; it is curiously careful not to overstate the effect of these influences and characteristically denies that Baker had part in them. To make the thing harder, he was sent from this meeting to a convention, for the whole constituency, with which the nomination lay, and his duty, of course, was to work for Baker. Here it became obvious that Hardin would be chosen; nothing could be done for Baker at that time, but Lincoln, being against his will there in Baker's interests, took an opportunity in the bargaining that took place to advance Baker's claim, to the detriment of his own, to be Hardin's successor two years later.
By some perverse accident notes about details of party management fill a disproportionate space among those letters of Lincoln's which have been preserved, but these reveal that, with all his business-like attention to the affairs of his very proper ambition, he was able throughout to illuminate dull matters of this order with action of singular disinterestedness. After being a second time postponed, no doubt to the advantage of his law business, he took his seat in the House of Representatives at Washington for two years in the spring of 1847. Two short sessions can hardly suffice for mastering the very complicated business of that body. He made hardly any mark. He probably learned much and was able to study at leisure the characters of his brother politicians. He earned the valuable esteem of some, and seems to have passed as a very pleasant, honest, plain specimen of the rough West. Like others of the younger Congressmen, he had the privilege of breakfasting with Webster. His brief career in the House seems to have disappointed him, and it certainly dissatisfied his constituents. The part that he played may impress us more favourably than it did them, but, slight as it was, it requires a historical explanation.
Mexico had detached itself from Spain in 1826, and in 1833 the province of Texas detached itself from Mexico. Texas was largely peopled by immigrants from the States, and these had grievances. One of them was that Mexico abolished slavery, but there was real misgovernment as well, and, among other cruel incidents of the rebellion which followed, the massacre of rebels at the Alamo stamped itself on American memory. The Republic of Texas began to seek annexation to the United States in 1839, but there was opposition in the States and there were difficulties with Mexico and other Governments. At last in 1845, at the very close of his term of office, President Tyler got the annexation pushed through in defiance of the Whigs who made him President. Mexico broke off diplomatic relations, but peace could no doubt have been preserved if peace had been any object with the new President Polk or with the Southern leaders whose views he represented. They had set their eyes upon a further acquisition, larger even than Texas—California, and the whole of the territories, still belonging to Mexico, to the east of it. It is not contested, and would not have been contested then, that the motive of their policy was the Southern desire to win further soil for cultivation by slaves. But there was no great difficulty in gaining some popularity for their designs in the North. Talk about "our manifest destiny" to reach the Pacific may have been justly described by Parson Wilbur as "half on it ign'ance and t'other half rum," but it is easy to see how readily it might be taken up, and indeed many Northerners at that moment had a fancy of their own for expansion in the North-West and were not over-well pleased with Polk when, in 1846, he set the final seal upon the settlement with Great Britain of the Oregon frontier.
When he did this Polk had already brought about his own war. The judgment on that war expressed at the time in the first "Biglow Papers" has seldom been questioned since, and there seldom can have been a war so sternly condemned by soldiers—Grant amongst others—who fought in it gallantly. The facts seem to have been just as Lincoln afterwards recited them in Congress. The Rio Grande, which looks a reasonable frontier on a map, was claimed by the United States as the frontier of Texas. The territory occupied by the American settlers of Texas reached admittedly up to and beyond the River Nueces, east of the Rio Grande. But in a sparsely settled country, where water is not abundant, the actual border line, if there be any clear line, between settlement from one side and settlement from the other will not for the convenience of treaty-makers run along a river, but rather for the convenience of the settlers along the water-parting between two rivers. So Mexico claimed both banks of the Rio Grande and Spanish settlers inhabited both sides. Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor, who was allowed no discretion in the matter, to march troops right up to the Rio Grande and occupy a position commanding the encampment of the Mexican soldiers there. The Mexican commander, thus threatened, attacked. The Mexicans had thus begun the war. Polk could thus allege his duty to prosecute it. When the whole transaction was afterwards assailed his critics might be tempted to go, or represented as going, upon the false ground that only Congress can constitutionally declare war—that is, of course, sanction purely offensive operations. Long, however, before the dispute could come to a head, the brilliant successes of General Taylor and still more of General Scott, with a few trained troops against large undisciplined numbers, put all criticism at a disadvantage. The City of Mexico was occupied by Scott in September, 1847, and peace, with the cession of the vast domain that had been coveted, was concluded in May, 1848.
War having begun, the line of the Whig opposition was to vote supplies and protest as best they might against the language endorsing Polk's policy which, in the pettiest spirit of political manoeuvre, was sometimes incorporated in the votes. In this Lincoln steadily supported them. One of his only two speeches of any length in Congress was made on the occasion of a vote of this kind in 1848. The subject was by that time so stale that his speech could hardly make much impression, but it appears to-day an extraordinarily clear, strong, upright presentment of the complex and unpopular case against the war. His other long speech is elevated above buffoonery by a brief, cogent, and earnest passage on the same theme, but it was a frank piece of clowning on a licensed occasion. It was the fashion for the House when its own dissolution and a Presidential election were both imminent to have a sort of rhetorical scrimmage in which members on both sides spoke for the edification of their own constituencies and that of Buncombe. The Whigs were now happy in having "diverted the war-thunder against the Democrats" by running for the Presidency General Taylor, a good soldier who did not know whether he was a Whig or a Democrat, but who, besides being a hero of the war, was inoffensive to the South, for he lived in Louisiana and had slaves of his own. It is characteristic of the time that the Democrats, in whose counsels the Southern men prevailed, now began a practice of choosing Northern candidates, and nominated General Cass of Michigan, whose distinction had not been won in war. The Democratic Congressmen in this debate made game of the Whigs, with their war-hero, and seem to have carried a crude manner of pleasantry pretty far when Lincoln determined to show them that they could be beaten at that game. He seems to have succeeded admirably, with a burlesque comparison, too long to quote, of General Cass's martial exploits with his own, and other such-like matter enhanced by the most extravagant Western manner and delivery.
Anyone who reads much of the always grave and sometimes most moving orations of Lincoln's later years may do well to turn back to this agreeable piece of debating-society horse-play. But he should then turn a few pages further back to Lincoln's little Bill for the gradual and compensated extinction of slavery in the District of Columbia, where Washington stands. He introduced this of his own motion, without encouragement from Abolitionist or Non-Abolitionist, accompanying it with a brief statement that he had carefully ascertained that the representative people of the district privately approved of it, but had no right to commit them to public support of it. It perished, of course. With the views which he had long formed and continued to hold about slavery, very few opportunities could in these years come to him of proper and useful action against it. He seized upon these opportunities not less because in doing so he had to stand alone.
His career as a Congressman was soon over. There was no movement to re-elect him, and the Whigs now lost his constituency. His speeches and his votes against the Mexican war offended his friends. Even his partner, the Abolitionist, Mr. Herndon, whose further acquaintance we have to make, was too much infected with the popularity of a successful war to understand Lincoln's plain position or to approve of his giving votes which might seem unpatriotic. Lincoln wrote back to him firmly but sadly. Persuaded as he was that political action in advance of public sentiment was idle, resigned and hardened as we might easily think him to many of the necessities of party discipline, it evidently caused him naïve surprise that, when he was called upon for a definite opinion, anybody should expect him, as he candidly puts it, to "tell a lie."
As a retiring Congressman he was invited to speak in several places in the East on behalf of Taylor's candidature; and after Taylor's election claimed his right as the proper person to be consulted, with certain others, about Government appointments in Illinois. Taylor carried out the "spoils system" with conscientious thoroughness; as he touchingly said, he had thought over the question from a soldier's point of view, and could not bear the thought that, while he as their chief enjoyed the Presidency, the private soldiers in the Whig ranks should not get whatever was going. Lincoln's attitude in the matter may be of interest. To take an example, he writes to the President, about the postmastership in some place, that he does not know whether the President desires to change the tenure of such offices on party grounds, and offers no advice; that A is a Whig whose appointment is much desired by the local Whigs, and a most respectable man; that B, also a Whig, would in Lincoln's judgment be a somewhat better but not so popular subject for appointment; that C, the present postmaster, is a Democrat, but is on every ground, save his political party, a proper person for the office. There was an office which he himself desired, it was that of "Commissioner of the General Land Office," a new office in Washington dealing with settlement on Government lands in the West. He was probably well suited to it; but his application was delayed by the fact that friends in Illinois wanted the post too; a certain Mr. Butterfield (a lawyer renowned for his jokes, which showed, it is said, "at least a well-marked humorous intention") got it; and then it fell to the lot of the disappointed Lincoln to have to defend Butterfield against some unfair attack. But a tempting offer was made him, that of the Governorship of Oregon Territory, and he wavered before refusing to take work which would, as it happened, have kept him far away when the opportunity of his life came. It was Mrs. Lincoln who would not let him cut himself off so completely from politics. As for himself, it is hard to resist the impression that he was at this time a tired man, disappointed as to the progress of his career and probably also disappointed and somewhat despondent about politics and the possibilities of good service that lay open to politicians. It may be that this was partly the reason why he was not at all aroused by the crisis in American politics which must now be related.
2. California and the Compromise of 1850.
It has been said that the motive for the conquests from Mexico was the desire for slave territory. The attractive part of the new dominion was of course California. Arizona and New Mexico are arid regions, and the mineral wealth of Nevada was unknown. The peacefully acquired region of Oregon, far north, need not concern us, but Oregon became a free State in 1859. Early in the war a struggle began between Northerners and Southerners (to a large extent independent of party) in the Senate and the House as to whether slavery should be allowed in the conquered land or not. David Wilmot, a Northern Democratic Congressman, proposed a proviso to the very first money grant connected with the war, that slavery should be forbidden in any territory to be annexed. The "Wilmot Proviso" was proposed again on every possible occasion; Lincoln, by the way, sturdily supported it while in Congress; it was always voted down. Cass proposed as a solution of all difficulties that the question of slavery should be left to the people of the new Territories or States themselves. The American public, apt as condensing an argument into a phrase, dismissed Cass's principle for the time being with the epithet "squatter sovereignty." Calhoun and his friends said it was contrary to the Constitution that an American citizen should not be free to move with his property, including his slaves, into territory won by the Union. The annexation was carried out, and the question of slavery was unsettled. Then events took a surprising turn.
In the winter of 1848 gold was discovered in California. Throughout 1849 gold-seekers came pouring in from every part of the world. This miscellaneous new people, whose rough ways have been more celebrated in literature than those of any similar crowd, lived at first in considerable anarchy, but they determined without delay to set up some regular system of government. In the course of 1849 they elected a Convention to draw up a State Constitution, and to the astonishment of all the States the Convention unanimously made the prohibition of slavery part of that Constitution. There was no likelihood that, with a further influx of settlers of the same sort, this decision of California would alter. Was California to be admitted as a State with this Constitution of its own choice, which the bulk of the people of America approved?
To politicians of the school now fully developed in the South there seemed nothing outrageous in saying that it should be refused admission. To them Calhoun's argument, which regarded a citizen's slave as his chattel in the same sense as his hat or walking-stick, seemed the ripe fruit of logic. It did not shock them in the least that they were forcing the slave system on an unwilling community, for were not the Northerners prepared to force the free system? A prominent Southern Senator, talking with a Northern colleague a little later, said triumphantly: "I see how it is. You may force freedom as much as you like, but we are to beware how we force slavery," and was surprised that the Northerner cheerfully accepted this position. It is necessary to remember throughout the following years that, whatever ordinary Southerners thought in private, their whole political action was now based on the assumption that slavery, as it was, was an institution which no reasonable man could think wrong.
Zachary Taylor, unlike Harrison, the previous hero of the Whigs, survived his inauguration by sixteen months. He was no politician at all, but placed in the position of President, for which fairness and firmness were really the greatest qualifications, he was man enough to rely on his own good sense. He had come to Washington under the impression that the disputes which raged there were due to the aggressiveness of the North; a very little time there convinced him of the contrary. Slave-owner as he was, the claim of the South to force slavery on California struck him as an arrogant pretension, and so far as matters rested with him, he was simply not to be moved by it. He sent a message to Congress advising the admission of California with the constitution of its own choice. When, as we shall shortly see, the great men of the Senate thought the case demanded conciliation and a great scheme of compromise, he resolutely disagreed; he used the whole of his influence against their compromise, and it is believed with good reason that he would have put his veto as President on the chief measure in which the compromise issued. If he had lived to carry out his policy, it seems possible that there would have been an attempt to execute the threats of secession which were muttered—this time in Virginia. But it is almost certain that at that time, and with the position which he occupied, he would have been able to quell the movement at once. There is nothing to suggest that Taylor was a man of any unusual gifts of intellect, but he had what we may call character, and it was the one thing wanting in political life at the time. The greatest minds in American politics, as we shall see, viewed the occasion otherwise, but, in the light of what followed, it seems a signal and irreparable error that, when the spirit of aggression rising in the South had taken definite shape in a demand which was manifestly wrongful, it was bought off and not met with a straightforward refusal. Taylor died in the course of 1850 and Vice-President Millard Fillmore, of New York, succeeded him. Fillmore had an appearance of grave and benign wisdom which led a Frenchman to describe him as the ideal ruler of a Republic, but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet nerveless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple.
The actual issue of the crisis was that the admission of California was bought from the South by large concessions in other directions. This was the proposal of Henry Clay, who was now an old man anxious for the Union, but had been a lover of such compromises ever since he promoted the Missouri Compromise thirty years ago; but, to the savage indignation of some of his Boston admirers, Webster used the whole force of his influence and debating power in support of Clay. The chief concessions made to the South were two. In the first place Territorial Governments were set up in New Mexico and Utah (since then the home of the Mormons) without any restriction on slavery. This concession was defended in the North on the ground that it was a sham, because the physical character of those regions made successful slave plantations impossible there. But it was, of course, a surrender of the principle which had been struggled for in the Wilmot Proviso during the last four years; and the Southern leaders showed the clearness of their limited vision by valuing it just upon that ground. There had been reason for the territorial concessions to slavery in the past generation because it was established in the territories concerned; but there was no such reason now. The second concession was that of a new Federal law to ensure the return of fugitive slaves from the free States. The demand for this was partly factitious, for the States in the far South, which were not exposed to loss of slaves, were the most insistent on it, and it would appear that the Southern leaders felt it politic to force the acceptance of the measure in a form which would humiliate their opponents. There is no escape from the contention, which Lincoln especially admitted without reserve, that the enactment of an effective Act of this sort was, if demanded, due under the provisions of the Constitution; but the measure actually passed was manifestly defiant of all principles of justice. It was so framed as almost to destroy the chance which a lawfully free negro might have of proving his freedom, if arrested by the professional slave-hunters as a runaway. It was the sort of Act which a President should have vetoed as a fraud upon the Constitution. Thus over and above the objection, now plain, to any compromise, the actual compromise proposed was marked by flagrant wrong. But it was put through by the weight of Webster and Clay.
This event marks the close of a period. It was the last achievement of Webster and Clay, both of whom passed away in 1852 in the hope that they had permanently pacified the Union. Calhoun, their great contemporary, had already died in 1850, gloomily presaging and lamenting the coming danger to the Union which was so largely his own creation. For a while the cheerful view of Webster and Clay seemed better justified. There had been angry protest in the North against the Fugitive Slave Law; there was some forcible resistance to arrests of negroes; and some States passed Protection of Liberty Acts of their own to impede the Federal law in its working. But the excitement, which had flared up suddenly, died down as suddenly. In the Presidential election of 1852 Northerners generally reflected that they wanted quiet and had an instinct, curiously falsified, that the Democratic party was the more likely to give it them. The Whigs again proposed a hero, General Scott, a greater soldier than Taylor, but a vainer man, who mistakenly broke with all precedent and went upon the stump for himself. The President who was elected, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a friend of Hawthorne, might perhaps claim the palm among the Presidents of those days, for sheer, deleterious insignificance. The favourite observation of his contemporaries upon him was that he was a gentleman, but his convivial nature made the social attractiveness of Southern circles in Washington overpowering to any brain or character that he may have possessed. A new generation of political personages now came to the front. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a man of force and considerable dignity, began to take the leading part in the powerful group of Southern Senators; Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, rapidly became the foremost man of the Democratic party generally; William Seward, late Governor of New York, and Salmon Chase, a Democrat, late Governor of Ohio, had played a manful part in the Senate in opposition to Webster and Clay and their compromise. From this time on we must look on these two, joined a little later by Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, as the obvious leaders in the struggle against slavery which was shortly to be renewed, and in which Lincoln's part seemed likely to remain a humble one.
3. Lincoln in Retirement.
Whether Seward and Chase and the other opponents of the Compromise were right, as it now seems they were, or not, Lincoln was not the man who in the unlooked-for crisis of 1850 would have been likely to make an insurrectionary stand against his old party-leader Clay, and the revered constitutional authority of Webster. He had indeed little opportunity to do so in Illinois, but his one recorded speech of this period, an oration to a meeting of both parties on the death of Clay in 1852, expresses approval of the Compromise. This speech, which is significant of the trend of his thoughts at this time, does not lend itself to brief extracts because it is wanting in the frankness of his speeches before and after. A harsh reference to Abolitionists serves to disguise the fact that the whole speech is animated by antagonism to slavery. The occasion and the subject are used with rather disagreeable subtlety to insinuate opposition to slavery into the minds of a cautious audience. The speaker himself seems satisfied with the mood of mere compromise which had governed Clay in this matter, or rather perhaps he is twisting Clay's attitude into one of more consistent opposition to slavery than he really showed. In any case we can be quite sure that the moderate and subtle but intensely firm opinion with which a little later Lincoln returned to political strife was the product of long and deep and anxious thought during the years from 1849 to 1854. On the surface it did not go far beyond the condemnation of slavery and acceptance of the Constitution which had guided him earlier, nor did it seem to differ from the wide-spread public opinion which in 1854 created a new party; but there was this difference that Lincoln had by then looked at the matter in all its bearings, and prepared his mind for all eventualities. We shall find, and need not be surprised to find, that he who now hung back a little, and who later moved when public opinion moved, later still continued to move when public opinion had receded.
What we know of these years of private life is mainly due to Mr. William Herndon, the young lawyer already quoted, whom he took into partnership in 1845, and who kept on the business of the firm in Springfield till Lincoln's death. This gentleman was, like Boswell, of opinion that a great man is not best portrayed as a figure in a stained-glass window. He had lived with Lincoln, groaned under his odd ways, and loved them, for sixteen years before his Presidency, and after his death he devoted much research, in his own memory and those of many others, to the task of substituting for Lincoln's aureole the battered tall hat, with valuable papers stuck in its lining, which he had long contemplated with reverent irritation. Mr. Herndon was not endowed with Boswell's artistic gift for putting his materials together, perhaps because he lacked that delicacy and sureness of moral perception which more than redeemed Boswell's absurdities. He succeeded on the whole in his aim, for the figure that more or less distinctly emerges from the litter of his workshop is lovable; but in spite of all Lincoln's melancholy, the dreariness of his life, sitting with his feet on the table in his unswept and untidy office at Illinois, or riding on circuit or staying at ramshackle western inns with the Illinois bar, cannot have been so unrelieved as it is in Mr. Herndon's presentation. And Herndon overdid his part. He ferreted out petty incidents which he thought might display the acute Lincoln as slightly too acute, when for all that can be seen Lincoln acted just as any sensible man would have acted. But the result is that, in this part of his life especially, Lincoln's way of living was subjected to so close a scrutiny as few men have undergone.
Herndon's scrutiny does not reveal the current of his thoughts either on life generally or on the political problem which hereafter was to absorb him. It shows on the contrary, and the recollections of his Presidency confirm it, that his thought on any important topic though it might flash out without disguise in rare moments of intimacy, usually remained long unexpressed. His great sociability had perhaps even then a rather formidable side to it. He was not merely amusing himself and other people, when he chatted and exchanged anecdotes far into the night; there was an element, not ungenial, of purposeful study in it all. He was building up his knowledge of ordinary human nature, his insight into popular feeling, his rather slow but sure comprehension of the individual men whom he did know. It astonished the self-improving young Herndon that the serious books he read were few and that he seldom seemed to read the whole of them—though with the Bible, Shakespeare, and to a less extent Burns, he saturated his mind. The few books and the great many men were part of one study. In so far as his thought and study turned upon politics it seems to have led him soon to the conclusion that he had for the present no part to play that was worth playing. By 1854, as he said himself, "his profession as a lawyer had almost superseded the thought of politics in his mind." But it does not seem that the melancholy sense of some great purpose unachieved or some great destiny awaiting him ever quite left him. He must have felt that his chance of political fame was in all appearance gone, and would have liked to win himself a considerable position and a little (very little) money as a lawyer; but the study, in the broadest sense, of which these years were full, evidently contemplated a larger education of himself as a man than professional keenness, or any such interest as he had in law, will explain. Middle-aged and from his own point of view a failure, he was set upon making himself a bigger man.
In some respects he let himself be. His exterior oddities never seem to have toned down much; he could not be taught to introduce tidiness or method into his office; nor did he make himself an exact lawyer; a rough and ready familiarity with practice and a firm grasp of larger principles of law contented him without any great apparatus of learning. His method of study was as odd as anything else about him; he could read hard and commit things to memory in the midst of bustle and noise; on the other hand, since reading aloud was his chosen way of impressing what he read on his own mind, he would do it at all sorts of times to the sore distraction of his partner. When his studies are spoken of, observation and thought on some plan concealed in his own mind must be taken to have formed the largest element in these studies. There was, however, one methodic discipline, highly commended of old but seldom perhaps seriously pursued with the like object by men of forty, even self-taught men, which he did pursue. Some time during these years he mastered the first six Books of Euclid. It would probably be no mere fancy if we were to trace certain definite effects of this discipline upon his mind and character. The faculty which he had before shown of reducing his thought on any subject to the simplest and plainest terms possible, now grew so strong that few men can be compared with him in this. He was gaining, too, from some source, what the ancient geometers would themselves have claimed as partly the product of their study: the plain fact and its plain consequences were not only clear in calm hours of thought, but remained present to him, felt and instinctive, through seasons of confusion, passion, and dismay. His life in one sense was very full of companionship, but it is probable that in his real intellectual interests he was lonely. To Herndon, intelligently interested in many things, his master's mind, much as he held it in awe, seemed chillingly unpoetic—which is a curious view of a mind steeped in Shakespeare and Burns. The two partners had been separately to Niagara. Herndon was anxious to know what had been Lincoln's chief impression, and was pained by the reply, "I wondered where all that water came from," which he felt showed materialism and insensibility. Lincoln's thought had, very obviously, a sort of poetry of its own, but of a vast and rather awful kind. He had occasionally written verses of his own a little before this time; sad verses about a friend who had become a lunatic, wondering that he should be allowed to outlive his mind while happy young lives passed away, and sad verses about a visit to old familiar fields in Indiana, where he wandered brooding, as he says,
"Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave."
They are not great poetry; but they show a correct ear for verse, and they are not the verses of a man to whom any of the familiar forms of poetic association were unusual. They are those of a man in whom the habitual undercurrent of thought was melancholy.
Apart from these signs and the deep, humorous delight which he evidently took in his children, there may be something slightly forbidding in this figure of a gaunt man, disappointed in ambition and not even happy at home, rubbing along through a rather rough crowd, with uniform rough geniality and perpetual jest; all the while in secret forging his own mind into an instrument for some vaguely foreshadowed end. But there are two or three facts which stand out certain and have to be taken account of in any image we may be tempted to form of him. In the first place, his was no forbidding figure at the time to those who knew him; a queer and a comic figure evidently, but liked, trusted, and by some loved; reputed for honest dealing and for kindly and gentle dealing; remarked too by some at that time, as before and ever after, for the melancholy of his face in repose; known by us beyond doubt to have gone through great pain; known lastly among his fellows in his profession for a fire of anger that flashed out only in the presence of cruelty and wrong.
His law practice, which he pursued with energy, and on which he was now, it seems, prepared to look as his sole business in life, fitted in none the less well with his deliberately adopted schemes of self-education. A great American lawyer, Mr. Choate, assures us that at the Illinois bar in those days Lincoln had to measure himself against very considerable men in suits of a class that required some intellect and training. And in his own way he held his own among these men. A layman may humbly conjecture that the combination in one person of the advocate and the solicitor must give opportunities of far truer intellectual training than the mere advocate can easily enjoy. The Illinois advocate was not all the time pleading the cause which he was employed to plead, and which if it was once offered to him it was his duty to accept; he was the personal adviser of the client whose cause he pleaded, and within certain limits he could determine whether the cause was brought at all, and if so whether he should take it up himself or leave it to another man. The rule in such matters was elastic and practice varied. Lincoln's practice went to the very limit of what is permissible in refusing legal aid to a cause he disapproved. Coming into court he discovered suddenly some fact about his case which was new to him but which would probably not have justified an English barrister in throwing up his brief. The case was called; he was absent; the judge sent to his hotel and got back a message: "Tell the judge I'm washing my hands." One client received advice much to this effect: "I can win your case; I can get you $600. I can also make an honest family miserable. But I shall not take your case, and I shall not take your fee. One piece of advice I will give you gratis: Go home and think seriously whether you cannot make $600 in some honest way." And this habit of mind was beyond his control. Colleagues whom he was engaged to assist in cases agreed that if a case lost his sympathy he became helpless and useless in it. This, of course, was not the way to make money; but he got along and won a considerable local position at the bar, for his perfect honesty in argument and in statement of fact was known to have won the confidence of the judges, and a difficult case which he thought was right elicited the full and curious powers of his mind. His invective upon occasion was by all accounts terrific. An advocate glanced at Lincoln's notes for his speech, when he was appearing against a very heartless swindler and saw that they concluded with the ominous words, "Skin Defendant." The vitriolic outburst which occurred at the point thus indicated seems to have been long remembered by the Illinois bar. To a young man who wished to be a lawyer yet shrunk from the profession lest it should necessarily involve some dishonesty Lincoln wrote earnestly and wisely, showing him how false his impression of the law was, but concluding with earnest entreaty that he would not enter the profession if he still had any fear of being led by it to become a knave.
One of his cases is interesting for its own sake, not for his part in it. He defended without fee the son of his old foe and friend Jack Armstrong, and of Hannah, who mended his breeches, on a charge of murder. Six witnesses swore that they had seen him do the deed about 11 P.M. on such and such a night. Cross-examined: They saw it all quite clearly; they saw it so clearly because of the moonlight. The only evidence for the defence was an almanac. There had been no moon that night. Another case is interesting for his sake. Two young men set up in a farm together, bought a waggon and team from a poor old farmer, Lincoln's client, did not pay him, and were sued. They had both been just under twenty-one when they contracted the debt, and they were advised to plead infancy. A stranger who was present in Court described afterwards his own indignation as the rascally tale was unfolded, and his greater indignation as he watched the locally famous Mr. Lincoln, lying back in his seat, nodding complacently and saying, "I reckon that's so," as each of the relevant facts was produced, and the relevant Statute read and expounded. At last, as the onlooker proceeded to relate, the time came for Lincoln to address the jury, with whom, by Illinois law, the issue still rested. Slowly he disengaged his long, lean form from his seat, and before he had got it drawn out to its height he had fixed a gaze of extraordinary benevolence on the two disgraceful young defendants and begun in this strain: "Gentlemen of the Jury, are you prepared that these two young men shall enter upon life and go through life with the stain of a dishonourable transaction for ever affixed to them," and so forth at just sufficient length and with just enough of Shakespearean padding about honour. The result with that emotional and probably irregular Western court is obvious, and the story concludes with the quite credible assertion that the defendants themselves were relieved. Any good jury would, of course, have been steeled against the appeal, which might have been expected, to their compassion for a poor and honest old man. A kind of innocent and benign cunning has been the most engaging quality in not a few great characters. It is tempting, though at the risk of undue solemnity, to look for the secret of Lincoln's cunning in this instance. We know from copybooks and other sources that these two young men, starting on the down grade with the help of their blackguardly legal adviser, were objects for pity, more so than the man who was about to lose a certain number of dollars. Lincoln, as few other men would have done, felt a certain actual regret for them then and there; he felt it so naturally that he knew the same sympathy could be aroused, at least in twelve honest men who already wished they could find for the plaintiff. It has often been remarked that the cause of his later power was a knowledge of the people's mind which was curiously but vitally bound up with his own rectitude.
Any attempt that we may make to analyse a subtle character and in some respects to trace its growth is certain to miss the exact mark. But it is in any case plain that Abraham Lincoln left political life in 1849, a praiseworthy self-made man with good sound views but with nothing much to distinguish him above many other such, and at a sudden call returned to political life in 1854 with a touch of something quite uncommon added to those good sound views.
4. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise.
The South had become captive to politicians, personally reputable and of some executive capacity, who had converted its natural prejudice into a definite doctrine which was paradoxical and almost inconceivably narrow, and who, as is common in such instances of perversion and fanaticism, knew hardly any scruple in the practical enforcement of their doctrine. In the North, on the other hand, though there were some few politicians who were clever and well-intentioned, public opinion had no very definite character, and public men generally speaking were flabby. At such a time the sheer adventurer has an excellent field before him and perhaps has his appointed use.
Stephen Douglas, who was four years younger than Lincoln, had come to Illinois from the Eastern States just about the time when Lincoln entered the Legislature. He had neither money nor friends to start with, but almost immediately secured, by his extraordinary address in pushing himself, a clerkship in the Assembly. He soon became, like Lincoln, a lawyer and a legislator, but was on the Democratic side. He rapidly soared into regions beyond the reach of Lincoln, and in 1847 became a Senator for Illinois, where he later became Chairman of the Committee on Territories, and as such had to consider the question of providing for the government of the districts called Kansas and Nebraska, which lay west and north-west of Missouri, and from which slavery was excluded by the Missouri Compromise. He was what in England is called a "Jingo," and was at one time eager to fight this country for the possession of what is now British Columbia. His short figure gave an impression of abounding strength and energy which obtained him the nickname of "the little Giant." With no assignable higher quality, and with the blustering, declamatory, shamelessly fallacious and evasive oratory of a common demagogue, he was nevertheless an accomplished Parliamentarian, and imposed himself as effectively upon the Senate as he did upon the people of Illinois and the North generally. He was, no doubt, a remarkable man, with the gift of attracting many people. A political opponent has described vividly how at first sight he was instantly repelled by the sinister and dangerous air of Douglas' scowl; a still stronger opponent, but a woman, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, seems on the contrary to have found it impossible to hate him. What he now did displayed at any rate a sporting quality.
In the course of 1854 Stephen Douglas while in charge of an inoffensive Bill dealing with the government of Kansas and Nebraska converted it into a form in which it empowered the people of Kansas at any time to decide for themselves whether they would permit slavery or not, and in express terms repealed the Missouri Compromise. With the easy connivance of President Pierce and the enthusiastic support of the Southerners, and by some extraordinary exercise of his art as demagogue and Parliamentarian, he triumphantly ran this measure through.
Just how it came about seems to be rather obscure, but it is easy to conjecture his motives. Trained in a school in which scruple or principle were unknown and the man who arrives is the great man, Douglas, like other such adventurers, was accessible to visions of a sort. He cared nothing whether negroes were slaves or not, and doubtless despised Northern and Southern sentiment on that subject equally; as he frankly said once, on any question between white men and negroes he was on the side of the white men, and on any question between negroes and crocodiles he would be on the side of the negroes. But he did care for the development of the great national heritage in the West, that subject of an easy but perfectly wholesome patriotic pride with which we are familiar. It must have been a satisfaction to him to feel that North and South would now have an equal chance in that heritage, and also that the white settlers in the West would be relieved of any restriction on their freedom. None the less his action was to the last degree reckless. The North had shown itself ready in 1850 to put up with a great deal of quiet invasion of its former principle, but to lay hands upon the sacred letter of the Act in which that principle was enshrined was to invite exciting consequences.
The immediate consequences were two-fold. In the first place Southern settlers came pouring into Kansas and Northern settlers in still larger numbers (rendered larger still by the help of an emigration society formed in the North-East for that purpose) came pouring in too. It was at first a race to win Kansas for slavery or for freedom. When it became apparent that freedom was winning easily, the race turned into a civil war between these two classes of immigrants for the possession of the Territorial government, and this kept on its scandalous and bloody course for three or four years.
In the second place there was a revolution in the party system. The old Whig party, which, whatever its tendencies, had avoided having any principle in regard to slavery, now abruptly and opportunely expired. There had been an attempt once before, and that time mainly among the Democrats, to create a new "Free-soil Party," but it had come to very little. This time a permanent fusion was accomplished between the majority of the former Whigs in the North and a numerous secession from among the Northern Democrats. They created the great Republican party, of which the name and organisation have continued to this day, but of which the original principle was simply and solely that there should be no further extension of slavery upon territory present or future of the United States. It naturally consisted of Northerners only. This was of course an ominous fact, and caused people, who were too timid either to join the Republicans or turn Democrat, to take refuge in another strange party, formed about this time, which had no views about slavery. This was the "American" party, commonly called the "Know-Nothing" party from its ridiculous and objectionable secret organisation. Its principle was dislike of foreign immigrants, especially such as were Roman Catholics. To them ex-President Fillmore, protesting against "the madness of the times" when men ventured to say yes or no on a question relating to slavery, fled for comfort, and became their candidate for the Presidency at the next election.
It was in 1854 that Lincoln returned to political life as one of the founders of the Republican party. But it will be better at once to deal with one or two later events with which he was not specially concerned. The Republicans chose as their Presidential candidate in 1856 an attractive figure, John Frémont, a Southerner of French origin, who had conducted daring and successful explorations in Oregon, had some hand (perhaps a very important hand) in conquering California from Mexico, and played a prominent part in securing California for freedom. The Southern Democrats again secured a Northern instrument in James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, an elderly and very respectable man, who was understood to be well versed in diplomatic and official life. He was a more memorable personage than Pierce. A great chorus of friendly witnesses to his character has united in ascribing all his actions to weakness.
Buchanan was elected; but for a brand-new party the Republicans had put up a very good fight, and they were in the highest of spirits when, shortly after Buchanan's Inauguration in 1857, a staggering blow fell upon them from an unexpected quarter. This was nothing less than a pronouncement by the Chief Justice and a majority of Justices in the Supreme Court of the United States, that the exclusion of slavery from any portion of the Territories, and therefore, of course, the whole aim and object of the Republicans, was, as Calhoun had contended eight or ten years before, unconstitutional.
Dred Scott was a Missouri slave whose misfortunes it is needless to compassionate, since, after giving his name to one of the most famous law cases in history, he was emancipated with his family by a new master into whose hands he had passed. Some time before the Missouri Compromise was repealed he had been taken by his master into Minnesota, as a result of which he claimed that he became, by virtue of the Missouri Compromise, a free man. His right to sue his master in a Federal Court rested on the allegation that he was now a citizen of Missouri, while his master was a citizen of another State. There was thus a preliminary question to be decided, Was he really a citizen, before the question, Was he a freeman, could arise at all. If the Supreme Court followed its established practice, and if it decided against his citizenship, it would not consider the question which interested the public, that of his freedom.
Chief Justice Roger Taney may be seen from the refined features of his portrait and the clear-cut literary style of his famous judgment to have been a remarkable man. He was now eighty-three, but in unimpaired intellectual vigour. In a judgment, with which five of his colleagues entirely concurred and from which only two dissented, he decided that Dred Scott was not a citizen, and went on, contrary to practice, to pronounce, in what was probably to be considered as a mere obiter dictum, that Dred Scott was not free, because the Missouri Compromise had all along been unconstitutional and void. Justices McLean and Curtis, especially the latter, answered Taney's arguments in cogent judgments, which it seems generally to be thought were right. Many lawyers thought so then, and so did the prudent Fillmore. This is one of the rare cases where a layman may have an opinion on a point of law, for the argument of Taney was entirely historical and rested upon the opinion as to negroes and slavery which he ascribed to the makers of the Constitution and the authors of the Declaration of Independence. On the question of Scott's citizenship he laid down that these men had hardly counted Africans as human at all, and used words such as "men," "persons," "citizens" in a sense which necessarily excluded the negro. We have seen already that he was wrong—the Southern politician who called the words of the Declaration of Independence "a self-evident lie" was a sounder historian than Taney; but an amazing fact is to be added: the Constitution, whose authors, according to Taney, could not conceive of a negro as a citizen, was actually the act of a number of States in several of which negroes were exercising the full rights of citizens at the time. It would be easy to bring almost equally plain considerations to bear against the more elaborate argument of Taney that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, but it is enough to say this much: the first four Presidents—that is, all the Presidents who were in public life when the Constitution was made—had all acted unhesitatingly upon the belief that Congress had the power to allow or forbid slavery in the Territories. The fifth, John Quincy Adams, when he set his hand to Acts involving this principle, had consulted before doing so the whole of his Cabinet on this constitutional point and had signed such legislation with the full concurrence of them all. Even Polk had acted later upon the same view. The Dred Scott judgment would thus appear to show the penetrating power at that time of an altogether fantastic opinion.
The hope, which Taney is known to have entertained, that his judgment would compose excited public opinion, was by no means fulfilled. It raised fierce excitement. What practical effect would hereafter be given to the opinion of six out of the nine judges in that Court might depend on many things. But to the Republicans, who appealed much to antiquity, it was maddening to be thus assured that their whole "platform" was unconstitutional. In the long run, there seems to be no doubt that Taney helped the cause of freedom. He had tried to make evident the personal sense of compassion for "these unfortunate people" with which he contemplated the opinion that he ascribed to a past generation; but he failed to do this, and instead he succeeded in imparting to the supposed Constitutional view of the slave, as nothing but a chattel, a horror which went home to many thousands of the warm-hearted men and women of his country.
For the time, however, the Republicans were deeply depressed, and a further perplexity shortly befell them. An attempt, to which we must shortly return, was made to impose the slave system on Kansas against the now unmistakable will of the majority there. Against this attempt Douglas, in opposition to whom the Republican party had been formed, revolted to his lasting honour, and he now stood out for the occasion as the champion of freedom. It was at this late period of bewilderment and confusion that the life-story of Abraham Lincoln became one with the life-story of the American people.
CHAPTER V
THE RISE OF LINCOLN
1. Lincoln's Return to Public Life.
We possess a single familiar letter in which Lincoln opened his heart about politics. It was written while old political ties were not yet quite broken and new ties not quite knit, and it was written to an old and a dear friend who was not his political associate. We may fittingly place it here, as a record of the strong and conflicting feelings out of which his consistent purpose in this crisis was formed.
"24 August, 1855.
"To JOSHUA SPEED.
"You know what a poor correspondent I am. Ever since I received your very agreeable letter of the 22nd I have been intending to write you an answer to it. You suggest that in political action, now, you and I would differ. I suppose we would; not quite so much, however, as you may think. You know I dislike slavery, and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it. So far there is no cause of difference. But you say that sooner than yield your legal right to the slave, especially at the bidding of those who are not themselves interested, you would see the Union dissolved. I am not aware that any one is bidding you yield that right; very certainly I am not. I leave that matter entirely to yourself. I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations under the Constitution in regard to your slaves. I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down and caught and carried back to their stripes and unrequited toil; but I bite my lips and keep quiet. In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a continual torment to me, and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power to make me miserable. You ought rather to appreciate how much the great body of the Northern people do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. I do oppose the extension of slavery because my judgment and feelings so prompt me, and I am under no obligations to the contrary. If for this you and I must differ, differ we must. . . .
"You say that if Kansas fairly votes herself a free State, as a Christian you will rejoice at it. All decent slave holders talk that way and I do not doubt their candour. But they never vote that way. Although in a private letter or conversation you will express your preference that Kansas shall be free, you will vote for no man for Congress who would say the same thing publicly. No such man could be elected from any district in a slave State. . . . The slave breeders and slave traders are a small, odious and detested class among you; and yet in politics they dictate the course of all of you, and are as completely your masters as you are the masters of your own negroes.
"You inquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a Whig; but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an Abolitionist. When I was at Washington I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times; and I never heard of any one attempting to un-Whig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery. I am not a Know-Nothing, that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favour of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
"Mary will probably pass a day or two in Louisville in October. My kindest regards to Mrs. Speed. On the leading subject of this letter I have more of her sympathy than I have of yours; and yet let me say I am
"Your friend forever,
"A. LINCOLN."
The shade of doubt which this letter suggests related really to the composition of political parties and the grouping of political forces, not in the least to the principles by which Lincoln's own actions would be guided. He has himself recorded that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise meant for him the sudden revival in a far stronger form of his interest in politics, and, we may add, of his political ambition. The opinions which he cherished most deeply demanded no longer patience but vehement action. The faculties of political organisation and of popular debate, of which he enjoyed the exercise, could now be used for a purpose which satisfied his understanding and his heart.
From 1854 onwards we find Lincoln almost incessantly occupied, at conventions, at public meetings, in correspondence, in secret consultation with those who looked to him for counsel, for the one object of strengthening the new Republican movement in his own State of Illinois, and, so far as opportunity offered, in the neighbouring States. Some of the best of his reported and the most effective of his unreported speeches were delivered between 1854 and 1858. Yet as large a part of his work in these years was done quietly in the background, and it continued to be his fate to be called upon to efface himself.
It is unnecessary to follow in any detail the labours by which he became a great leader in Illinois. It may suffice to pick out two instances that illustrate the ways of this astute, unselfish man. The first is very trifling and shows him merely astute. A Springfield newspaper called the Conservative was acquiring too much influence as the organ of moderate and decent opinion that acquiesced in the extension of negro slavery. The Abolitionist, Mr. Herndon, was a friend of the editor. One day he showed Lincoln an article in a Southern paper which most boldly justified slavery whether the slaves were black or white. Lincoln observed what a good thing it would be if the pro-slavery papers of Illinois could be led to go this length. Herndon ingeniously used his acquaintance with the editor to procure that he should reprint this article with approval. Of course that promising journalistic venture, the Conservative, was at once ruined by so gross an indiscretion. This was hard on its confiding editor, and it is not to Lincoln's credit that he suggested or connived at this trick. But this trumpery tale happens to be a fair illustration of two things. In the first place a large part of Lincoln's activity went in the industrious and watchful performance of services to his cause, very seldom as questionable but constantly as minute as this, and in making himself as in this case confidant and adviser to a number of less notable workers. In the second place a biographer must set forth if he can the materials for the severest judgment on his subject, and in the case of a man whose fame was built on his honesty, but who certainly had an aptitude for ingenious tricks and took a humorous delight in them, this duty might involve a tedious examination of many unimportant incidents. It may save such discussion hereafter to say, as can safely be said upon a study of all the transactions in his life of which the circumstances are known, that this trick on the editor of the Conservative marks the limit of Lincoln's deviation from the straight path. Most of us might be very glad if we had really never done anything much more dishonest.
Our second tale of this period is much more memorable. In 1856 the term of office of one of the Senators for Illinois came to an end; and there was a chance of electing an opponent of Douglas. Those of the Republicans of Illinois who were former Whigs desired the election of Lincoln, but could only secure it by the adhesion of a sufficient number of former Democrats and waverers. United States Senators were elected by the Legislatures of their own States through a procedure similar to that of the Conclave of Cardinals which elects a Pope; if there were several candidates and no one of them had an absolute majority of the votes first cast, the candidate with most votes was not elected; the voting was repeated, perhaps many times, till some one had an absolute majority; the final result was brought about by a transfer of votes from one candidate to another in which the prompt and cunning wire-puller had sometimes a magnificent opportunity for his skill. In this particular contest there were many ballots, and Lincoln at first led. His supporters were full of eager hope. Lincoln, looking on, discerned before any of them the setting in of an under-current likely to result in the election of a supporter of Douglas. He discerned, too, that the surest way to prevent this was for the whole of his friends immediately to go over to the Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, who was a sound opponent of slavery. He sacrificed his own chance instantly by persuading his supporters to do this. They were very reluctant, but he overbore them; one, a very old friend, records that he never saw him more earnest and decided. The same friend records, what is necessary to the appreciation of Lincoln's conduct, that his personal disappointment and mortification at his failure were great. Lincoln, it will be remembered, had acted just in this way when he sought election to the House of Representatives; he was to repeat this line of conduct in a manner at least as striking in the following year. Minute criticism of his action in many matters becomes pointless when we observe that his managing shrewdness was never more signally displayed than it was three times over in the sacrifice of his own personal chances.
For four years, it is to be remembered, the activity and influence of which we are speaking were of little importance beyond the boundaries of Illinois. It is true that at the Republican Convention in 1856 which chose Frémont as its candidate for the Presidency, Lincoln was exposed for a moment to the risk (for so it was to be regarded) of being nominated for the Vice-Presidency; but even his greatest speech was not noticed outside Illinois, and in the greater part of the Northern States his name was known to comparatively few and to them only as a local notability of the West. But in the course of 1858 he challenged the attention of the whole country. There was again a vacancy for a Senator for Illinois. Douglas was the sole and obvious candidate of the Democrats. Lincoln came forward as his opponent. The elections then pending of the State Legislature, which in its turn would elect a Senator, became a contest between Lincoln and Douglas. In the autumn of that year these rival champions held seven joint debates before mass meetings in the open air at important towns of Illinois, taking turns in the right of opening the debate and replying at its close; in addition each was speaking at meetings of his own at least once a day for three months. At the end of it all Douglas had won his seat in the Senate, and Lincoln had not yet gained recognition among the Republican leaders as one of themselves. Nevertheless the contest between Lincoln and Douglas was one of the decisive events in American history, partly from the mere fact that at that particular moment any one opposed Douglas at all; partly from the manner in which, in the hearing of all America, Lincoln formulated the issue between them; partly from the singular stroke by which he deliberately ensured his own defeat and certain further consequences.
2. The Principles and the Oratory of Lincoln.
We can best understand the causes which suddenly made him a man of national consequence by a somewhat close examination of the principles and the spirit which governed all his public activity from the moment of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The new Republican party which then began to form itself stood for what might seem a simple creed; slavery must be tolerated where it existed because the Constitution and the maintenance of the Union required it, but it must not be allowed to extend beyond its present limits because it was fundamentally wrong. This was what most Whigs and many Democrats in the North had always held, but the formulation of it as the platform of a party, and a party which must draw its members almost entirely from the North, was bound to raise in an acute form questions on which very few men had searched their hearts. Men who hated slavery were likely to falter and find excuses for yielding when confronted with the danger to the Union which would arise. Men who loved the Union might in the last resort be ready to sacrifice it if they could thereby be rid of complicity with slavery, or might be unwilling to maintain it at the cost of fratricidal war. The stress of conflicting emotions and the complications of the political situation were certain to try to the uttermost the faith of any Republican who was not very sure just how much he cared for the Union and how much for freedom, and what loyalty to either principle involved. It was the distinction of Lincoln—a man lacking in much of the knowledge which statesmen are supposed to possess, and capable of blundering and hesitation about details—first, that upon questions like these he was free from ambiguity of thought or faltering of will, and further, that upon his difficult path, amid bewildering and terrifying circumstances, he was able to take with him the minds of very many very ordinary men.
In a slightly conventional memorial oration upon Clay, Lincoln had said of him that "he loved his country, partly because it was his own country, and mostly because it was a free country." He might truly have said the like of himself. To him the national unity of America, with the Constitution which symbolised it, was the subject of pride and of devotion just in so far as it had embodied and could hereafter more fully embody certain principles of permanent value to mankind. On this he fully knew his own inner mind. For the preservation of an America which he could value more, say, than men value the Argentine Republic, he was to show himself better prepared than any other man to pay any possible price. But he definitely refused to preserve the Union by what in his estimation would have been the real surrender of the principles which had made Americans a distinct and self-respecting nation.
Those principles he found in the Declaration of Independence. Its rhetorical inexactitude gave him no trouble, and must not, now that its language is out of fashion, blind us to the fact that the founders of the United States did deliberately aspire to found a commonwealth in which common men and women should count for more than elsewhere, and in which, as we might now phrase it, all authority must defer somewhat to the interests and to the sentiments of the under dog. "Public opinion on any subject," he said, "always has a 'central idea' from which all its minor thoughts radiate. The 'central idea' in our public opinion at the beginning was, and till recently has continued to be, 'the equality of man'; and, although it has always submitted patiently to whatever inequality seemed to be a matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady and progressive effort towards the practical equality of all men." The fathers, he said again, had never intended any such obvious untruth as that equality actually existed, or that any action of theirs could immediately create it; but they had set up a standard to which continual approximation could be made.
So far as white men were concerned such approximation had actually taken place; the audiences Lincoln addressed were fully conscious that very many thousands had found in the United States a scope to lead their own lives which the traditions and institutions no less than the physical conditions of their former countries had denied them. There was no need for him to enlarge on this fact; but there are repeated indications of the distaste and alarm with which he witnessed a demand that newcomers from Europe, or some classes of them, should be accorded lesser privileges than they had enjoyed.
But notions of freedom and equality as applied to the negroes presented a real difficulty. "There is," said Lincoln, "a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black men." (We might perhaps add that as the inferior race becomes educated and rises in status it is likely itself to share the same disgust.) Lincoln himself disliked the thought of intermarriage between the races. He by no means took it for granted that equality in political power must necessarily and properly follow upon emancipation. Schemes for colonial settlement of the negroes in Africa, or for gradual emancipation accompanied by educational measures, appealed to his sympathy. It was not given him to take a part in the settlement after the war, and it is impossible to guess what he would have achieved as a constructive statesman; but it is certain that he would have proceeded with caution and with the patience of sure faith; and he had that human sympathy with the white people of the South, and no less with the slaves themselves, which taught him the difficulty of the problem. But difficult as the problem was, one solution was certainly wrong, and that was the permanent acquiescence in slavery. If we may judge from reiteration in his speeches, no sophism angered him quite so much as the very popular sophism which defended slavery by presenting a literal equality as the real alternative to it. "I protest against the counterfeit logic which says that since I do not want a negro woman for my slave I must necessarily want her for my wife. I may want her for neither. I may simply let her alone. In some respects she is certainly not my equal. But in her natural right to eat the bread which she has earned by the sweat of her brow, she is my equal and the equal of any man."
The men who had made the Union had, as Lincoln contended, and in regard to most of them contended justly, been true to principle in their dealing with slavery. "They yielded to slavery," he insists, "what the necessity of the case required, and they yielded nothing more." It was, as we know, impossible for them in federating America, however much they might hope to inspire the new nation with just ideas, to take the power of legislating as to slavery within each existing State out of the hands of that State. Such power as they actually possessed of striking at slavery they used, as we have seen and as Lincoln recounted in detail, with all promptitude and almost to its fullest extent. They reasonably believed, though wrongly, that the natural tendency of opinion throughout the now freed Colonies with principles of freedom in the air would work steadily towards emancipation. "The fathers," Lincoln could fairly say, "place slavery, where the public mind could rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction." The task for statesmen now was "to put slavery back where the fathers placed it."
Now this by no means implied that slavery in the States which now adhered to it should be exposed to attack from outside, or the slave owner be denied any right which he could claim under the Constitution, however odious and painful it might be, as in the case of the rendition of fugitive slaves, to yield him his rights. "We allow," says Lincoln, "slavery to exist in the slave States, not because it is right, but from the necessities of the Union. We grant a fugitive slave law because it is so 'nominated in the bond'; because our fathers so stipulated—had to—and we are bound to carry out this agreement." And the obligations to the slave owners and the slave States, which this original agreement and the fundamental necessities of the Union involved, must be fulfilled unswervingly, in spirit as well as in the letter. Lincoln was ready to give the slave States any possible guarantee that the Constitution should not be altered so as to take away their existing right of self-government in the matter of slavery. He had remained in the past coldly aloof from the Abolitionist propaganda when Herndon and other friends tried to interest him in it, feeling, it seems, that agitation in the free States against laws which existed constitutionally in the slave States was not only futile but improper. With all his power he dissuaded his more impulsive friends from lending any aid to forcible and unlawful proceedings in defence of freedom in Kansas. "The battle of freedom," he exclaims in a vehement plea for what may be called moderate as against radical policy, "is to be fought out on principle. Slavery is violation of eternal right. We have temporised with it from the necessities of our condition; but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black foul lie can never be consecrated into God's hallowed truth." In other words, the sure way and the only way to combat slavery lay in the firm and the scrupulous assertion of principles which would carry the reason and the conscience of the people with them; the repeal of the prohibition of slavery in the Territories was a defiance of such principles, but so too in its way was the disregard by Abolitionists of the rights covenanted to the slave States. This side of Lincoln's doctrine is apt to jar upon us. We feel with a great American historian that the North would have been depraved indeed if it had not bred Abolitionists, and it requires an effort to sympathise with Lincoln's rigidly correct feeling—sometimes harshly expressed and sometimes apparently cold. It is not possible to us, as it was to him a little later, to look on John Brown's adventure merely as a crime. Nor can we wonder that, when he was President and Civil War was raging, many good men in the North mistook him and thought him half-hearted, because he persisted in his respect for the rights of the Slave States so long as there seemed to be a chance of saving the Union in that way. It was his primary business, he then said, to save the Union if he could; "if I could save the Union by emancipating all the slaves I would do so; if I could save it by emancipating none of them, I would do it; if I could save it by emancipating some and not others, I would do that too." But, as in the letter at the beginning of this chapter he called Speed to witness, his forbearance with slavery cost him real pain, and we shall misread both his policy as President and his character as a man if we fail to see that in the bottom of his mind he felt this forbearance to be required by the very same principles which roused him against the extension of the evil. Years before, he had written to an Abolitionist correspondent that respect for the rights of the slave States was due not only to the Constitution but, "as it seems to me, in a sense to freedom itself." Negro slavery was not the only important issue, nor was it an isolated issue. What really was in issue was the continuance of the nation "dedicated," as he said on a great occasion, "to the proposition that all men are equal," a nation founded by the Union of self-governing communities, some of which lagged far behind the others in applying in their own midst the elementary principles of freedom, but yet a nation actuated from its very foundation in some important respects by the acknowledgment of human rights.
The practical policy, then, on which his whole efforts were concentrated consisted in this single point—the express recognition of the essential evil of slavery by the enactment that it should not spread further in the Territories subject to the Union. If slavery were thus shut up within a ring fence and marked as a wrong thing which the Union as a whole might tolerate but would not be a party to, emancipation in the slave States would follow in course of time. It would come about, Lincoln certainly thought, in a way far better for the slaves as well as for their masters, than any forced liberation. He was content to wait for it. "I do not mean that when it takes a turn towards ultimate extinction, it will be in a day, nor in a year, nor in two years. I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least, but that it will occur in the best way for both races in God's own good time I have no doubt." If we wonder whether this policy, if soon enough adopted by the Union as a whole, would really have brought on emancipation in the South, the best answer is that, when the policy did receive national sanction by the election of Lincoln, the principal slave States themselves instinctively recognised it as fatal to slavery.
For the extinction of slavery he would wait; for a decision on the principle of slavery he would not. It was idle to protest against agitation of the question. If politicians would be silent that would not get rid of "this same mighty deep-seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting them and stirring them up in every avenue of society—in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life." The stand, temperate as it was, that he advocated against slavery should be taken at once and finally. The difference, of which people grown accustomed to slavery among their neighbours thought little, between letting it be in Missouri, which they could not help, and letting it cross the border into Kansas, which they could help, appeared to Lincoln the whole tremendous gulf between right and wrong, between a wise people's patience with ills they could not cure and a profligate people's acceptance of evil as their good. And here there was a distinction between Lincoln and many Republicans, which again may seem subtle, but which was really far wider than that which separated him from the Abolitionists. Slavery must be stopped from spreading into Kansas not because, as it turned out, the immigrants into Kansas mostly did not want it, but because it was wrong, and the United States, where they were free to act, would not have it. The greatest evil in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the laxity of public tone which had made it possible. "Little by little, but steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the old faith for the new faith." Formerly some deference to the "central idea" of equality was general and in some sort of abstract sense slavery was admitted to be wrong. Now it was boldly claimed by the South that "slavery in the abstract was right." All the most powerful influences in the country, "Mammon" (for "the slave property is worth a billion dollars"), "fashion, philosophy," and even "the theology of the day," were enlisted in favour of this opinion. And it met with no resistance. "You yourself may detest slavery; but your neighbour has five or six slaves, and he is an excellent neighbour, or your son has married his daughter, and they beg you to help save their property, and you vote against your interests and principle to oblige a neighbour, hoping your vote will be on the losing side." And again "the party lash and the fear of ridicule will overawe justice and liberty; for it is a singular fact, but none the less a fact and well known by the most common experience, that men will do things under the terror of the party lash that they would not on any account or for any consideration do otherwise; while men, who will march up to the mouth of a loaded cannon without shrinking, will run from the terrible name of 'Abolitionist,' even when pronounced by a worthless creature whom they with good reason despise." And so people in the North, who could hardly stomach the doctrine that slavery was good, yet lapsed into the feeling that it was a thing indifferent, a thing for which they might rightly shuffle off their responsibility on to the immigrants into Kansas. This feeling that it was indifferent Lincoln pursued and chastised with special scorn. But the principle of freedom that they were surrendering was the principle of freedom for themselves as well as for the negro. The sense of the negro's rights had been allowed to go back till the prospect of emancipation for him looked immeasurably worse than it had a generation before. They must recognise that when, by their connivance, they had barred and bolted the door upon the negro, the spirit of tyranny which they had evoked would then "turn and rend them." The "central idea" which had now established itself in the intellect of the Southern was one which favoured the enslavement of man by man "apart from colour." A definite choice had to be made between the principle of the fathers, which asserted certain rights for all men, and that other principle against which the fathers had rebelled and of which the "divine right of kings" furnished Lincoln with his example. In what particular manner the white people would be made to feel the principle of tyranny when they had definitely "denied freedom to others" and ceased to "deserve it for themselves" Lincoln did not attempt to say, and perhaps only dimly imagined. But he was as convinced as any prophet that America stood at the parting of the ways and must choose now the right principle or the wrong with all its consequences.
The principle of tyranny presented itself for their choice in a specious form in Douglas' "great patent, everlasting principle of 'popular sovereignty.'" This alleged principle was likely, so to say, to take upon their blind side men who were sympathetic to the impatience of control of any crowd resembling themselves but not sympathetic to humanity of another race and colour. The claim to some divine and indefeasible right of sovereignty overriding all other considerations of the general good, on the part of a majority greater or smaller at any given time in any given area, is one which can generally be made to bear a liberal semblance, though it certainly has no necessary validity. Americans had never before thought of granting it in the case of their outlying and unsettled dominions; they would never, for instance, as Lincoln remarked, have admitted the claim of settlers like the Mormons to make polygamy lawful in the territory they occupied. In the manner in which it was now employed the proposed principle could, as Lincoln contended, be reduced to this simple form "that, if one man chooses to enslave another, no third man shall have the right to object."
It is impossible to estimate how far Lincoln foresaw the strain to which a firm stand against slavery would subject the Union. It is likely enough that those worst forebodings for the Union, which events proved to be very true, were confined to timid men who made a practice of yielding to threats. Lincoln appreciated better than many of his fellows the sentiment of the South, but it is often hard for men, not in immediate contact with a school of thought which seems to them thoroughly perverse, to appreciate its pervasive power, and Lincoln was inclined to stake much upon the hope that reason will prevail. Moreover, he had a confidence in the strength of the Union which might have been justified if his predecessor in office had been a man of ordinary firmness. But it is not to be supposed that any undue hopefulness, if he felt it, influenced his judgment. He was of a temper which does not seek to forecast what the future has to show, and his melancholy prepared him well for any evil that might come. Two things we can say with certainty of his aim and purpose. On the one hand, as has already been said, whatever view he had taken of the peril to the Union he would never have sought to avoid the peril by what appeared to him a surrender of the principle which gave the Union its worth. On the other hand, he must always have been prepared to uphold the Union at whatever the cost might prove to be. To a man of deep and gentle nature war will always be hateful, but it can never, any more than an individual death, appear the worst of evils. And the claim of the Southern States to separate from a community which to him was venerable and to form a new nation, based on slavery and bound to live in discord with its neighbors, did not appeal to him at all, though in a certain literal sense it was a claim to liberty. His attitude to any possible movement for secession was defined four years at least before secession came, in words such as it was not his habit to use without full sense of their possible effect or without much previous thought. They were quite simple: "We won't break up the Union, and you shan't."
Such were the main thoughts which would be found to animate the whole of Lincoln's notable campaign, beginning with his first encounter with Douglas in 1855 and culminating in his prolonged duel with him in the autumn of 1858. It is unnecessary here to follow the complexities, especially in regard to the Dred Scott judgments, through which the discussion wandered. It is now worth few men's while to do more than glance at two or three of his speeches at that period; his speeches in the formal Lincoln-Douglas debates, except the first, are not the best of them. A scientific student of rhetoric, as the art by which man do actually persuade crowds, might indeed do well to watch closely the use by Douglas and Lincoln of their respective weapons, but for most of us it is an unprofitable business to read reiterated argument, even though in beautiful language, upon points of doubt that no longer trouble us. Lincoln does not always show to advantage; later readers have found him inferior in urbanity to Douglas, of whom he disapproved, while Douglas probably disapproved of no man; his speeches are, of course, not free either from unsound arguments or from the rough and tumble of popular debate; occasionally he uses hackneyed phrases; but it is remarkable that a hackneyed or a falsely sentimental phrase in Lincoln comes always as a lapse and a surprise. Passages abound in these speeches which to almost any literate taste are arresting for the simple beauty of their English, a beauty characteristic of one who had learned to reason with Euclid and learned to feel and to speak with the authors of the Bible. And in their own kind they were a classic and probably unsurpassed achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the Presidential election of 1856 wrote to a supporter of Fillmore to persuade him of a proposition which must seem paradoxical to anyone not deeply versed in American institutions, namely, that it was actually against Fillmore's interest to gain votes from Frémont in Illinois. He demonstrated his point, but he was not always judicious in his way of addressing solemn strangers, and in his rural manner he concludes his letter, "the whole thing is as simple as figuring out the weight of three small hogs," and this inelegant sentence conveys with little exaggeration one especial merit of his often austerely graceful language. Grave difficulties are handled in a style which could arouse all the interest of a boy and penetrate the understanding of a case-hardened party man.
But if in comparison with the acknowledged masterpieces of our prose we rank many passages in these speeches very high—and in fact the men who have appreciated them most highly have been fastidious scholars—we shall not yet have measured Lincoln's effort and performance. For these are not the compositions of a cloistered man of letters, they are the outpourings of an agitator upon the stump. The men who think hard are few; few of them can clothe their thought in apt and simple words; very, very few are those who in doing this could hold the attention of a miscellaneous and large crowd. Popular government owes that comparative failure, of which in recent times we have taken perhaps exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit. Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite overshadowed his; a person whose extraordinary and good-humoured vitality armed him with an external charm even for people who, like Mrs. Beecher Stowe, detested his principles; an orator whose mastery of popular appeal and of resourceful and evasive debate was quite unhampered by any weakness for the truth. The utterance had to be kept up day after day and night after night for a quarter of a year, by a man too poor to afford little comforts, travelling from one crowded inn to another, by slow trains on a railway whose officials paid little attention to him, while his more prosperous and distinguished rival could travel in comfort and comparative magnificence. The physical strain of electioneering, which is always considerable, its alternation of feverish excitement with a lassitude that, after a while, becomes prevailing and intense, were in this case far greater and more prolonged than in any other instance recorded of English or probably of American statesmen. If, upon his sudden elevation shortly afterwards, Lincoln was in a sense an obscure man raised up by chance, he was nevertheless a man who had accomplished a heroic labour.
On the whole the earthen vessel in which he carried his treasure of clear thought and clean feelings appears to have enhanced its flavour. There was at any rate nothing outward about him that aroused the passion of envy. A few peculiarly observant men were immediately impressed with his distinction, but there is no doubt that to the ordinary stranger he appeared as a very odd fish. "No portraits that I have ever seen," writes one, "do justice to the awkwardness and ungainliness of his figure." Its movements when he began to speak rather added to its ungainliness, and, though to a trained actor his elocution seemed perfect, his voice when he first opened his mouth surprised and jarred upon the hearers with a harsh note of curiously high pitch. But it was the sort of oddity that arrests attention, and people's attention once caught was apt to be held by the man's transparent earnestness. Soon, as he lost thought of himself in his subject, his voice and manner changed; deeper notes, of which friends record the beauty, rang out, the sad eyes kindled, and the tall, gaunt figure, with the strange gesture of the long, uplifted arms, acquired even a certain majesty. Hearers recalled afterwards with evident sincerity the deep and instantaneous impression of some appeal to simple conscience, as when, "reaching his hands towards the stars of that still night," he proclaimed, "in some things she is certainly not my equal, but in her natural right to eat the bread that she has earned with the sweat of her brow, she is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of any man." Indeed, upon a sympathetic audience, already excited by the occasion, he could produce an effect which the reader of his recorded speeches would hardly believe. Of his speech at an early state convention of the Republican party there is no report except that after a few sentences every reporter laid down his pen for the opposite of the usual reason, and, as he proceeded, "the audience arose from their chairs and with pale faces and quivering lips pressed unconsciously towards him." And of his speech on another similar occasion several witnesses seem to have left descriptions hardly less incongruous with English experience of public meetings. If we credit him with these occasional manifestations of electric oratory—as to which it is certain that his quiet temperament did at times blaze out in a surprising fashion—it is not to be thought that he was ordinarily what could be called eloquent; some of his speeches are commonplace enough, and much of his debating with Douglas is of a drily argumentative kind that does honour to the mass meetings which heard it gladly. But the greatest gift of the orator he did possess; the personality behind the words was felt. "Beyond and above all skill," says the editor of a great paper who heard him at Peoria, "was the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to his fellow men."
One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected. In debate, at least, he had no use for perorations, and the reader who looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to explain only if there was time for it. We associate our older Parliamentary oratory with an art which keeps the hearer pleasedly expectant rather than dangerously attentive, through an argument which if dwelt upon might prove unsubstantial, secure that it all leads in the end to some great cadence of noble sound. But in Lincoln's argumentative speeches the employment of beautiful words is least sparing at the beginning or when he passes to a new subject. It seems as if he deliberately used up his rhetorical effects at the outset to put his audience in the temper in which they would earnestly follow him and to challenge their full attention to reasoning which was to satisfy their calmer judgment. He put himself in a position in which if his argument were not sound nothing could save his speech from failure as a speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." When the man is proved not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue. But the method by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare distinction. It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse of life. It is not, of course, pretended that he never used a fallacious argument or made an unfair score—he was entirely human. But this is the testimony of an Illinois political wire-puller to Lincoln: "He was one of the shrewdest politicians in the State. Nobody had more experience in that way. Nobody knew better what was passing in the minds of the people. Nobody knew better how to turn things to advantage politically." And then he goes on—and this is really the sum of what is to be said of his oratory: "He could not cheat people out of their votes any more than he could out of their money."
3. Lincoln against Douglas.
It has now to be told how the contest with Douglas which concluded Lincoln's labours in Illinois affected the broad stream of political events in America as a whole. Lincoln, as we know, was still only a local personage; Illinois is a State bigger than Ireland, but it is only a little part and was still a rather raw and provincial part of the United States; but Douglas had for years been a national personage, for a time the greatest man among the Democrats, and now, for a reason which did him honour, he was in disgrace with many of his party and on the point of becoming the hero of all moderate Republicans.
We need not follow in much detail the events of the great political world. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw it into a ferment, which the continuing disorders in Kansas were in themselves sufficient to keep up. New great names were being made in debate in the Senate; Seward, the most powerful opponent of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, kept his place as the foremost man in the Republican party not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in literature and the Press were heard upon the same side—the New York Tribune, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so large a country can, a national importance. Broadly it may be said that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the Republicans—it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a visit to Europe to vote for Frémont as President, and we know the views of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin's fellow labourer Asa Gray. But fashion and that better and quite different influence, the tone of opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more felt than among Washington politicians. A strong and respectable group of Southern Senators, of whom Jefferson Davis was the strongest, were the real driving power of the administration. Convivial President Pierce and doting President Buchanan after him were complaisant to their least scrupulous suggestions in a degree hardly credible of honourable men who were not themselves Southerners.
One famous incident of life in Congress must be told to explain the temper of the times. In 1856, during one of the many debates that arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to madness. Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked every minor quality of greatness. He would not call his opponent in debate a skunk, but he would expend great verbal ingenuity in coupling his name with repeated references to that animal's attributes. On this occasion he used to the full both the finer and the most exquisitely tasteless qualities of his eloquence. This sort of thing passed the censorship of many excellent Northern men who would lament Lincoln's lack of refinement; and though from first to last the serious provocation in their disputes lay in the set policy of the Southern leaders, it ought to be realised that they, men who for the most part were quite kind to their slaves and had long ago argued themselves out of any compunction about slavery, were often exposed to intense verbal provocation. Nevertheless, what followed on Sumner's speech is terribly significant of the depravation of Southern honour.
Congressman Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, had an uncle in the Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner's speech. A day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly rise. Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his uncle, and in the presence, it seems, of Southern Senators who could have stopped him, beat Sumner on the head with a stick with all his might. Sumner was incapacitated by injuries to his spine for nearly five years. Brooks, with a virtuous air, explained in Congress that he had caught Sumner in a helpless attitude because if Sumner had been free to use his superior strength he, Brooks, would have had to shoot him with his revolver. It seems to be hardly an exaggeration to say that the whole South applauded Brooks and exulted. Exuberant Southerners took to challenging Northern men, knowing well that their principles compelled them to refuse duels, but that the refusal would still be humiliating to the North. Brooks himself challenged Burlingame, a distinguished Congressman afterwards sent by Lincoln as Minister to China, who had denounced him. Burlingame accepted, and his second arranged for a rifle duel at a wild spot across the frontier at Niagara. Brooks then drew back; he alleged, perhaps sincerely, that he would have been murdered on his way through the Northern States, but Northern people were a little solaced. The whole disgusting story contains only one pleasant incident. Preston Brooks, who, after numbers of congratulations, testimonials, and presentations, died within a year of his famous exploit, had first confessed himself tired of being a hero to every vulgar bully in the South!
Now, though this dangerous temper burned steadily in the South, and there were always sturdy Republicans ready to provoke it, and questions arising out of slavery would constantly recur to disturb high political circles, it is not to be imagined that opinion in the North, the growing and bustling portion of the States, would remain for years excited about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1857 men's minds were agitated by a great commercial depression and collapse of credit, and in 1858 there took place one of the most curious (for it would seem to have deserved this cold description) of evanescent religious revivals. Meanwhile, by 1857 the actual bloodshed in Kansas had come to an end under the administration of an able Governor; the enormous majority of settlers in Kansas were now known to be against slavery and it was probably assumed that the legalisation of slavery could not be forced upon them. Prohibition of slavery there by Congress thus began to seem needless, and the Dred Scott judgments raised at least a grave doubt as to whether it was possible. Thus enthusiasm for the original platform of the Republicans was cooling down, and to the further embarrassment of that party, when towards the end of 1857 the Southern leaders attempted a legislative outrage, the great champion of the Northern protest was not a Republican, but Douglas himself.
A Convention had been elected in Kansas to frame a State Constitution. It represented only a fraction of the people, since, for some reason good or bad, the opponents of slavery did not vote in the election. But it was understood that whatever Constitution was framed would be submitted to the popular vote. The Convention framed a Constitution legalising slavery, and its proposals came before Congress backed by the influence of Buchanan. Under them the people of Kansas were to vote whether they would have this Constitution as it stood, or have it with the legalisation of slavery restricted to the slaves who had then been brought into the territory. No opportunity was to be given them of rejecting the Constitution altogether, though Governor Walker, himself in favor of slavery, assured the President that they wished to do so. Ultimately, by way of concession to vehement resistance, the majority in Congress passed an Act under which the people in Kansas were to vote simply for or against the slavery Constitution as it stood, only—if they voted for it, they as a State were to be rewarded with a large grant of public lands belonging to the Union in their territory. Eventually the Kansas people, unmoved by this bribe, rejected the Constitution by a majority of more than 11,000 to 1,800. Now, the Southern leaders, three years before, had eagerly joined with Douglas to claim a right of free choice for the Kansas people. The shamelessness of this attempt to trick them out of it is more significant even than the tale of Preston Brooks. There was no hot blood there; the affair was quietly plotted by respected leaders of the South. They were men in many ways of character and honour, understood by weak men like Buchanan to represent the best traditions of American public life. But, as they showed also in other instances that cannot be related here, slavery had become for them a sacred cause which hallowed almost any means. It is essential to remember this in trying to understand the then political situation.
Douglas here behaved very honourably. He, with his cause of popular sovereignty, could not have afforded to identify himself with the fraud on Kansas, but he was a good enough trickster to have made his protest safely if he had cared to do so. As it was he braved the hatred of Buchanan and the fury of his Southern friends by instant, manly, courageous, and continued opposition. It may therefore seem an ungracious thing that, immediately after this, Lincoln should have accepted the invitation of his friends to oppose Douglas' re-election. To most of the leading Republicans out of Illinois it seemed altogether unwise and undesirable that their party, which had seemed to be losing ground, should do anything but welcome Douglas as an ally. Of these Seward indeed went too far for his friends, and in his sanguine hope that it would work for freedom was ready to submit to the doctrine of "popular sovereignty"; but, except the austere Chase, now Governor of Ohio, who this once, but unfortunately not again, was whole-heartedly with Lincoln, the Republican leaders in the East, and great Republican journals, like the Tribune, declared their wish that Douglas should be re-elected. Why, then, did Lincoln stand against him?
It has often been suggested that his personal feelings towards Douglas played some part in the matter, though no one thinks they played the chief part. Probably they did play a part, and it is a relief to think that Lincoln thoroughly gratified some minor feelings in this contest. Lincoln no doubt enjoyed measuring himself against other men; and it was galling to his ambition to have been so completely outstripped by a man inferior to him in every power except that of rapid success. He had also the deepest distrust for Douglas as a politician, thinking that he had neither principle nor scruple, though Herndon, who knew, declares he neither distrusted nor had cause to distrust Douglas in his professional dealings as a lawyer. He had, by the way, one definite, if trifling, score to wipe off. After their joint debate at Peoria in 1855 Douglas, finding him hard to tackle, suggested to Lincoln that they should both undertake to make no more speeches for the present. Lincoln oddly assented at once, perhaps for no better reason than a ridiculous difficulty, to which he once confessed, in refusing any request whatever. Lincoln of course had kept this agreement strictly, while Douglas had availed himself of the first temptation to break it. Thus on all grounds we may be sure that Lincoln took pleasure in now opposing Douglas. But to go further and say that the two men cordially hated each other is probably to misread both. There is no necessary connection between a keen desire to beat a man and any sort of malignity towards him. That much at least may be learned in English schools, and the whole history of his dealing with men shows that in some school or other Lincoln had learned it very thoroughly. Douglas, too, though an unscrupulous, was not, we may guess, an ungenerous man.
But the main fact of the matter is that Lincoln would have turned traitor to his rooted convictions if he had not stood up and fought Douglas even at this moment when Douglas was deserving of some sympathy. Douglas, it must be observed, had simply acted on his principle that the question between slavery and freedom was to be settled by local, popular choice; he claimed for the white men of Kansas the fair opportunity of voting; given that, he persistently declared, "I do not care whether slavery be voted up or voted down." In Lincoln's settled opinion this moral attitude of indifference to the wrongfulness of slavery, so long as respect was had to the liberties of the privileged race, was, so to say, treason to the basic principle of the American Commonwealth, a treason which had steadily been becoming rife and upon which it was time to stamp.
There can be no doubt of his earnestness about this. But the Republican leaders, honourably enough, regarded this as an unpractical line to take, and indeed to the political historian this is the most crucial question in American history. Nobody can say that civil war would or would not have occurred if this or that had been done a little differently, but Abraham Lincoln, at this crisis of his life, did, in pursuance of his peculiarly cherished principle, forge at least a link in the chain of events which actually precipitated the war. And he did it knowing better than any other man that he was doing something of great national importance, involving at least great national risk. Was he pursuing his principles, moderate as they were in the original conception, with fanaticism, or at the best preferring a solemn consistency of theory to the conscientious handling of facts not reducible to theory? As a question of practical statesmanship in the largest sense, how did matters really stand in regard to slavery and to the relations between South and North, and what was Lincoln's idea of "putting slavery back where the fathers placed it" really worth?
Herndon in these days went East to try to enlist the support of the great men for Lincoln. He found them friendly but immovable. Editor Horace Greeley said to him: "The Republican standard is too high; we want something practical." This, we may be pretty sure, stiffened Lincoln's back, as a man with a cause that he cared for, and, for that matter, as a really shrewd manager in a party which he thought stood for something. It reveals the flabbiness which the Northerners were in danger of making a governing tradition of policy. The wrongfulness of any extension of slavery might be loudly asserted in 1854, but in 1858, when it no longer looked as if so great an extension of it was really imminent, there was no harm in shifting towards some less provocative principle on which more people at the moment might agree. Confronted with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a united South whose leaders were by now accustomed to make the Union Government go which way they chose and had no sort of disposition to compromise their principle in the least. "What," as Lincoln put it in an address given, not long after his contest with Douglas, at the Cooper Institute in New York, "what do you think will content the South?" "Nothing," he answered, "but an acknowledgment that slavery is right." "Holding as they do that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong." That being so, there was no use, he said, in "groping about for some middle ground between right and wrong," or in "a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care." And there is ample evidence that he understood rightly the policy of the South. It is very doubtful whether any large extension of cultivation by slave labour was economically possible in Kansas or in regions yet further North, but we have seen to what lengths the Southern leaders would go in the attempt to secure even a limited recognition of slavery as lawful in a new State. They were not succeeding in the business of the Kansas Constitution. But they had a very good prospect of a far more important success. The celebrated dicta of Chief Justice Taney and other judges in the Dred Scott case had not amounted to an actual decision, nor if they had would a single decision have been irreversible. Whether the principle of them should become fixed in American Constitutional law depended (though this could not be openly said) on whether future appointments to the Supreme Court were to be made by a President who shared Taney's views; whether the executive action of the President was governed by the same views; and on the subtle pressure which outside opinion does exercise, and in this case had surely exercised, upon judicial minds. If the simple principle that the right to a slave is just one form of the ordinary right to property once became firmly fixed in American jurisprudence it is hard to see how any laws prohibiting slavery could have continued to be held constitutional except in States which were free States when the Constitution was adopted. Of course, a State like New York where slaves were industrially useless would not therefore have been filled with slave plantations, but, among a loyally minded people, the tradition which reprobated slavery would have been greatly weakened. The South would have been freed from the sense that slavery was a doomed institution. If attempts to plant slavery further in the West with profit failed, there was Cuba and there was Central America, on which filibustering raids already found favour in the South, and in which the national Government might be led to adopt schemes of conquest or annexation. Moreover, it was avowed by leaders like Jefferson Davis that though it might be impracticable to hope for the repeal of the prohibition of the slave trade, at least some relaxation of its severity ought to be striven for, in the interest of Texas and New Mexico and of possible future Territories where there might be room for more slaves. Such were the views of the leaders whose influence preponderated with the present President and in the main with the present Congress. When Lincoln judged that a determined stand against their policy was required, and further that no such stand could be possible to a party which had embraced Douglas with his principle, "I care not whether slavery be voted up or voted down," there is no doubt now that he was right and the great body of Republican authority opposed to him wrong.
When Lincoln and his friends in Illinois determined to fight Douglas, it became impossible for the Republican party as a whole to fall far behind them. This was in itself at that crisis an important thing. Lincoln added greatly to its importance by the opening words in the first speech of his campaign. They were the most carefully prepared words that he had yet spoken, and the most momentous that he had spoken till now or perhaps ever spoke. There is nothing in them for which what has been said of the situation and of his views will not have prepared us, and nothing which thousands of men might not have said to one another in private for a year or two before. But the first public avowal by a responsible man in trenchant phrase, that a grave issue has been joined upon which one party or the other must accept entire defeat, may be an event of great and perilous consequence.
He said: "If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become lawful alike in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South."
It may perhaps be said that American public opinion has in the past been very timid in facing clear-cut issues. But, as has already been observed, an apt phrase crystallising the unspoken thought of many is even more readily caught up in America than anywhere else; so, though but few people in States at a distance paid much attention to the rest of the debates, or for a while again to Lincoln, the comparison of the house divided against itself produced an effect in the country which did not wear out. In this whole passage, moreover, Lincoln had certainly formulated the question before the nation more boldly, more clearly, more truly than any one before. It is impossible to estimate such influences precisely, but this was among the speeches that rank as important actions, and the story, most characteristic of the speaker, which lay behind it, is worth relating in detail. Lincoln had actually in a speech in 1856 declared that the United States could not long endure half slave and half free. "What in God's name," said some friend after the meeting, "could induce you to promulgate such an opinion?" "Upon my soul," he said, "I think it is true," and he could not be argued out of this opinion. Finally the friend protested that, true or not, no good could come of spreading this opinion abroad, and after grave reflection Lincoln promised not to utter it again for the present. Now, in 1858, having prepared his speech he read it to Herndon. Herndon questioned whether the passage on the divided house was politic. Lincoln said: "I would rather be defeated with this expression in my speech, and uphold and discuss it before the people, than be victorious without it." Once more, just before he delivered it, he read it over to a dozen or so of his closest supporters, for it was his way to discuss his intentions fully with friends, sometimes accepting their advice most submissively and sometimes disregarding it wholly. One said it was "ahead of its time," another that it was a "damned fool utterance." All more or less strongly condemned it, except this time Herndon, who, according to his recollection, said, "It will make you President." He listened to all and then addressed them, we are told, substantially as follows: "Friends, this thing has been retarded long enough. The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth—let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right." Rather a memorable pronouncement of a candidate to his committee; and the man who records it is insistent upon every little illustration he can find both of Lincoln's cunning and of his ambition.
Lincoln did go down in this particular contest. Many friends wrote and reproved him after this "damned fool utterance," but his defeat was not, after all, attributed to that. All the same he did himself assure his defeat, and he did it with extraordinary skill, for the purpose of ensuring that the next President should be a Republican President, though it is impossible he should at that time have counted upon being himself that Republican. Each candidate had undertaken to answer set questions which his opponent might propound to him. And great public attention was paid to the answers to these interrogatories. The Dred Scott judgments created a great difficulty for Douglas; he was bound to treat them as right; but if they were right and Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in a Territory, neither could a Territorial Legislature with authority delegated by Congress have that power; and, if this were made clear, it would seem there was an end of that free choice of the people in the Territories of which Douglas had been the great advocate. Douglas would use all his evasive skill in keeping away from this difficult point. If, however, he could be forced to face it Lincoln knew what he would say. He would say that slavery would not be actually unlawful in a Territory, but would never actually exist in it if the Territorial Legislature chose to abstain, as it could, from passing any of the laws which would in practice be necessary to protect slave property. By advocating this view Douglas would fully reassure those of his former supporters in Illinois who puzzled themselves on the Dred Scott case, but he would infuriate the South. Lincoln determined to force Douglas into this position by the questions which he challenged him to answer. When he told his friends of his ambition, they all told him he would lose his election. "Gentlemen," said Lincoln, "I am killing larger game; if Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this." The South was already angry with Douglas for his action over the Kansas Constitution, but he would have been an invincible candidate for the South to support in 1860, and it must have told in his favour that his offence then had been one of plain honesty. But in this fresh offence the Southern leaders had some cause to accuse him of double dealing, and they swore he should not be President.
A majority of the new Illinois Legislature returned Douglas to the Senate. Lincoln, however, had an actual majority of the votes of the whole State. Probably also he had gained a hold on Illinois for the future out of all proportion to the actual number of votes then given against the popular Douglas, and above all he had gathered to him a band of supporters who had unbounded belief in him. But his fall for the moment was little noticed or regretted outside Illinois, or at any rate in the great Eastern States, to which Illinois was, so to speak, the provinces and he a provincial attorney. His first words in the campaign had made a stir, but the rest of his speeches in these long debates could not be much noticed at a distance. Douglas had won, and the presumption was that he had proved himself the better man. Lincoln had performed what, apart from results, was a work of intellectual merit beyond the compass of any American statesman since Hamilton; moreover, as can now be seen, there had been great results; for, first, the young Republican party had not capitulated and collapsed, and, then, the great Democratic party, established in power, in indifference, and in complicity with wrong, was split clean in two. But these were not results that could be read yet awhile in election figures. Meanwhile the exhausted Lincoln reconciled himself for the moment to failure. As a private man he was thoroughly content that he could soon work off his debt for his election expenses, could earn about 500 pounds a year, and be secure in the possession of the little house and the 2,000 pounds capital which was "as much as any man ought to have." As a public man he was sadly proud that he had at least "said some words which may bear fruit after I am forgotten." Persistent melancholy and incurable elasticity can go together, and they make a very strong combination. The tone of resignation had not passed away from his comparatively intimate letters when he was writing little notes to one political acquaintance and another inciting them to look forward to the fun of the next fight.
4. John Brown.
For the next few months the excitements of the great political world concern this biography little. There was strife between Davis and Douglas in the Senate. At a meeting strong against slavery, Seward regained courage from the occasion and roused the North with grave and earnest words about the "irrepressible conflict." The "underground railway," or chain of friendly houses by which fugitive slaves were stealthily passed on to Canada, became famous. Methodist professors riotously attempted to rescue an arrested fugitive at Oberlin. A Southern grand jury threw out the bill of indictment against a slave-trading crew caught red-handed. In California Democrats belonging to what was nicknamed "the chivalry" forced upon Senator Broderick, a literally democratic Irishman and the bravest of the Democrats who stood out for fair treatment to Kansas, a duel in which he might fairly be said to have been murdered. The one event which demands more than allusion was the raid and the death of John Brown.
John Brown, in whom Puritan religion, as strict as that of his ancestors on the Mayflower, put forth gentler beauties of character than his sanguinary mission may suggest, had been somewhat of a failure as a scientific farmer, but as a leader of fighting men in desperate adventure only such men as Drake or Garibaldi seem to have excelled him. More particularly in the commotions in Kansas he had led forays, slain ruthlessly, witnesses dry-eyed the deaths of several of his tall, strong sons, and as a rule earned success by cool judgment—all, as he was absolutely sure, at the clear call of God. In October, 1859—how and with whose help the stroke was prepared seems to be a question of some mystery—John Brown, gathering a little band of Abolitionists and negroes, invaded the slave States and seized the United States arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia. In the details, which do not matter, of this tiny campaign, John Brown seems, for the first time in his life, to have blundered badly. This was the only thing that lay upon his conscience towards the last. What manner of success he can have expected does not appear; most likely he had neither care nor definite expectation as to the result. The United States troops under Robert Lee, soon to be famous, of course overcame him quickly. One of his prisoners describes how he held out to the last; a dead son beside him; one hand on the pulse of a dying son, his rifle in the other. He was captured, desperately wounded. Southerners could not believe the fact that Brown had not contemplated some hideous uprising of slaves against their wives and children, but he only wished to conquer them with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon, quietly freeing slaves as he went. So naturally there was talk of lynching, but the Virginian gentlemen concerned would not have that. Governor Wise, of Virginia, had some talk with him and justified his own high character rather than Brown's by the estimate he gave of him in a speech at Richmond. Brown was hanged. "Stonewall" Jackson, a brother fanatic, if that is the word, felt the spectacle "awful," as he never felt slaughter in battle, and "put up a prayer that if possible Brown might be saved." "So perish all foes of the human race," said the officer commanding on the occasion, and the South generally felt the like.
A little before his death Brown was asked: "How do you justify your acts?" He said: "I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—I say it without wishing to be offensive—and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times." In a conversation still later, he is reported to have concluded: "I wish to say furthermore that you had better—all you people at the South—prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of now. But this question is still to be settled—this negro question I mean. The end of that is not yet." To a friend he wrote that he rejoiced like Paul because he knew like Paul that "if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ."
Lincoln, who regarded lawlessness and slavery as twin evils, could only say of John Brown's raid: "That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same." Seward, it must be recorded, spoke far more sympathetically of him than Lincoln; and far more justly, for there is a flaw somewhere in this example, as his chief biographer regards it, of "Mr. Lincoln's common-sense judgment." John Brown had at least left to every healthy-minded Northern boy a memory worth much in the coming years of war and, one hopes, ever after. He had well deserved to be the subject of a song which, whatever may be its technical merits as literature, does stir. Emerson took the same view of him as the song writer, and Victor Hugo suggested as an epitaph for him: "Pro Christo sicut Christus." A calmer poet, Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Friday, December 2, 1859, the day when Brown was hanged: "This will be a great day in our history, the date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one. Even now, as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves. This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will soon come."
Any one who is interested in Lincoln is almost forced to linger over the contrasting though slighter character who crossed the stage just before he suddenly took the principal part upon it. Men like John Brown may be fitly ranked with the equally rare men who, steering a very different course, have consistently acted out the principles of the Quakers, constraining no man whether by violence or by law, yet going into the thick of life prepared at all times to risk all. All such men are abnormal in the sense that most men literally could not put life through on any similar plan and would be wrong and foolish to try. The reason is that most men have a wider range of sympathy and of intellect than they. But the common sense of most of us revolts from any attitude of condemnation or condescension towards them; for they are more disinterested than most of us, more single-minded, and in their own field often more successful. With a very clear conscience we refuse to take example from these men whose very defects have operated in them as a special call; but undoubtedly most of us regard them with a warmth of sympathy which we are slow to accord to safer guides. We turn now from John Brown, who saw in slavery a great oppression, and was very angry, and went ahead slaying the nearest oppressor and liberating—for some days at least—the nearest slave, to a patient being, who, long ago in his youth, had boiled with anger against slavery, but whose whole soul now expressed itself in a policy of deadly moderation towards it: "Let us put back slavery where the fathers placed it, and there let it rest in peace." We are to study how he acted when in power. In almost every department of policy we shall see him watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending judgment, temporising, making trial of this expedient and of that, adopting in the end, quite unthanked, the measure of which most men will say, when it succeeds, "That is what we always said should be done." Above all, in that point of policy which most interests us, we shall witness the long postponement of the blow that killed negro slavery, the steady subordination of this particular issue to what will not at once appeal to us as a larger and a higher issue. All this provoked at the time in many excellent and clever men dissatisfaction and deep suspicion; they longed for a leader whose heart visibly glowed with a sacred passion; they attributed his patience, the one quality of greatness which after a while everybody might have discerned in him, not to a self-mastery which almost passed belief, but to a tepid disposition and a mediocre if not a low level of desire. We who read of him to-day shall not escape our moments of lively sympathy with these grumblers of the time; we shall wish that this man could ever plunge, that he could ever see red, ever commit some passionate injustice; we shall suspect him of being, in the phrase of a great philosopher, "a disgustingly well-regulated person," lacking that indefinable quality akin to the honest passions of us ordinary men, but deeper and stronger, which alone could compel and could reward any true reverence for his memory. These moments will recur but they cannot last. A thousand little things, apparent on the surface but deeply significant; almost every trivial anecdote of his boyhood, his prime, or his closing years; his few recorded confidences; his equally few speeches made under strong emotion; the lineaments of his face described by observers whom photography corroborated; all these absolutely forbid any conception of Abraham Lincoln as a worthy commonplace person fortunately fitted to the requirements of his office at the moment, or as merely a "good man" in the negative and disparaging sense to which that term is often wrested. It is really evident that there were no frigid perfections about him at all; indeed the weakness of some parts of his conduct is so unlike what seems to be required of a successful ruler that it is certain some almost unexampled quality of heart and mind went to the doing of what he did. There is no need to define that quality. The general wisdom of his statesmanship will perhaps appear greater and its not infrequent errors less the more fully the circumstances are appreciated. As to the man, perhaps the sense will grow upon us that this balanced and calculating person, with his finger on the pulse of the electorate while he cracked his uncensored jests with all comers, did of set purpose drink and refill and drink again as full and fiery a cup of sacrifice as ever was pressed to the lips of hero or of saint.
5. The Election of Lincoln.
Unlooked-for events were now raising Lincoln to the highest place which his ambition could contemplate. His own action in the months that followed his defeat by Douglas cannot have contributed much to his surprising elevation, yet it illustrates well his strength and his weakness, his real fitness, now and then startlingly revealed, for the highest position, and the superficial unfitness which long hid his capacity from many acute contemporaries.
In December, 1859, he made a number of speeches in Kansas and elsewhere in the West, and in February, 1860, he gave a memorable address in the Cooper Institute in New York before as consciously intellectual an audience as could be collected in that city, proceeding afterwards to speak in several cities of New England. His appearance at the Cooper Institute, in particular, was a critical venture, and he knew it. There was natural curiosity about this untutored man from the West. An exaggerated report of his wit prepared the way for probable disappointment. The surprise which awaited his hearers was of a different kind; they were prepared for a florid Western eloquence offensive to ears which were used to a less spontaneous turgidity; they heard instead a speech with no ornament at all, whose only beauty was that it was true and that the speaker felt it. The single flaw in the Cooper Institute speech has already been cited, the narrow view of Western respectability as to John Brown. For the rest, this speech, dry enough in a sense, is an incomparably masterly statement of the then political situation, reaching from its far back origin to the precise and definite question requiring decision at that moment. Mr. Choate, who as a young man was present, set down of late years his vivid recollection of that evening. "He appeared in every sense of the word like one of the plain people among whom he loved to be counted. At first sight there was nothing impressive or imposing about him; his clothes hung awkwardly on his giant frame; his face was of a dark pallor without the slightest tinge of colour; his seamed and rugged features bore the furrows of hardship and struggle; his deep-set eyes looked sad and anxious; his countenance in repose gave little evidence of the brilliant power which raised him from the lowest to the highest station among his countrymen; as he talked to me before the meeting he seemed ill at ease." We know, as a fact, that among his causes of apprehension, he was for the first time painfully conscious of those clothes. "When he spoke," proceeds Mr. Choate, "he was transformed; his eye kindled, his voice rang, his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly. For an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely simple. What Lowell called 'the grand simplicities of the Bible,' with which he was so familiar, were reflected in his discourse. . . . It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts, and found his way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity."
The newspapers of the day after this speech confirm these reverent reminiscences. On this, his first introduction to the cultivated world of the East, Lincoln's audience were at the moment and for the moment conscious of the power which he revealed. The Cooper Institute speech takes the plain principle that slavery is wrong, and draws the plain inference that it is idle to seek for common ground with men who say it is right. Strange but tragically frequent examples show how rare it is for statesmen in times of crisis to grasp the essential truth so simply. It is creditable to the leading men of New York that they recognised a speech which just at that time urged this plain thing in sufficiently plain language as a very great speech, and had an inkling of great and simple qualities in the man who made it. It is not specially discreditable that very soon and for a long while part of them, or of those who were influenced by their report, reverted to their former prejudices in regard to Lincoln. When they saw him thrust by election managers into the Presidency, very few indeed of what might be called the better sort believed, or could easily learn, that his great qualities were great enough to compensate easily for the many things he lacked. This specially grotesque specimen of the wild West was soon seen not to be of the charlatan type; as a natural alternative he was assumed to be something of a simpleton. Many intelligent men retained this view of him throughout the years of his trial, and, only when his triumph and tragic death set going a sort of Lincoln myth, began to recollect that "I came to love and trust him even before I knew him," or the like. A single speech like this at the Cooper Institute might be enough to show a later time that Lincoln was a man of great intellect, but it could really do little to prepare men in the East for what they next heard of him.
Already a movement was afoot among his friends in Illinois to secure his nomination for the Presidency at the Convention of the Republican party which was to be held in Chicago in May. Before that Convention could assemble it had become fairly certain that whoever might be chosen as the Republican candidate would be President of the United States, and signs were not wanting that he would be faced with grave peril to the Union. For the Democratic party, which had met in Convention at Charleston in April, had proceeded to split into two sections, Northern and Southern. This memorable Convention was a dignified assembly gathered in a serious mood in a city of some antiquity and social charm. From the first, however, a latent antipathy between the Northern and the Southern delegates made itself felt. The Northerners, predisposed to a certain deference towards the South and prepared to appreciate its graceful hospitality, experienced an uneasy sense that they were regarded as social inferiors. Worse trouble than this appeared when the Convention met for its first business, the framing of the party platform. Whether the position which Lincoln had forced Douglas to take up had precipitated this result or not, dissension between Northern and Southern Democrats on the subject of slavery had already manifested itself in Congress, and in the party Convention the division became irreparable. Douglas, it will be remembered, had started with the principle that slavery in the Territories formed a question for the people of each territory to decide; he had felt bound to accept the doctrine underlying the Dred Scott judgments, according to which slavery was by the Constitution lawful in all territories; pressed by Lincoln, he had tried to reconcile his original position with this doctrine by maintaining that while slavery was by the Constitution lawful in every Territory it was nevertheless lawful for a Territorial Legislature to make slave-owning practically impossible. In framing a declaration of the party principles as to slavery the Southern delegates in the Democratic Convention aimed at meeting this evasion. With considerable show of logic they asserted, in the party platform which they proposed, not merely the abstract rightfulness and lawfulness of slavery, but the duty of Congress itself to make any provision that might be necessary to protect it in the Territories. To this the Northern majority of the delegates could not consent; they carried an amendment declaring merely that they would abide by any decision of the Supreme Court as to slavery. Thereupon the delegates, not indeed of the whole South but of all the cotton-growing States except Georgia, withdrew from the Convention. The remaining delegates were, under the rules of the Convention, too few to select a candidate for the Presidency, and the Convention adjourned, to re-assemble at Baltimore in June. Eventually, after attempts at reunion and further dissensions, two separate Democratic Conventions at Baltimore, a Northern and a Southern, nominated, as their respective candidates, Stephen Douglas, the obvious choice with whom, if the Southerners had cared to temporise further, a united Democratic party could have swept the polls, and John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a gentleman not otherwise known than as the standard bearer on this great occasion of the undisguised and unmitigated claims of the slave owners.
Thus it was that the American Democratic party forfeited power for twenty-four years, divided between the consistent maintenance of a paradox and the adroit maintenance of inconsistency. Another party in this election demands a moment's notice. A Convention of delegates, claiming to represent the old Whigs, met also at Baltimore and declared merely that it stood for "the Constitution of the country, the union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws." They nominated for the Presidency John Bell of Tennessee, and for the Vice-Presidency Edward Everett. This latter gentleman was afterwards chosen as the orator of the day at the ceremony on the battlefield of Gettysburg when Lincoln's most famous speech was spoken. He was a travelled man and a scholar; he was Secretary of State for a little while under Fillmore, and dealt honestly and firmly with the then troublous question of Cuba. His orations deserve to be looked at, for they are favourable examples of the eloquence which American taste applauded, and as such they help to show how original Lincoln was in the simpler beauty of his own simpler diction. In justice to the Whigs, let it be noted that they declared for the maintenance of the Union, committing themselves with decision on the question of the morrow; but it was a singular platform that resolutely and totally ignored the only issue of the day. Few politicians can really afford to despise either this conspicuously foolish attempt to overcome a difficulty by shutting one's eyes to it, or the more plausible proposal of the Northern Democrats to continue temporising with a movement for slavery in which they were neither bold enough nor corrupted enough to join. The consequences, now known to us, of a determined stand against the advance of slavery were instinctively foreseen by these men, and they cannot be blamed for shrinking from them. Yet the historian now, knowing that those consequences exceeded in terror all that could have been foreseen, can only agree with the judgment expressed by Lincoln in one of his Kansas speeches: "We want and must have a national policy as to slavery which deals with it as being a wrong. Whoever would prevent slavery becoming national and perpetual yields all when he yields to a policy which treats it either as being right, or as being a matter of indifference." The Republican party had been founded upon just this opinion. Electoral victory was now being prepared for it, not because a majority was likely yet to take so resolute a view, but because its effective opponents were divided between those who had gone the length of calling slavery right and those who strove to treat it as indifferent. The fate of America may be said to have depended in the early months of 1860 on whether the nominee of the Republican party was a man who would maintain its principles with irresolution, or with obstinacy, or with firm moderation.
When it had first been suggested to Lincoln in the course of 1859 that he might be that nominee he said, "I do not think myself fit for the Presidency." This was probably his sincere opinion at the moment, though perhaps the moment was one of dejection. In any case his opinion soon changed, and though it is not clear whether he encouraged his friends to bring his name forward, we know in a general way that when they decided to do so he used every effort of his own to help them. We must accept without reserve Herndon's reiterated assertion that Lincoln was intensely ambitious; and, if ambition means the eager desire for great opportunities, the depreciation of it, which has long been a commonplace of literature, and which may be traced back to the Epicureans, is a piece of cant which ought to be withdrawn from currency, and ambition, commensurate with the powers which each man can discover in himself, should be frankly recognised as a part of Christian duty. In judging him to be the best man for the Presidency, Lincoln's Illinois friends and he himself formed a very sensible judgment, but they did so in flagrant contradiction to many superficial appearances. This candidate for the chief magistracy at a critical time of one of the great nations of the world had never administered any concern much larger than that post office that he once "carried around in his hat." Of the several other gentlemen whose names were before the party there was none who might not seem greatly to surpass him in experience of affairs. To one of them, Seward, the nomination seemed to belong almost of right. Chase and Seward both were known and dignified figures in that great assembly the Senate. Chase was of proved rectitude and courage, Seward of proved and very considerable ability. Chase had been Governor of Ohio, Seward of New York State; and the position of Governor in a State—a State it must be remembered is independent in almost the whole of what we call domestic politics—is strictly analogous to the position of President in the Union, and, especially in a great State, is the best training ground for the Presidency. But beyond this, Seward, between whom and Lincoln the real contest lay, had for some time filled a recognised though unofficial position as the leader of his party. He had failed, as has been seen in his dealings with Douglas, in stern insistence upon principle, but the failure was due rather to his sanguine and hopeful temper than to lack of courage. On the whole from the time when he first stood up against Webster in the discussions of 1850, when Lincoln was both silent and obscure, he had earned his position well. Hereafter, as Lincoln's subordinate, he was to do his country first-rate service, and to earn a pure fame as the most generously loyal subordinate to a chief whom he had thought himself fit to command. We happen to have ample means of estimating now all Lincoln's Republican competitors; we know that none of the rest were equal to Seward; and we know that Seward himself, if he had had his way, would have brought the common cause to ruin. Looking back now at the comparison which Lincoln, when he entered into the contest, must have drawn between himself and Seward—for of the rest we need not take account—we can see that to himself at least and some few in Illinois he had now proved his capacities, and that in Seward's public record, more especially in his attitude towards Douglas, he had the means of measuring Seward. In spite of the far greater experience of the latter he may have thought himself to be his superior in that indefinable thing—the sheer strength of a man. Not only may he have thought this; he must have known it. He had shown his grasp of the essential facts when he forced the Republican party to do battle with Douglas and the party of indifference; he showed the same now when, after long years of patience and self-discipline, he pushed himself into Seward's place as the Republican leader.
All the same, what little we know of the methods by which he now helped his own promotion suggests that the people who then and long after set him down as a second-rate person may have had a good deal to go upon. A kind friend has produced a letter which he wrote in March, 1860, to a Kansas gentleman who desired to be a delegate to the Republican Convention, and who offered, upon condition, to persuade his fellow delegates from Kansas to support Lincoln. Here is the letter: "As to your kind wishes for myself, allow me to say I cannot enter the ring on the money basis—first because in the main it is wrong; and secondly I have not and cannot get the money. I say in the main the use of money is wrong; but for certain objects in a political contest the use of some is both right and indispensable. With me, as with yourself, this long struggle has been one of great pecuniary loss. I now distinctly say this: If you shall be appointed a delegate to Chicago I will furnish one hundred dollars to bear the expenses of the trip." The Kansas gentleman failed to obtain the support of the Kansas delegates as a body for Lincoln. Lincoln none the less held to his promise of a hundred dollars if the man came to Chicago; and, having, we are assured, much confidence in him, took the earliest opportunity of appointing him to a lucrative office, besides consulting him as to other appointments in Kansas. This is all that we know of the affair, but our informant presents it as one of a number of instances in which Lincoln good-naturedly trusted a man too soon, and obstinately clung to his mistake. As to the appointment, the man had evidently begun by soliciting money in a way which would have marked him to most of us as a somewhat unsuitable candidate for any important post; and the payment of the hundred dollars plainly transgresses a code both of honour and of prudence which most politicians will recognise and which should not need definition. To say, as Lincoln probably said to himself, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in a moderate payment for expenses to a fellow worker in a public cause, whom you believe to have sacrificed much, is to ignore the point, indeed several points. Lincoln, hungry now for some success in his own unrewarded career, was tempted to a small manoeuvre by which he might pick up a little support; he was at the same time tempted, no less, to act generously (according to his means) towards a man who, he readily believed, had made sacrifices like his own. He was not the man to stand against this double temptation.
Petty lapses of this order, especially when the delinquent may be seen to hesitate and excuse himself, are more irritating than many larger and more brazen offences, for they give us the sense of not knowing where we are. When they are committed by a man of seemingly strong and high character, it is well to ask just what they signify. Some of the shrewdest observers of Lincoln, friendly and unfriendly, concur in their description of the weaknesses of which this incident may serve as the example, weaknesses partly belonging to his temperament, but partly such as a man risen from poverty, with little variety of experience and with no background of home training, stands small chance of escaping. For one thing his judgment of men and how to treat them was as bad in some ways as it was good in others. His own sure grasp of the largest and commonest things in life, and his sober and measured trust in human nature as a whole, gave him a rare knowledge of the mind of the people in the mass. So, too, when he had known a man long, or been with him or against him in important transactions, he sometimes developed great insight and sureness of touch; and, when the man was at bottom trustworthy, his robust confidence in him was sometimes of great public service. But he had no gift of rapid perception and no instinctive tact or prudence in regard to the very numerous and very various men with whom he had slight dealings on which he could bestow no thought. This is common with men who have risen from poverty; if they have not become hard and suspicious, they are generally obtuse to the minor indications by which shrewd men of education know the impostor, and they are perversely indulgent to little meannesses in their fellows which they are incapable of committing themselves. In Lincoln this was aggravated by an immense good-nature—as he confessed, he could hardly say "no";—it was an obstinate good-nature, which found a naughty pleasure in refusing to be corrected; and if it should happen that the object of his weak benevolence had given him personal cause of offence, the good-nature became more incorrigible than ever. Moreover, Lincoln's strength was a slow strength, shown most in matters in which elementary principles of right or the concentration of intense thought guided him. Where minor and more subtle principles of conduct should have come in, on questions which had not come within the range of his reflection so far and to which, amidst his heavy duties, he could not spare much cogitation, he would not always show acute perception, and, which is far worse, he would often show weakness of will. The present instance may be ever so trifling, yet it does relate to the indistinct and dangerous borderland of political corruption. It need arouse no very serious suspicions. Mr. Herndon, whose pertinacious researches unearthed that Kansas gentleman's correspondence, and who is keenly censorious of Lincoln's fault, in the upshot trusts and reveres Lincoln. And the massive testimony of his keenest critics to his honesty quite decides the matter. But Lincoln had lived in a simple Western town, not in one of the already polluted great cities; he was a poor man himself and took the fact that wealth was used against him as a part of the inevitable drawbacks of his lot; and it is certain that he did not clearly take account of the whole business of corruption and jobbery as a hideous and growing peril to America. It is certain too that he lacked the delicate perception of propriety in such matters, or the strict resolution in adhering to it on small occasions, which might have been possessed by a far less honest man. The severest criticisms which Lincoln afterwards incurred were directed to the appointments which he made; we shall see hereafter that he had very solid reasons for his general conduct in such matters; but it cannot be said with conviction that he had that horror of appointment on other grounds than merit which enlightens, though it does not always govern, more educated statesmen. His administration would have been more successful, and the legacy he left to American public life more bountiful, if his traditions, or the length of his day's work, had allowed him to be more careful in these things. As it is he was not commended to the people of America and must not be commended to us by the absence of defects as a ruler or as a man, but by the qualities to which his defects belonged. An acute literary man wrote of Lincoln, when he had been three years in office, these remarkable words: "You can't help feeling an interest in him, a sympathy and a kind of pity; feeling, too, that he has some qualities of great value, yet fearing that his weak points may wreck him or may wreck something. His life seems a series of wise, sound conclusions, slowly reached, oddly worked out, on great questions with constant failures in administration of detail and dealings with individuals." It was evidently a clever man who wrote this; he would have been a wise man if he had known that the praise he was bestowing on Lincoln was immeasurably greater than the blame.
So the natural prejudice of those who welcomed Lincoln as a prophet in the Cooper Institute but found his candidature for the Presidency ridiculous, was not wholly without justification. His partisans, however—also not unjustly—used his humble origin for all it was worth. The Republicans of Illinois were assembled at Decatur in preparation for the Chicago Convention, when, amid tumultuous cheers, there marched in old John Hanks and another pioneer bearing on their shoulders two long fence rails labelled: "Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom in the year 1830." "Gentlemen," said Lincoln, in response to loud calls, "I suppose you want to know something about those things. Well, the truth is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom. I don't know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don't think they are a credit to the makers. But I do know this: I made rails then, and I think I could make better ones than these now." It is unnecessary to tell of the part those rails were to play in the coming campaign. It is a contemptible trait in books like that able novel "Democracy," that they treat the sentiment which attached to the "Rail-splitter" as anything but honourable.
The Republican Convention met at Chicago in circumstances of far less dignity than the Democratic Convention at Charleston. Processions and brass bands, rough fellows collected by Lincoln's managers, rowdies imported from New York by Seward's, filled the streets with noise; and the saloon keepers did good business. Yet the actual Convention consisted of grave men in an earnest mood. Besides Seward and Chase and Lincoln, Messrs. Cameron of Pennsylvania and Bates of Missouri, of whom we shall hear later, were proposed for the Presidency. So also were Messrs. Dayton and Collamer, politicians of some repute; and McLean, of the Supreme Court, had some supporters. The prevalent expectation in the States was that Seward would easily secure the nomination, but it very soon appeared in the Convention that his opponents were too strong for that. Several ballots took place; there were the usual conferences and bargainings, which probably affected the result but little; Lincoln's managers, especially Judge David Davis, afterwards of the Supreme Court, were shrewd people; Lincoln had written to them expressly that they could make no bargain binding on him, but when Cameron was clearly out of the running they did promise Cameron's supporters a place in Lincoln's Cabinet, and a similar promise was made for one Caleb Smith. The delegates from Pennsylvania went on to Lincoln; then those of Ohio; and before long his victory was assured. A Committee of the Convention, some of them sick at heart, was sent to bear the invitation to Lincoln. He received them in his little house with a simple dignity which one of them has recorded; and as they came away one said, "Well, we might have chosen a handsomer article, but I doubt whether a better."
On the whole, if we can put aside the illusion which besets us, who read the preceding history if at all in the light of Lincoln's speeches, and to whom his competitors are mere names, this was the most surprising nomination ever made in America. Other Presidential candidates have been born in poverty, but none ever wore the scars of poverty so plainly; others have been intrinsically more obscure, but these have usually been chosen as bearing the hall-mark of eminent prosperity or gentility. Lincoln had indeed at this time displayed brilliant ability in the debates with Douglas, and he had really shown a statesman's grasp of the situation more than any other Republican leader. The friends in Illinois who put him forward—men like David Davis, who was a man of distinction himself—did so from a true appreciation of his powers. But this does not seem to have been the case with the bulk of the delegates from other States. The explanation given us of their action is curious. The choice was not the result of merit; on the other hand, it was not the work of the ordinary wicked wire-puller, for what may be called the machine was working for Seward. The choice was made by plain representative Americans who set to themselves this question: "With what candidate can we beat Douglas?" and who found the answer in the prevalence of a popular impression, concerning Lincoln and Seward, which was in fact wholly mistaken. There was, it happens, earnest opposition to Seward among some Eastern Republicans on the good ground that he was a clean man but with doubtful associates. This opposition could not by itself have defeated him. What did defeat him was his reputation at the moment as a very advanced Republican who would scare away the support of the weaker brethren. He was, for instance, the author of the alarming phrase about "irrepressible conflict," and he had spoken once, in a phrase that was misinterpreted, about "a higher law than the Constitution." Lincoln had in action taken a far stronger line than Seward; he was also the author of the phrase about the house divided against itself; but then, besides the fact that Lincoln was well regarded just where Douglas was most popular, Lincoln was a less noted man than Seward and his stronger words occasioned less wide alarm. So, to please those who liked compromise, the Convention rejected a man who would certainly have compromised, and chose one who would give all that moderation demanded and die before he yielded one further inch. Many Americans have been disposed to trace in the raising up of Lincoln the hand of a Providence protecting their country in its worst need. It would be affectation to set their idea altogether aside; it is, at any rate, a memorable incident in the history of a democracy, permeated with excellent intentions but often hopelessly subject to inferior influences, that at this critical moment the fit man was chosen on the very ground of his supposed unfitness.
The result of the contest between the four Presidential candidates was rendered almost a foregone conclusion by the decision of the Democrats. Lincoln in deference to the usual and seemly procedure took no part in the campaign, nor do his doings in the next months concern us. Seward, to his great honour, after privately expressing his bitter chagrin at the bestowal of what was his due upon "a little Illinois attorney," threw himself whole-heartedly into the contest, and went about making admirable speeches. On the night of November 6, Lincoln sat alone with the operator in the telegraph box at Springfield, receiving as they came in the results of the elections of Presidential electors in the various States. Long before the returns were complete his knowledge of such matters made him sure of his return, and before he left that box he had solved in principle, as he afterwards declared, the first and by no means least important problem of his Presidency, the choice of a Cabinet.
The victory was in one aspect far from complete. If we look not at the votes in the Electoral College with which the formal choice of President lay, but at the popular votes by which the electors were returned, we shall see that the new President was elected by a minority of the American people. He had a large majority over Douglas, but if Douglas had received the votes which were given for the Southern Democrat, Breckinridge, he would have had a considerable majority over Lincoln, though the odd machinery of the Electoral College would still have kept him out of the Presidency. In another aspect it was a fatally significant victory. Lincoln's votes were drawn only from the Northern States; he carried almost all the free States and he carried no others. For the first time in American history, the united North had used its superior numbers to outvote the South. This would in any case have caused great vexation, and the personality of the man chosen by the North aggravated it. The election of Lincoln was greeted throughout the South with a howl of derision.
CHAPTER VI
SECESSION
1. The Case of the South against the Union.
The Republicans of the North had given their votes upon a very clear issue, but probably few of them had fully realised how grave a result would follow. Within a few days of the election of Lincoln the first step in the movement of Secession had been taken, and before the new President entered upon his duties it was plain that either the dissatisfied States must be allowed to leave the Union or the Union must be maintained by war.
Englishmen at that time and since have found a difficulty in grasping the precise cause of the war that followed. Of those who were inclined to sympathise with the North, some regarded the war as being simply about slavery, and, while unhesitatingly opposed to slavery, wondered whether it was right to make war upon it; others, regarding it as a war for the Union and not against slavery at all, wondered whether it was right to make war for a Union that could not be peaceably maintained. Now it is seldom possible to state the cause of a war quite candidly in a single sentence, because as a rule there are on each side people who concur in the final rupture for somewhat different reasons. But, in this case, forecasting a conclusion which must be examined in some detail, we can state the cause of war in a very few sentences. If we ask first what the South fought for, the answer is: the leaders of the South and the great mass of the Southern people had a single supreme and all-embracing object in view, namely, to ensure the permanence and, if need be, the extension of the slave system; they carried with them, however, a certain number of Southerners who were opposed or at least averse to slavery, but who thought that the right of their States to leave the Union or remain in it as they chose must be maintained. If we ask what the North fought for, the answer is: A majority, by no means overwhelming, of the Northern people refused to purchase the adhesion of the South by conniving at any further extension of slavery, and an overwhelming majority refused to let the South dissolve the Union for slavery or for any other cause.
The issue about slavery, then, became merged in another issue, concerning the Union, which had so far remained in the background.
The first thing that must be grasped about it is the total difference of view which now existed between North and South in regard to the very nature of their connection. The divergence had taken place so completely and in the main so quietly that each side now realised with surprise and indignation that the other held an opposite opinion. In the North the Union was regarded as constituting a permanent and unquestionable national unity from which it was flat rebellion for a State or any other combination of persons to secede. In the South the Union appeared merely as a peculiarly venerable treaty of alliance, of which the dissolution would be very painful, but which left each State a sovereign body with an indefeasible right to secede if in the last resort it judged that the painful necessity had come. In a few border States there was division and doubt on this subject, a fact which must have helped to hide from each side the true strength of opinion on the other. But, setting aside these border States, there were in the North some who doubted whether it was expedient to fight for the Union, but none of any consequence who doubted that it was constitutionally correct; and there were in the South men who insisted that no occasion to secede had arisen, but these very men, when outvoted in their States, maintained most passionately the absolute right of secession.
The two sides contended for two contrary doctrines of constitutional law. It is natural when parties are disputing over a question of political wisdom and of moral right that each should claim for its contention if possible the sanction of acknowledged legal principle. So it was with the parties to the English Civil War, and the tendency to regard matters from a legal point of view is to this day deeply engrained in the mental habits of America. But North and South were really divided by something other than legal opinion, a difference in the objects to which their feelings of loyalty and patriotism were directed. This difference found apt expression in the Cabinet of President Buchanan, who of course remained in office between the election of Lincoln in November and his inauguration in March. General Cass of Michigan had formerly stood for the Presidency with the support of the South, and he held Cabinet office now as a sympathiser with the South upon slavery, but he was a Northerner. "I see how it is," he said to two of his colleagues; "you are a Virginian, and you are a South Carolinian; I am not a Michigander, I am an American."
In a former chapter the creation of the Union and the beginnings of a common national life have been traced in outline. Obstacles to the Union had existed both in the North and in the South, and, after it had been carried, the tendency to threaten disruption upon some slight conflict of interest had shown itself in each. But a proud sense of single nationality had soon become prevalent in both, and in the North nothing whatever had happened to set back this growth, for the idea which Lowell had once attributed to his Hosea Biglow of abjuring Union with slave owners was a negligible force. Undivided allegiance to the Union was the natural sentiment of citizens of Ohio or Wisconsin, States created by the authority of the Union out of the common dominion of the Union. It had become, if anything, more deeply engrained in the original States of the North, for their predominant occupation in commerce would tend in this particular to give them larger views. The pride of a Boston man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was of the same order as his pride in the city of Boston; both were largely pride in the part which Boston and Massachusetts had taken in making the United States of America. Such a man knew well that South Carolina had once threatened secession, but, for that matter, the so-called Federalists of New England had once threatened it. The argument of Webster in the case of South Carolina was a classic, and was taken as conclusive on the question of legal right. The terser and more resonant declaration of President Jackson, a Southerner, and the response to it which thrilled all States, South or North, outside South Carolina, had set the seal to Webster's doctrines. There had been loud and ominous talk of secession lately; it was certainly not mere bluster; Northerners in the main were cautious politicians and had been tempted to go far to conciliate it. But if the claim of Southern States were put in practice, the whole North would now regard it not as a respectable claim, but as an outrage.
It is important to notice that the disposition to take this view did not depend upon advanced opinions against slavery. Some of the most violent opponents of slavery would care relatively little about the Constitution or the Union; they would at first hesitate as to whether a peaceful separation between States which felt so differently on a moral question like slavery was not a more Christian solution of their difference than a fratricidal war. On the other hand, men who cared little about slavery, and would gladly have sacrificed any convictions they had upon that matter for the sake of the Union, were at first none the less vehement in their anger at an attack upon the Union. There is, moreover, a more subtle but still important point to be observed in this connection. Democrats in the North inclined as a party to stringent and perhaps pedantically legal views of State rights as against the rights of the Union; but this by no means necessarily meant that they sympathised more than Republicans with the claim to dissolve the Union. They laid emphasis on State rights merely because they believed that these would be a bulwark against any sort of government tyranny, and that the large power which was reserved to the local or provincial authorities of the States made the government of the nation as a whole more truly expressive of the will of the whole people. They now found themselves entangled (as we shall see) in curious doubts as to what the Federal Government might do to maintain the Union, but they had not the faintest doubt that the Union was meant to be maintained. The point which is now being emphasised must not be misapprehended; differences of sentiment in regard to slavery, in regard to State rights, in regard to the authority of Government, did, as the war went on and the price was paid, gravely embarrass the North; but it was a solid and unhesitating North which said that the South had no right to secede.
Up to a certain point the sense of patriotic pride in the Union had grown also in the South. It was fostered at first by the predominant part which the South played in the political life of the country. But for a generation past the sense of a separate interest of the South had been growing still more vigorously. The political predominance of the South had continued, but under a standing menace of downfall as the North grew more populous and the patriotism which it at first encouraged had become perverted into an arrogantly unconscious feeling that the Union was an excellent thing on condition that it was subservient to the South. The common interest of the Southern States was slavery; and, when the Northerners had become a majority which might one day dominate the Federal Government, this common interest of the slave States found a weapon at hand in the doctrine of the inherent sovereignty of each individual State. This doctrine of State sovereignty had come to be held as universally in the South as the strict Unionist doctrine in the North, and held with as quiet and unshakable a confidence that it could not be questioned. It does not seem at all strange that the State, as against the Union, should have remained the supreme object of loyalty in old communities like those of South Carolina and Virginia, abounding as they did in conservative influences which were lacking in the North. But this provincial loyalty was not in the same sense a natural growth in States like Alabama or Mississippi. These, no less than Indiana and Illinois, were the creatures of the Federal Congress, set up within the memory of living men, with arbitrary boundaries that cut across any old lines of division. There was, in fact, no spontaneous feeling of allegiance attaching to these political units, and the doctrine of their sovereignty had no use except as a screen for the interest in slavery which the Southern States had in common. But Calhoun, in a manner characteristic of his peculiar and dangerous type of intellect, had early seen in a view of State sovereignty, which would otherwise have been obsolete, the most serviceable weapon for the joint interests of the Southern States. In a society where intellectual life was restricted, his ascendency had been great, though his disciples had, reasonably enough, thrown aside the qualifications which his subtle mind had attached to the right of secession. Thus in the Southern States generally, even among men most strongly opposed to the actual proposal to secede, the real or alleged constitutional right of a State to secede if it chose now passed unquestioned and was even regarded as a precious liberty.
It is impossible to avoid asking whether on this question of constitutional law the Northern opinion or the Southern opinion was correct. (The question was indeed an important question in determining the proper course of procedure for a President when confronted with secession, but it must be protested that the moral right and political wisdom of neither party in the war depended mainly, if at all, upon this legal point. It was a question of the construction which a court of law should put upon a document which was not drawn up with any view to determining this point.) If we go behind the Constitution, which was then and is now in force, to the original document of which it took the place, we shall find it entitled "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union," but we shall not find any such provisions as men desirous of creating a stable and permanent federal government might have been expected to frame. If we read the actual Constitution we shall find no word distinctly implying that a State could or could not secede. As to the real intention of its chief authors, there can be no doubt that they hoped and trusted the Union would prove indissoluble, and equally little doubt that they did not wish to obtrude upon those whom they asked to enter into it the thought that this step would be irrevocable. For the view taken in the South there is one really powerful argument, on which Jefferson Davis insisted passionately in the argumentative memoirs with which he solaced himself in old age. It is that in several of the States, when the Constitution was accepted, public declarations were made to the citizens of those States by their own representatives that a State might withdraw from the Union. But this is far from conclusive. No man gets rid of the obligation of a bond by telling a witness that he does not mean to be bound; the question is not what he means, but what the party with whom he deals must naturally take him to mean. Now the Constitution of the United States upon the face of it purports to create a government able to take its place among the other governments of the world, able if it declares war to wield the whole force of its country in that war, and able if it makes peace to impose that peace upon all its subjects. This seems to imply that the authority of that government over part of the country should be legally indefeasible. It would have been ridiculous if, during a war with Great Britain, States on the Canadian border should have had the legal right to secede, and set up a neutral government with a view to subsequent reunion with Great Britain. The sound legal view of this matter would seem to be: that the doctrine of secession is so repugnant to the primary intention with which the national instrument of government was framed that it could only have been supported by an express reservation of the right to secede in the Constitution itself.
The Duke of Argyll, one of the few British statesmen of the time who followed this struggle with intelligent interest, briefly summed up the question thus: "I know of no government in the world that could possibly have admitted the right of secession from its own allegiance." Oddly enough, President Buchanan, in his Message to Congress on December 4, put the same point not less forcibly.