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Title: Abraham Lincoln

Author: Lord Charnwood

Release Date: May 11, 2006 [EBook #18379]

Language: English

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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 naive 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 Fremont, 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 Fremont 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 Fremont 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 Fremont 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.

But to say--as in a legal sense we may--that the Southern States rebelled
is not necessarily to say that they were wrong.  The deliberate endeavour
of a people to separate themselves from the political sovereignty under
which they live and set up a new political community, in which their
national life shall develop itself more fully or more securely, must
always command a certain respect.  Whether it is entitled further to the
full sympathy and to the support or at least acquiescence of others is a
question which in particular cases involves considerations such as cannot
be foreseen in any abstract discussion of political theory.  But,
speaking very generally, it is a question in the main of the worth which
we attribute on the one hand to the common life to which it is sought to
give freer scope, and on the other hand to the common life which may
thereby be weakened or broken up.  It sometimes seems to be held that
when a decided majority of the people whose voices can be heard, in a
more or less defined area, elect to live for the future under a
particular government, all enlightened men elsewhere would wish them to
have their way.  If any such principle could be accepted without
qualification, few movements for independence would ever have been more
completely justified than the secession of the Southern States.  If we
set aside the highland region of which mention has already been made, in
the six cotton-growing States which first seceded, and in several of
those which followed as soon as it was clear that secession would be
resisted, the preponderance of opinion in favour of the movement was
overwhelming.  This was not only so among the educated and governing
portions of society, which were interested in slavery.  While the negroes
themselves were unorganised and dumb and made no stir for freedom, the
poorer class of white people, to whom the institution of slavery was in
reality oppressive, were quite unconscious of this; the enslavement of
the negro appeared to them a tribute to their own dignity, and their
indiscriminating spirit of independence responded enthusiastically to the
appeal that they should assert themselves against the real or fancied
pretensions of the North.  So large a statement would require some
qualification if we were here concerned with the life of a Southern
leader; and there was of course a brief space, to be dealt with in this
chapter, in which the question of secession hung in the balance, and it
is true in this, as in every case, that the men who gave the initial push
were few.  But, broadly speaking, it is certain that the movement for
secession was begun with at least as general an enthusiasm and maintained
with at least as loyal a devotion as any national movement with which it
can be compared.  And yet to-day, just fifty-one years after the
consummation of its failure, it may be doubted whether one soul among the
people concerned regrets that it failed.

English people from that time to this have found the statement
incredible; but the fact is that this imposing movement, in which rich
and poor, gentle and simple, astute men of state and pious clergymen,
went hand in hand to the verge of ruin and beyond, was undertaken simply
and solely in behalf of slavery.  Northern writers of the time found it
so surprising that they took refuge in the theory of conspiracy, alleging
that a handful of schemers succeeded, by the help of fictitious popular
clamour and intimidation of their opponents, in launching the South upon
a course to which the real mind of the people was averse.  Later and
calmer historical survey of the facts has completely dispelled this view;
and the English suspicion, that there must have been some cause beyond
and above slavery for desiring independence, never had any facts to
support it.  Since 1830 no exponent of Southern views had ever hinted at
secession on any other ground than slavery; every Southern leader
declared with undoubted truth that on every other ground he prized the
Union; outside South Carolina every Southern leader made an earnest
attempt before he surrendered the Union cause to secure the guarantees he
thought sufficient for slavery within the Union.  The Southern statesman
(for the soldiers were not statesmen) whose character most attracts
sympathy now was Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Southern
Confederacy, and though he was the man who persisted longest in the view
that slavery could be adequately secured without secession, he was none
the less entitled to speak for the South in his remarkable words on the
Constitution adopted by the Southern Confederacy: "The new Constitution
has put at rest for ever all the agitating questions relating to our
peculiar institution, African slavery.  This was the immediate cause of
the late rupture and present revolution.  The prevailing ideas
entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of
the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was wrong
in principle socially, morally, and politically.  Our new government is
founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its
corner stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not the equal
of the white man; that slavery--subordination to the white man--is his
natural and normal condition.  This, our new government, is the first in
the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical,
and moral truth.  The great objects of humanity are best attained when
there is conformity to the Creator's laws and decrees."  Equally explicit
and void of shame was the Convention of the State of Mississippi.  "Our
position," they declared, "is thoroughly identified with slavery."

It is common to reproach the Southern leaders with reckless folly.  They
tried to destroy the Union, which they really valued, for the sake of
slavery, which they valued more; they in fact destroyed slavery; and they
did this, it is said, in alarm at an imaginary danger.  This is not a
true ground of reproach to them.  It is true that the danger to slavery
from the election of Lincoln was not immediately pressing.  He neither
would have done nor could have done more than to prevent during his four
years of office any new acquisition of territory in the slave-holding
interest, and to impose his veto on any Bill extending slavery within the
existing territory of the Union.  His successor after four years might or
might not have been like-minded.  He did not seem to stand for any
overwhelming force in American politics; there was a majority opposed to
him in both Houses of Congress; a great majority of the Supreme Court,
which might have an important part to play, held views of the
Constitution opposed to his; he had been elected by a minority only of
the whole American people.  Why could not the Southern States have sat
still, secure that no great harm would happen to their institution for
the present, and hoping that their former ascendency would come back to
them with the changing fortunes of party strife?  This is an argument
which might be expected to have weighed with Southern statesmen if each
of them had been anxious merely to keep up the value of his own slave
property for his own lifetime, but this was far from being their case.
It is hard for us to put ourselves at the point of view of men who could
sincerely speak of their property in negroes as theirs by the "decree of
the Creator"; but it is certain that within the last two generations
trouble of mind as to the rightfulness of slavery had died out in a large
part of the South; the typical Southern leader valued the peculiar form
of society under which he lived and wished to hand it on intact to his
children's children.  If their preposterous principle be granted, the
most extreme among them deserve the credit of statesmanlike insight for
having seen, the moment that Lincoln was elected, that they must strike
for their institution now if they wished it to endure.  The Convention of
South Carolina justly observed that the majority in the North had voted
that slavery was sinful; they had done little more than express this
abstract opinion, but they had done all that.  Lincoln's administration
might have done apparently little, and after it the pendulum would
probably have swung back.  But the much-talked-of swing of the pendulum
is the most delusive of political phenomena; America was never going to
return to where it was before this first explicit national assertion of
the wrongfulness of slavery had been made.  It would have been hard to
forecast how the end would come, or how soon; but the end was certain if
the Southern States had elected to remain the countrymen of a people who
were coming to regard their fundamental institution with growing
reprobation.  Lincoln had said, "This government cannot endure
permanently, half slave and half free."  Lincoln was right, and so from
their own point of view, that of men not brave or wise enough to take in
hand a difficult social reform, were the leaders who declared immediately
for secession.

In no other contest of history are those elements in human affairs on
which tragic dramatists are prone to dwell so clearly marked as in the
American Civil War.  No unsophisticated person now, except in ignorance
as to the cause of the war, can hesitate as to which side enlists his
sympathy, or can regard the victory of the North otherwise than as the
costly and imperfect triumph of the right.  But the wrong
side--emphatically wrong--is not lacking in dignity or human worth; the
long-drawn agony of the struggle is not purely horrible to contemplate;
there is nothing that in this case makes us reluctant to acknowledge the
merits of the men who took arms in the evil cause.  The experience as to
the relations between superior and inferior races, which is now at the
command of every intelligent Englishman, forbids us to think that the
inferiority of the negro justified slavery, but it also forbids us to
fancy that men to whom the relation of owner to slave had become natural
must themselves have been altogether degraded.  The men upon the Southern
side who can claim any special admiration were simple soldiers who had no
share in causing the war; among the political leaders whom they served,
there was none who stands out now as a very interesting personality, and
their chosen chief is an unattractive figure; but we are not to think of
these authors of the war as a gang of hardened, unscrupulous, corrupted
men.  As a class they were reputable, public-spirited, and religious men;
they served their cause with devotion and were not wholly to blame that
they chose it so ill.  The responsibility for the actual secession does
not rest in an especial degree on any individual leader.  Secession began
rather with the spontaneous movement of the whole community of South
Carolina, and in the States which followed leading politicians expressed
rather than inspired the general will.  The guilt which any of us can
venture to attribute for this action of a whole deluded society must rest
on men like Calhoun, who in a previous generation, while opinion in the
South was still to some extent unformed, stifled all thought of reform
and gave the semblance of moral and intellectual justification to a
system only susceptible of a historical excuse.

The South was neither base nor senseless, but it was wrong.  To some
minds it may not seem to follow that it was well to resist it by war, and
indeed at the time, as often happens, people took up arms with greater
searchings of heart upon the right side than upon the wrong.  If the
slave States had been suffered to depart in peace they would have set up
a new and peculiar political society, more truly held together than the
original Union by a single avowed principle; a nation dedicated to the
inequality of men.  It is not really possible to think of the free
national life which they could thus have initiated as a thing to be
respected and preserved.  Nor is it true that their choice for themselves
of this dingy freedom was no concern of their neighbours.  We have seen
how the slave interest hankered for enlarged dominion; and it is certain
that the Southern Confederacy, once firmly established, would have been
an aggressive and disturbing power upon the continent of America.  The
questions of territorial and other rights between it and the old Union
might have been capable of satisfactory settlement for the moment, or
they might have proved as insoluble as Lincoln thought they were.  But,
at the best, if the States which adhered to the old Union had admitted
the claim of the first seceding States to go, they could only have
retained for themselves an insecure existence as a nation, threatened at
each fresh conflict of interest or sentiment with a further disruption
which could not upon any principle have been resisted.  The preceding
chapters have dwelt with iteration upon the sentiments which had operated
to make Americans a people, and on the form and the degree in which those
sentiments animated the mind of Lincoln.  Only so perhaps can we fully
appreciate for what the people of the North fought.  It is inaccurate,
though not gravely misleading, to say that they fought against slavery.
It would be wholly false to say that they fought for mere dominion.  They
fought to preserve and complete a political unity nobly conceived by
those who had done most to create it, and capable, as the sequel showed,
of a permanent and a healthy continuance.

And it must never be forgotten, if we wish to enter into the spirit which
sustained the North in its struggle, that loyalty for Union had a larger
aspect than that of mere allegiance to a particular authority.  Vividly
present to the mind of some few, vaguely but honestly present to the mind
of a great multitude, was the sense that even had slavery not entered
into the question a larger cause than that of their recent Union was
bound up with the issues of the war.  The Government of the United States
had been the first and most famous attempt in a great modern country to
secure government by the will of the mass of the people.  If in this
crucial instance such a Government were seen to be intolerably weak, if
it was found to be at the mercy of the first powerful minority which
seized a worked-up occasion to rebel, what they had learnt to think the
most hopeful agency for the uplifting of man everywhere would for ages to
come have proved a failure.  This feeling could not be stronger in any
American than it was in Lincoln himself.  "It has long been a question,"
he said, "whether any Government which is not too strong for the
liberties of the people can be strong enough to maintain itself."  There
is one marked feature of his patriotism, which could be illustrated by
abundance of phrases from his speeches and letters, and which the people
of several countries of Europe can appreciate to-day.  His affection for
his own country and its institutions is curiously dependent upon a wider
cause of human good, and is not a whit the less intense for that.  There
is perhaps no better expression of this widespread feeling in the North
than the unprepared speech which he delivered on his way to become
President, in the Hall of Independence at Philadelphia, in which the
Declaration of Independence had been signed.  "I have never," he said,
"had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments
embodied in the Declaration of Independence.  I have often pondered over
the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here and framed
and adopted that Declaration of Independence.  I have pondered over the
toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who
achieved that independence.  I have often inquired of myself what great
principle or idea it was that kept the Confederacy so long together.  It
was not the mere matter of separation of the colonies from the
motherland, it was the sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which
gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope to the
world, for all future time.  It was that which gave promise that in due
time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men."


2. _The Progress of Secession_.

So much for the broad causes without which there could have been no Civil
War in America.  We have now to sketch the process by which the fuel was
kindled.  It will be remembered that the President elected in November
does not enter upon his office for nearly four months.  For that time,
therefore, the conduct of government lay in the hands of President
Buchanan, who, for all his past subserviency to Southern interests,
believed and said that secession was absolutely unlawful.  Several
members of his Cabinet were Southerners who favoured secession; but the
only considerable man among them, Cobb of Georgia, soon declared that his
loyalty to his own State was not compatible with his office and resigned;
and, though others, including the Secretary for War, hung on to their
position, it does not appear that they influenced Buchanan much, or that
their somewhat dubious conduct while they remained was of great
importance.  Black, the Attorney-General, and Cass, the Secretary of
State, who, however, resigned when his advice was disregarded, were not
only loyal to the Union, but anxious that the Government should do
everything that seemed necessary in its defence.  Thus this
administration, hitherto Southern in its sympathies, must be regarded for
its remaining months as standing for the Union, so far as it stood for
anything.  Lincoln meanwhile had little that he could do but to watch
events and prepare.  There was, nevertheless, a point in the negotiations
which took place between parties at which he took on himself a tremendous
responsibility and at which his action was probably decisive of all that
followed.

The Presidential election took place on November 6, 1860.  On November 10
the Legislature of South Carolina, which had remained in session for this
purpose, convened a specially elected Convention of the State to decide
upon the question of secession.  Slave owners and poor whites, young and
old, street rabble, persons of fashion, politicians and clergy, the whole
people of this peculiar State, distinguished in some marked respects even
from its nearest neighbours, received the action of the Legislature with
enthusiastic but grave approval.  It was not till December 20 that the
Convention could pass its formal "Ordinance of Secession," but there was
never for a moment any doubt as to what it would do.  The question was
what other States would follow the example of South Carolina.  There
ensued in all the Southern States earnest discussion as to whether to
secede or not, and in the North, on which the action of South Carolina,
however easily it might have been foretold, came as a shock, great
bewilderment as to what was to be done.  As has been said, there was in
the South generally no disposition to give up Southern claims, no doubt
as to the right of secession, and no fundamental and overriding loyalty
to the Union, but there was a considerable reluctance to give up the
Union and much doubt as to whether secession was really wise; there was
in the North among those who then made themselves heard no doubt whatever
as to the loyalty due to the Union, but there was, apart from previous
differences about slavery, every possible variety and fluctuation of
opinion as to the right way of dealing with States which should secede or
rebel.  In certain border States, few in number but likely to play an
important part in civil war, Northern and Southern elements were mingled.
Amid loud and distracted discussion, public and private, leaders of the
several parties and of the two sections of the country conducted earnest
negotiations in the hope of finding a peaceable settlement, and when
Congress met, early in December, their debates took a formal shape in
committees appointed by the Senate and by the House.

Meanwhile the President was called upon to deal with the problem
presented for the Executive Government of the Union by the action of
South Carolina.  It may be observed that if he had given his mind to the
military measures required to meet the possible future, the North, which
in the end had his entire sympathy, would have begun the war with that
advantage in preparation which, as it was, was gained by the South.  In
this respect he did nothing.  But, apart from this, if he had taken up a
clear and comprehensible attitude towards South Carolina and had given a
lead to Unionist sympathy, he would have consolidated public opinion in
the North, and he would have greatly strengthened those in the South who
remained averse to secession.  There would have been a considerable
further secession, but in all likelihood it would not have become so
formidable as it did.  As it was, the movement for secession proceeded
with all the proud confidence that can be felt in a right which is not
challenged, and the people of the South were not aware, though shrewd
leaders like Jefferson Davis knew it well, of the risk they would
encounter till they had committed themselves to defying it.

The problem before Buchanan was the same which, aggravated by his failure
to deal with it, confronted Lincoln when he came into office, and it must
be clearly understood.  The secession of South Carolina was not a
movement which could at once be quelled by prompt measures of repression.
Even if sufficient military force and apt forms of law had existed for
taking such measures they would have united the South in support of South
Carolina, and alienated the North, which was anxious for conciliation.
Yet it was possible for the Government of the Union, while patiently
abstaining from violent or provocative action, to make plain that in the
last resort it would maintain its rights in South Carolina with its full
strength.  The main dealings of the Union authorities with the people of
a State came under a very few heads.  There were local Federal Courts to
try certain limited classes of issues; jurors, of course, could not be
compelled to serve in these nor parties to appear.  There was the postal
service; the people of South Carolina did not at present interfere with
this source of convenience to themselves and of revenue to the Union.
There were customs duties to be collected at the ports, and there were
forts at the entrance of the harbour in Charleston, South Carolina, as
well as forts, dockyards and arsenals of the United States at a number of
points in the Southern States; the Government should quietly but openly
have taken steps to ensure that the collection should go on unmolested,
and that the forts and the like should be made safe from attack, in South
Carolina and everywhere else where they were likely to be threatened.
Measures of this sort were early urged upon Buchanan by Scott, the
Lieutenant-General (that is, Second in Command under the President) of
the Army, who had been the officer that carried out Jackson's military
dispositions when secession was threatened in South Carolina thirty years
before, and by other officers concerned, particularly by Major Anderson,
a keen Southerner, but a keen soldier, commanding the forts at
Charleston, and by Cass and Black in his Cabinet.  Public opinion in the
North demanded such measures.

If further action than the proper manning and supply of certain forts had
been in contemplation, an embarrassing legal question would have arisen.
In the opinion of the Attorney-General, of leading Democrats like Cass
and Douglas, and apparently of most legal authorities of every party,
there was an important distinction, puzzling to an English lawyer even if
he is versed in the American Constitution, between the steps which the
Government might justly take in self-protection, and measures which could
be regarded as coercion of the State of South Carolina as such.  These
latter would be unlawful.  Buchanan, instead of acting on or declaring
his intentions, entertained Congress, which met early in December, with a
Message, laying down very clearly the illegality of secession, but
discussing at large this abstract question of the precise powers of the
Executive in resisting secession.  The legal question will not further
concern us because the distinction which it was really intended to draw
between lawful and unlawful measures against secession quite coincided,
in its practical application, with what common sense and just feeling
would in these peculiar circumstances have dictated.  But, as a natural
consequence of such discussion, an impression was spread abroad of the
illegality of something vaguely called coercion, and of the shadowy
nature of any power which the Government claimed.

Up to Lincoln's inauguration the story of the Charleston forts, of which
one, lying on an island in the mouth of the harbour, was the famous Fort
Sumter, is briefly this.  Buchanan was early informed that if the Union
Government desired to hold them, troops and ships of war should instantly
be sent.  Congressmen from South Carolina remaining in Washington came to
him and represented that their State regarded these forts upon its soil
as their own; they gave assurances that there would be no attack on the
forts if the existing military situation was not altered, and they tried
to get a promise that the forts should not be reinforced.  Buchanan would
give them no promise, but he equally refused the entreaties of Scott and
his own principal ministers that he should reinforce the forts, because
he declared that this would precipitate a conflict.  Towards the end of
the year Major Anderson, not having men enough to hold all the forts if,
as he expected, they were attacked, withdrew his whole force to Fort
Sumter, which he thought the most defensible, dismantling the principal
other fort.  The Governor of South Carolina protested against this as a
violation of a supposed understanding with the President, and seized upon
the United States arsenal and the custom house, taking the revenue
officers into State service.  Commissioners had previously gone from
South Carolina to Washington to request the surrender of the forts, upon
terms of payment for property; they now declared that Anderson's
withdrawal, as putting him in a better position for defence, was an act
of war, and demanded that he should be ordered to retire to the mainland.
Buchanan wavered; decided to yield to them on this last point;
ultimately, on the last day of 1860, yielded instead to severe pressure
from Black, and decided to reinforce Anderson on Fort Sumter.  The actual
attempt to reinforce him was bungled; a transport sent for this purpose
was fired upon by the South Carolina forces, and returned idle.  This
first act of war, for some curious reason, caused no excitement.  The
people of the North were intensely relieved that Buchanan had not yielded
to whatever South Carolina might demand, and, being prone to forgive and
to applaud, seem for a time to have experienced a thrill of glory in the
thought that the national administration had a mind.  Dix, the Secretary
of the Treasury, elated them yet further by telegraphing to a Treasury
official at New Orleans, "If any one attempts to haul down the American
flag, shoot him on the spot."  But Anderson remained without
reinforcements or further provisions when Lincoln entered office; and
troops in the service first of South Carolina and afterwards of the
Southern Confederacy, which was formed in February, erected batteries and
prepared to bombard Fort Sumter.

No possible plea for President Buchanan can make him rank among those who
have held high office with any credit at all, but he must at once be
acquitted of any intentional treachery to the Union.  It is agreed that
he was a truthful and sincere man, and there is something pleasant in the
simple avowal he made to a Southern negotiator who was pressing him for
some instant concession, that he always said his prayers before deciding
any important matter of State.  His previous dealings with Kansas would
suggest to us robust unscrupulousness, but it seems that he had quite
given his judgment over into the keeping of a little group of Southern
Senators.  Now that he was deprived of this help, he had only enough will
left to be obstinate against other advice.  It is suggested that he had
now but one motive, the desire that the struggle should break out in his
successor's time rather than his own.  Even this is perhaps to judge
Buchanan's notorious and calamitous laches unfairly.  Any action that he
took must to a certain extent have been provocative, and he knew it, and
he may have clung to the hope that by sheer inaction he would give time
for some possible forces of reason and conciliation to work.  If so, he
was wrong, but similar and about as foolish hopes paralysed Lincoln's
Cabinet (and to a less but still very dangerous degree Lincoln himself)
when they took up the problem which Buchanan's neglect had made more
urgent.  Buchanan had in this instance the advantage of far better
advice, but this silly old man must not be gibbeted and Lincoln left free
from criticism for his part in the same transaction.  Both Presidents
hesitated where to us who look back the case seems clear.  The
circumstances had altered in some respects when Lincoln came in, but it
is only upon a somewhat broad survey of the governing tendencies of
Lincoln's administration and of its mighty result in the mass that we
discover what really distinguishes his slowness of action in such cases
as this from the hesitation of a man like Buchanan.  Buchanan waited in
the hope of avoiding action, Lincoln with the firm intention to see his
path in the fullest light he could get.

From an early date in November, 1860, every effort was made, by men too
numerous to mention, to devise if possible such a settlement of what were
now called the grievances of the South as would prevent any other State
from following the example of South Carolina.  Apart from the intangible
difference presented by much disapprobation of slavery in the North and
growing resentment in the South as this disapprobation grew louder, the
solid ground of dispute concerned the position of slavery in the existing
Territories and future acquisitions of the United States Government; the
quarrel arose from the election of a President pledged to use whatever
power he had, though indeed that might prove little, to prevent the
further extension of slavery; and we may almost confine our attention to
this point.  Other points came into discussion.  Several of the Northern
States had "Personal Liberty Laws" expressly devised to impede the
execution of the Federal law of 1850 as to fugitive slaves.  Some
attention was devoted to these, especially by Alexander Stephens, who, as
the Southern leader most opposed to immediate secession, wished to direct
men's minds to a grievance that could be remedied.  Lincoln, who had
always said that, though the Fugitive Slave Law should be made just and
seemly, it ought in substance to be enforced, made clear again that he
thought such "Personal Liberty Laws" should be amended, though he
protested that it was not for him as President-elect to advise the State
Legislatures on their own business.  The Republicans generally agreed.
Some of the States concerned actually began amending their laws.  Thus,
if the disquiet of the South had depended on this grievance, the cause of
disquiet would no doubt have been removed.  Again the Republican leaders,
including Lincoln in particular, let there be no ground for thinking that
an attack was intended upon slavery in the States where it was
established; they offered eventually to give the most solemn pledge
possible in this matter by passing an Amendment of the Constitution
declaring that it should never be altered so as to take away the
independence of the existing slave States as to this portion of their
democratic institutions.  Lincoln indeed refused on several occasions to
make any fresh public disclaimer of an intention to attack existing
institutions.  His views were "open to all who will read."  "For the good
men in the South," he writes privately, "--I regard the majority of them
as such--I have no objection to repeat them seventy times seven.  But I
have bad men to deal with both North and South; men who are eager for
something new upon which to base new misrepresentations; men who would
like to frighten me, or at least fix upon me the character of timidity
and cowardice."  Nevertheless he endeavoured constantly in private
correspondence to narrow and define the issue, which, as he insisted,
concerned only the territorial extension of slavery.

The most serious of the negotiations that took place, and to which most
hope was attached, consisted in the deliberations of a committee of
thirteen appointed by the Senate in December, 1860, which took for its
guidance a detailed scheme of compromise put forward by Senator
Crittenden, of Kentucky.  The efforts of this committee to come to an
agreement broke down at the outset upon the question of the Territories,
and the responsibility, for good or for evil, of bringing them to an end
must probably be attributed to the advice of Lincoln.  Crittenden's first
proposal was that there should be a Constitutional Amendment declaring
that slavery should be prohibited "in all the territory of the United
States, now held or hereafter acquired, north of latitude 36 degrees 30
minutes"--(the limit fixed in the Missouri Compromise, but restricted
then to the Louisiana purchase)--while in all territory, now held or
thereafter acquired south of that line, it should be permitted.
Crittenden also proposed that when a Territory on either side of the line
became a State, it should become free to decide the question for itself;
but the discussion never reached this point.  On the proposal as to the
Territories there seemed at first to be a prospect that the Republicans
would agree, in which case the South might very likely have agreed too.
The desire for peace was intensely strong among the commercial men of New
York and other cities, and it affected the great political managers and
the statesmen who, like Seward himself, were in close touch with this
commercial influence.  Tenacious adherence to declared principle may have
been as strong in country districts as the desire for accommodation was
in these cities, but it was at any rate far less vocal, and on the whole
it seems that compromise was then in the air.  It seemed clear from the
expressed opinions of his closest allies that Seward would support this
compromise.  Now Seward just at this time received Lincoln's offer of the
office of Secretary of State, a great office and one in which Seward
expected to rule Lincoln and the country, but in accepting which, as he
did, he made it incumbent on himself not to part company at once with the
man who would be nominally his chief.  Then there occurred a visit paid
on Seward's behalf by his friend Thurlow Weed, an astute political
manager but also an able statesman, to Lincoln at Springfield.  Weed
brought back a written statement of Lincoln's views.  Seward's support
was not given to the compromise; nor naturally was that of the more
radical Republicans, to use a term which now became common; and the
Committee of Thirteen found itself unable to agree.

It is unnecessary to repeat what Lincoln's conviction on this, to him the
one essential point of policy, was, or to quote from the numerous letters
in which from the time of his nomination he tried to keep the minds of
his friends firm on this single principle, and to show them that if there
were the slightest further yielding as to this, save indeed as to the
peculiar case of New Mexico, which did not matter, and which perhaps he
regarded as conceded already, the Southern policy of extending slavery
and of "filibustering" against neighbouring counties for that purpose
would revive in full force, and the whole labour of the Republican
movement would have to begin over again.  Since his election he had been
writing also to Southern politicians who were personally friendly, to
Gilmer of North Carolina, to whom he offered Cabinet office, and to
Stephens, making absolutely plain that his difference with them lay in
this one point, but making it no less plain that on this point he was,
with entire respect to them, immovable.  Now, on December 22, the _New
York Tribune_ was "enabled to state that Mr. Lincoln stands now as he
stood in May last, square upon the Republican platform."  The writing
that Weed brought to Seward must have said, perhaps more elaborately, the
same.  If Lincoln had not stood square upon that platform there were
others like Senator Wade of Ohio and Senator Grimes of Iowa who might
have done so and might have been able to wreck the compromise.  Lincoln,
however, did wreck it, at a time when it seemed likely to succeed, and it
is most probable that thereby he caused the Civil War.  It cannot be said
that he definitely expected the Civil War.  Probably he avoided making
any definite forecast; but he expressed no alarm, and he privately told a
friend about this time that "he could not in his heart believe that the
South designed the overthrow of the Government."  But, if he had in his
heart believed it, nothing in his life gives reason to think that he
would have been more anxious to conciliate the South; on the contrary, it
is in line with all we know of his feelings to suppose that he would have
thought firmness all the more imperative.  We cannot recall the solemnity
of his long-considered speech about "a house divided against itself,"
with which all his words and acts accorded, without seeing that, if
perhaps he speculated little about the risks, he was prepared to face
them whatever they were.  Doubtless he took a heavy responsibility, but
it is painful to find honourable historians, who heartily dislike the
cause of slavery, capable to-day of wondering whether he was right to do
so.  "If he had not stood square" in December upon the same "platform" on
which he had stood in May, if he had preferred to enroll himself among
those statesmen of all countries whose strongest words are uttered for
their own subsequent enjoyment in eating them, he might conceivably have
saved much bloodshed, but he would not have left the United States a
country of which any good man was proud to be a citizen.

Thus, by the end of 1860, the bottom was really out of the policy of
compromise, and it is not worth while to examine the praiseworthy efforts
that were still made for it while State after State in the South was
deciding to secede.  One interesting proposal, which was aired in
January, 1861, deserves notice, namely, that the terms of compromise
proposed by Crittenden should have been submitted to a vote of the whole
people.  It was not passed.  Seward, whom many people now thought likely
to catch at any and every proposal for a settlement, said afterwards with
justice that it was "unconstitutional and ineffectual."  Ineffectual it
would have been in this sense: the compromise would in all probability
have been carried by a majority consisting of men in the border States
and of all those elsewhere who, though they feared war and desired good
feeling, had no further definite opinion upon the chief questions at
issue; but it would have left a local majority in many of the Southern
States and a local majority in many of the Northern States as
irreconcilable with each other as ever.  It was opposed also to the
spirit of the Constitution.  In a great country where the people with
infinitely varied interests and opinions can slowly make their
predominant wishes appear, but cannot really take counsel together and
give a firm decision upon any emergency, there may be exceptional cases
when a popular vote on a defined issue would be valuable, significant,
desired by the people themselves; but the machinery of representative
government, however faulty, is the only machinery by which the people can
in some sense govern itself, instead of making itself ungovernable.
Above all, in a serious crisis it is supremely repugnant to the spirit of
popular government that the men chosen by a people to govern it should
throw their responsibility back at the heads of the electors.  It is well
to be clear as to the kind of proceeding which the authors of this
proposal were really advocating: a statesman has come before the ordinary
citizen with a definite statement of the principle on which he would act,
and an ordinary citizen has thereupon taken his part in entrusting him
with power; then comes the moment for the statesman to carry out his
principle, and the latent opposition becomes of necessity more alarming;
the statesman is therefore to say to the ordinary citizen, "This is a
more difficult matter than I thought; and if I am to act as I said I
would, take on yourself the responsibility which I recently put myself
forward to bear."  The ordinary citizen will naturally as a rule decline
a responsibility thus offered him, but he will not be grateful for the
offer or glad to be a forced accomplice in this process of indecision.

If we could determine the prevailing sentiment in the North at some
particular moment during the crisis, it would probably represent what
very few individual men continued to think for six months together.
Early in the crisis some strong opponents of slavery were for letting the
South go, declaring, as did Horace Greeley of the _New York Tribune_,
that "they would not be citizens of a Republic of which one part was
pinned to the other part with bayonets"; but this sentiment seems soon to
have given way when the same men began to consider, as Lincoln had
considered, whether an agreement to sever the Union between the States,
with the difficult adjustment of mutual interests which it would have
involved, could be so effected as to secure a lasting peace.  A blind
rage on behalf of conciliation broke out later in prosperous business men
in great towns--even in Boston it is related that "Beacon Street
aristocrats" broke up a meeting to commemorate John Brown on the
anniversary of his death, and grave persons thought the meeting an
outrage.  Waves of eager desire for compromise passed over the Northern
community.  Observers at the time and historians after are easily
mistaken as to popular feeling; the acute fluctuations of opinion
inevitable among journalists, and in any sort of circle where men are
constantly meeting and talking politics, may leave the great mass of
quiet folk almost unaffected.  We may be sure that there was a
considerable body of steady opinion very much in accord with Lincoln;
this should not be forgotten, but it must not be supposed that it
prevailed constantly.  On the contrary, it was inherent in the nature of
the crisis that opinion wavered and swayed.  We should miss the whole
significance of Lincoln's story if we did not think of the North now and
to the end of the war as exposed to disunion, hesitation, and quick
reaction.  If at this time a sufficiently authoritative leader with
sufficiently determined timidity had inaugurated a policy of stampede, he
might have had a vast and tumultuous following.  Only his following would
quickly, if too late, have repented.  What was wanted, if the people of
the North were to have what most justly might be called their way, was a
leader who would not seem to hurry them along, nor yet be ever looking
round to see if they followed, but just go groping forward among the
innumerable obstacles, guided by such principles of good sense and of
right as would perhaps on the whole and in the long run be approved by
the maturer thought of most men; and Lincoln was such a leader.

When we turn to the South, where, as has been said, the movement for
secession was making steady though not unopposed progress, we have indeed
to make exceptions to any sweeping statement, but we must recognise a far
more clearly defined and far more prevailing general opinion.  We may set
aside for the moment the border slave States of Maryland, Virginia,
Kentucky, and Missouri, each of which has a distinct and an important
history.  Delaware belonged in effect to the North.  In Texas there were
peculiar conditions, and Texas had an interesting history of its own in
this matter, but may be treated as remote.  There was also, as has been
said, a highland region covering the west of Virginia and the east of
Kentucky but reaching far south into the northern part of Alabama.
Looking at the pathetic spectacle of enduring heroism in a mistaken cause
which the South presented, many people have been ready to suppose that it
was manoeuvred and tricked into its folly by its politicians and might
have recovered itself from it if the North and the Government had
exercised greater patience and given it time.  In support of this view
instances are cited of strong Unionist feeling in the South.  Such
instances probably belong to the peculiar people of this highland
country, or else to the mixed and more or less neutral population that
might be found at New Orleans or trading along the Mississippi.  There
remains a solid and far larger South in which indeed (except for South
Carolina) dominant Southern policy was briskly debated, but as a question
of time, degree, and expediency.  Three mental forces worked for the same
end: the alarmed vested interest of the people of substance, aristocratic
and otherwise; the racial sentiment of the poor whites, a sentiment often
strongest in those who have no subject of worldly pride but their colour;
and the philosophy of the clergy and other professional men who
constituted what in some countries is called the intellectual class.
These influences resulted in a rare uniformity of opinion that slavery
was right and all attacks on it were monstrous, that the Southern States
were free to secede and form, if they chose, a new Confederacy, and that
they ought to do this if the moment should arrive when they could not
otherwise safeguard their interests.  Doubtless there were leading men
who had thought over the matter in advance of the rest and taken counsel
together long before, but the fact seems to be that such leaders now
found their followers in advance of them.  Jefferson Davis, by far the
most commanding man among them, now found himself--certainly it served
him right--anxiously counselling delay, and spending nights in prayer
before he made his farewell speech to the Senate in words of greater
dignity and good feeling than seem to comport with the fanatical
narrowness of his view and the progressive warping of his determined
character to which it condemned him.  Whatever fundamental loyalty to the
Union existed in any man's heart there were months of debate in which it
found no organised and hardly any audible expression.  The most notable
stand against actual secession was that which was made in Georgia by
Stephens; he was determined and outspoken, but he proceeded wholly upon
the ground that secession was premature.  And this instance is
significant of something further.  It has been said that discussion and
voting were not free, and it would be altogether unlikely that their
freedom should in no cases be infringed, but there is no evidence that
this charge was widely true.  It is surely significant of the general
temper of the South, and most honourable to it, that Stephens, who thus
struggled against secession at that moment, was chosen Vice-President of
the Southern Confederacy.

By February 4, 1861, the States of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama,
Georgia, and Louisiana had followed South Carolina by passing Ordinances
of Secession, and on that date representatives of these States met at
Montgomery in Alabama to found a new Confederacy.  Texas, where
considerable resistance was offered by Governor Houston, the adventurous
leader under whom that State had separated from Mexico, was in process of
passing the like Ordinance.  Virginia and North Carolina, which lie north
of the region where cotton prevails, and with them their western
neighbour Tennessee, and Arkansas, yet further west and separated from
Tennessee by the Mississippi River, did not secede till after Lincoln's
inauguration and the outbreak of war.  But the position of Virginia
(except for its western districts) admitted of very little doubt, and
that of Tennessee and North Carolina was known to be much the same.
Virginia took a historic pride in the Union, and its interest in slavery
was not quite the same as that of the cotton States, yet its strongest
social ties were to the South.  This State was now engaged in a last idle
attempt to keep itself and other border States in the Union, with some
hope also that the departed States might return; and on this same
February 6, a "Peace Convention," invited by Virginia and attended by
delegates from twenty-one States, met at Washington with ex-President
Tyler in the chair; but for Virginia it was all along a condition of any
terms of agreement that the right of any State to secede should be fully
acknowledged.

The Congress of the seceding States, which met at Montgomery, was
described by Stephens as, "taken all in all, the noblest, soberest, most
intelligent, and most conservative body I was ever in."  It has been
remarked that Southern politicians of the agitator type were not sent to
it.  It adopted a provisional Constitution modelled largely upon that of
the United States.  Jefferson Davis, who had retired to his farm, was
sent for to become President; Stephens, as already said, became
Vice-President.  The delegates there were to continue in session for the
present as the regular Congress.  Whether sobered by the thought that
they were acting in the eyes of the world, or in accordance with their
own prevailing sentiment, these men, some of whom had before urged the
revival of the slave trade, now placed in their Constitution a perpetual
prohibition of it, and when, as a regular legislature, they afterwards
passed a penal statute which carried out this intention inadequately,
President Davis conscientiously vetoed it and demanded a more
satisfactory measure.  At his inauguration the Southern President
delivered an address, typical of that curious blending of propriety and
insincerity, of which the politics of that period in America had offered
many examples.  It may seem incredible, but it contained no word of
slavery, but recited in dignified terms how the South had been driven to
separation by "wanton aggression on the part of others," and after it had
"vainly endeavoured to secure tranquillity."  The new Southern Congress
now resolved to take over the forts and other property in the seceded
States that had belonged to the Union, and the first Confederate general,
Beauregard, was sent to Charleston to hover over Fort Sumter.


3. _The Inauguration of Lincoln_.

The first necessary business of the President-elect, while he watched the
gathering of what Emerson named "the hurricane in which he was called to
the helm," was to construct a strong Cabinet, to which may be added the
seemingly unnecessary business forced upon him of dealing with a horde of
pilgrims who at once began visiting him to solicit some office or, in
rarer cases, to press their disinterested opinions.  His Cabinet,
designed in principle, as has been said, while he was waiting in the
telegraph office for election returns, was actually constructed with some
delay and hesitation.  Lincoln could not know personally all the men he
invited to join him, but he proceeded with the view of conjoining in his
administration representatives of the chief shades of opinion which in
this critical time it would be his supreme duty to hold together.  Not
only different shades of opinion, but the local sentiment of different
districts had to be considered; he once complained that if the twelve
Apostles had to be chosen nowadays the principle of locality would have
to be regarded; but at this time there was very solid reason why
different States should be contented and why he should be advised as to
their feelings.  His own chief rivals for the Presidency offered a good
choice from both these points of view.  They were Seward of New York,
Chase of Ohio, Bates of Missouri, Cameron of Pennsylvania.  Seward and
Chase were both able and outstanding men: the former was in a sense the
old Republican leader, but was more and more coming to be regarded as the
typical "Conservative," or cautious Republican; Chase on the other hand
was a leader of the "Radicals," who were "stern and unbending" in their
attitude towards slavery and towards the South.  These two must be got
and kept together if possible.  Bates was a good and capable man who
moreover came from Missouri, a border slave State, where his influence
was much to be desired.  He became Attorney-General.  Cameron, an
unfortunate choice as it turned out, was a very wealthy business man of
Pennsylvania, representative of the weighty Protectionist influence
there.  After he had been offered office, which had been without
Lincoln's authority promised him in the Republican Convention, Lincoln
was dismayed by representations that he was "a bad, corrupted man"; he
wrote a curious letter asking Cameron to refuse his offer; Cameron
instead produced evidence of the desire of Pennsylvania for him; Lincoln
stuck to his offer; the old Whig element among Republicans, the
Protectionist element, and above all, the friends of the indispensable
Seward, would otherwise have been outweighted in the Cabinet.  Cameron
eventually became for a time Secretary of War.  To these Lincoln, upon
somebody's strong representations, tried, without much hope, to add some
distinctly Southern politician.  The effort, of course, failed.
Ultimately the Cabinet was completed by the addition of Caleb Smith of
Indiana as Secretary of the Interior, Gideon Welles of Connecticut as
Secretary of the Navy, and Montgomery Blair of Maryland as
Postmaster-General.  Welles, with the guidance of a brilliant
subordinate, Fox, served usefully, was very loyal to Lincoln, had an
antipathy to England which was dangerous, and kept very diligently a
diary for which we may be grateful now.  Blair was a vehement,
irresponsible person with an influential connection, and, which was
important, his influence and that of his family lay in Maryland and other
border slave States.  Of all these men, Seward, Secretary of State--that
is, Foreign Minister and something more--and Chase, Secretary of the
Treasury, most concern us.  Lincoln's offer to Seward was made and
accepted in terms that did credit to both men, and Seward, still smarting
at his own defeat, was admirably loyal.  But his friends, though they had
secured the appointment of Cameron to support them, thought increasingly
ill of the prospects of a Cabinet which included the Radical Chase.  On
the very night before his inauguration Lincoln received from Seward, who
had just been helping to revise his Inaugural Address, a letter
withdrawing his acceptance of office.  By some not clearly recorded
exercise of that great power over men, which, if with some failures, was
generally at his command, he forced Seward to see that the unconditional
withdrawal of this letter was his public duty.  It must throughout what
follows be remembered that Lincoln's first and most constant duty was to
hold together the jarring elements in the North which these jarring
elements in his own Cabinet represented; and it was one of his great
achievements that he kept together, for as long as was needful, able but
discordant public servants who could never have combined together without
him.

On February 11, 1861, Lincoln, standing on the gallery at the end of a
railway car, upon the instant of departure from the home to which he
never returned, said to his old neighbours (according to the version of
his speech which his private secretary got him to dictate immediately
after): "My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my
feeling of sadness at this parting.  To this place, and the kindness of
these people, I owe everything.  Here I have lived for a quarter of a
century, and have passed from a young to an old man.  Here my children
have been born and one is buried.  I now leave, not knowing when or
whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which
rested upon Washington.  Without the assistance of that Divine Being who
ever attended him, I cannot succeed.  With that assistance, I cannot
fail.  Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be
everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.
To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend
me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

He was, indeed, going to a task not less great than Washington's, but he
was going to it with a preparation in many respects far inferior to his.
For the last eight years he had laboured as a public speaker, and in a
measure as a party leader, and had displayed and developed comprehension,
perhaps unequalled, of some of the larger causes which mould public
affairs.  But, except in sheer moral discipline, those years had done
nothing to supply the special training which he had previously lacked,
for high executive office.  In such office at such a time ready decision
in an obscure and passing situation may often be a not less requisite
than philosophic grasp either of the popular mind or of eternal laws.
The powers which he had hitherto shown would still be needful to him, but
so too would other powers which he had never practised in any comparable
position, and which nature does not in a moment supply.  Any attempt to
judge of Lincoln's Presidency--and it can only be judged at all when it
has gone on some way--must take account, not perhaps so much of his
inexperience, as of his own reasonable consciousness of it and his great
anxiety to use the advice of men who were in any way presumably more
competent.

He deliberately delayed his arrival in Washington and availed himself of
official invitations to stay at four great towns and five State capitals
which he could conveniently pass on his way.  The journey abounded in
small incidents and speeches, some of which exposed him to a little
ridicule in the press, though they probably created an undercurrent of
sympathy for him.  Near one station where the train stopped lived a
little girl he knew, who had recently urged upon him to wear a beard or
whiskers.  To this dreadful young person, and to that persistent good
nature of his which was now and then fatuous, was due the ill-designed
hairy ornamentation which during his Presidency hid the really beautiful
modelling of his jaw and chin.  He enquired for her at the station, had
her fetched from the crowd, claimed her praise for this supposed
improvement, and kissed her in presence of the press.  In New York he was
guilty of a more sinister and tragic misfeasance.  In that city, where,
if it may be said with respect, there has existed from of old a
fashionable circle not convinced of its own gentility and insisting the
more rigorously on minor decorum, Lincoln went to the opera, and history
still deplores that this misguided man went there and sat there with his
large hands in black kid gloves.  Here perhaps it is well to say that the
educated world of the Eastern States, including those who privately
deplored Lincoln's supposed unfitness, treated its untried chief
magistrate with that engrained good breeding to which it was utterly
indifferent how plain a man he might be.  His lesser speeches as he went
were unstudied appeals to loyalty, with very simple avowals of inadequacy
to his task, and expressions of reliance on the people's support when he
tried to do his duty.  To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart
and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly
felicitous.  Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia,
which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered
felicitous at the time.  They were too unpretentious.  Moreover, they
contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity of the crisis
in a way which threw doubt on his own serious statesmanship.  Whether
they were felicitous or not, the intention of these much-criticised
utterances was the best proof of his statesmanship.  He would appeal to
the steady loyalty of the North, but he was not going to arouse its
passion.  He assumed to the last that calm reflection might prevail in
the South, which was menaced by nothing but "an artificial crisis."  He
referred to war as a possibility, but left no doubt of his own wish by
all means to avoid it.  "There will," he said, "be no bloodshed unless it
be forced on the Government.  The Government will not use force unless
force is used against it."

Before he passed through Baltimore he received earnest communications
from Seward and from General Scott.  Each had received trustworthy
information of a plot, which existed, to murder him in that city.  Owing
to their warnings he went through Baltimore secretly at night, so that
his arrival in Washington, on February 23, was unexpected.  This was his
obvious duty, and nobody who knew him was ever in doubt of his personal
intrepidity; but of course it helped to damp the effect of what many
people would have been glad to regard as a triumphal progress.

On March 4, 1861, old Buchanan came in his carriage to escort his
successor to the inaugural ceremony, where it was the ironical fate of
Chief Justice Taney to administer the oath to a President who had already
gone far to undo his great work.  Yet a third notable Democrat was there
to do a pleasant little act.  Douglas, Lincoln's defeated rival, placed
himself with a fine ostentation by his side, and, observing that he was
embarrassed as to where to put his new tall hat and preposterous
gold-knobbed cane, took charge of these encumbrances before the moment
arrived for the most eagerly awaited of all his speeches.  Lincoln had
submitted his draft of his "First Inaugural" to Seward, and this draft
with Seward's abundant suggestions of amendment has been preserved.  It
has considerable literary interest, and, by the readiness with which most
of Seward's suggestions were adopted, and the decision with which some,
and those not the least important, were set aside by Lincoln, it
illustrates well the working relation which, after one short struggle,
was to be established between these two men.  By Seward's advice Lincoln
added to an otherwise dry speech some concluding paragraphs of emotional
appeal.  The last sentence of the speech, which alone is much remembered,
is Seward's in the first conception of it, Seward's in the slightly
hackneyed phrase with which it ends, Lincoln's alone in the touch of
haunting beauty which is on it.

His "First Inaugural" was by general confession an able state paper,
setting forth simply and well a situation with which we are now familiar.
It sets out dispassionately the state of the controversy on slavery, lays
down with brief argument the position that the Union is indissoluble, and
proceeds to define the duty of the Government in face of an attempt to
dissolve it.  "The power," he said, "confided to me will be used to hold,
occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government,
and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary
for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force against or
among the people anywhere.  The mails, unless repelled, will continue to
be furnished in all parts of the Union."  He proceeded to set out what he
conceived to be the impossibility of real separation; the intimate
relations between the peoples of the several States must still continue;
they would still remain for adjustment after any length of warfare; they
could be far better adjusted in Union than in enmity.  He concluded: "In
your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the
momentous issue of civil war.  The Government will not assail you.  You
can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.  I am loath
to close.  We are not enemies but friends.  We must not be enemies.
Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of
affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every
battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all
over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."


4. _The Outbreak of War_.

Upon the newly-inaugurated President there now descended a swarm of
office-seekers.  The Republican party had never been in power before, and
these patriotic people exceeded in number and voracity those that had
assailed any American President before.  To be accessible to all such was
the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on
him at this time.  When in the course of nature the number of
office-seekers abated, they were succeeded, as will be seen, by
supplicants of another kind, whose petitions were often really harrowing.
The horror of this enduring visitation has been described by Artemus Ward
in terms which Lincoln himself could not have improved upon.  His
classical treatment of the subject is worth serious reference; for it
should be realised that Lincoln, who had both to learn his new trade of
statecraft and to exercise it in a terrible emergency, did so with a
large part of each day necessarily consumed by worrying and distasteful
tasks of a much paltrier kind.

On the day after the Inauguration came word from Major Anderson at Fort
Sumter that he could only hold out a few weeks longer unless reinforced
and provisioned.  With it came to Lincoln the opinion of General Scott,
that to relieve Fort Sumter now would require a force of 20,000 men,
which did not exist.  The Cabinet was summoned with military and naval
advisers.  The sailors thought they could throw men and provisions into
Fort Sumter; the soldiers said the ships would be destroyed by the
Confederate batteries.  Lincoln asked his Cabinet whether, assuming it to
be feasible, it was politically advisable now to provision Fort Sumter.
Blair said yes emphatically; Chase said yes in a qualified way.  The
other five members of the Cabinet said no; General Scott had given his
opinion, as on a military question, that the fort should now be
evacuated; they argued that the evacuation of this one fort would be
recognised by the country as merely a military necessity arising from the
neglect of the last administration.  Lincoln reserved his decision.

Let us conceive the effect of a decision to evacuate Fort Sumter.  South
Carolina had for long claimed it as a due acknowledgment of its sovereign
and independent rights, and for no other end; the Confederacy now claimed
it and its first act had been to send Beauregard to threaten the fort.
Even Buchanan had ended by withstanding these claims.  The assertion that
he would hold these forts had been the gist of Lincoln's Inaugural.  This
was the one fort that was in the eyes of the Northern public or the
Southern public either; they probably never realised that there were
other forts, Fort Pickens, for example, on the Gulf of Mexico, which the
administration was prepared to defend.  And now it was proposed that
Lincoln, who had put down his foot with a bang yesterday, should take it
up with a shuffle to-day.  And Lincoln reserved his judgment; and, which
is much more, went on reserving it till the question nearly settled
itself to his disgrace.

Lincoln lacked here, it would seem, not by any means the qualities of the
trained administrator, but just that rough perception and vigour which
untaught genius might be supposed to possess.  The passionate Jackson
(who, by the way, was a far more educated man in the respects which
count) would not have acted so.  Lincoln, it is true, had declared that
he would take no provocative step--"In your hands, my dissatisfied
fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war,"
and the risk which he would have taken by over-ruling that day the
opinion of the bulk of his Cabinet based on that of his chief military
adviser is obvious, but it seems to have been a lesser risk than he did
take in delaying so long to overrule his Cabinet.  It is precisely
characteristic of his strength and of his weakness that he did not at
once yield to his advisers; that he long continued weighing the matter
undisturbed by the danger of delay; that he decided as soon as and no
sooner than he felt sure as to the political results, which alone here
mattered, for the military consequences amounted to nothing.

This story was entangled from the first with another difficult story.
Commissioners from the Southern Confederacy came to Washington and sought
interviews with Seward; they came to treat for the recognition of the
Confederacy and the peaceful surrender of forts and the like within its
borders.  Meanwhile the action of Virginia was in the balance, and the
"Peace Convention," summoned by Virginia, still "threshing again," as
Lowell said, "the already twice-threshed straw of debate."  The action of
Virginia and of other border States, about which Lincoln was intensely
solicitous, would certainly depend upon the action of the Government
towards the States that had already seceded.  Might it not be well that
the Government should avoid immediate conflict with South Carolina about
Fort Sumter, though conflict with the Confederacy about Fort Pickens and
the rest would still impend?  Was it not possible that conflict could be
staved off till an agreement could be reached with Virginia and the
border States, which would induce the seceded States to return?  These
questions were clearly absurd, but they were as clearly natural, and they
greatly exercised Seward.  Disappointed at not being President and
equally disturbed at the prospect of civil war, but still inclined to
large and sanguine hopes, he was rather anxious to take things out of
Lincoln's hands and very anxious to serve his country as the great
peacemaker.  Indirect negotiations now took place between him and the
Southern Commissioners, who of course could not be officially recognised,
through the medium of two Supreme Court Judges, especially one Campbell,
who was then in Washington.  Seward was quite loyal to Lincoln and told
him in a general way what he was doing; he was also candid with Campbell
and his friends, and explained to them his lack of authority, but he
talked freely and rashly of what he hoped to bring about.  Lincoln gave
Seward some proper cautions and left him all proper freedom; but it is
possible that he once told Douglas that he intended, at that moment, to
evacuate Fort Sumter.  The upshot of the matter is that the decision of
the Government was delayed by negotiations which, as it ought to have
known, could come to nothing, and that the Southern Government and the
Commissioners, after they had got home, thought they had been deceived in
these negotiations.

Discussions were still proceeding as to Fort Sumter when a fresh
difficulty arose for Lincoln, but one which enabled him to become
henceforth master in his Cabinet.  The strain of Seward's position upon a
man inclined to be vain and weak can easily be imagined, but the sudden
vagary in which it now resulted was surprising.  Upon April 1 he sent to
Lincoln "Some Thoughts for the President's Consideration."  In this
paper, after deploring what he described as the lack of any policy so
far, and defining, in a way that does not matter, his attitude as to the
forts in the South, he proceeded thus: "I would demand explanations from
Great Britain and Russia, and send agents into Canada, Mexico, and
Central America, to raise a vigorous spirit of independence on this
continent against European intervention, and if satisfactory explanations
are not received from Spain and France, would convene Congress and
declare war against them."  In other words, Seward would seek to end all
domestic dissensions by suddenly creating out of nothing a dazzling
foreign policy.  But this was not the only point, even if it was the main
point; he proceeded: "Either the President must do it" (that is the sole
conduct of this policy) "himself, or devolve it on some member of his
Cabinet.  It is not my especial province.  But I neither seek to evade
nor assume responsibility."  In other words, Seward put himself forward
as the sole director of the Government.  In his brief reply Lincoln made
no reference whatever to Seward's amazing programme.  He pointed out that
the policy so far, as to which Seward had complained, was one in which
Seward had entirely concurred.  As to the concluding demand that some one
man, and that man Seward, should control all policy, he wrote, "If this
must be done, I must do it.  When a general line of policy is adopted, I
apprehend there is no danger of its being changed without good reason, or
continuing to be a subject of unnecessary debate; still, upon points
arising in its progress I wish, and suppose I am entitled to have, the
advice of all the Cabinet."  Seward was not a fool, far from it; he was
one of the ablest men in America, only at that moment strained and
excited beyond the limits of his good sense.  Lincoln's quiet answer
sobered him then and for ever after.  He showed a generous mind; he wrote
to his wife soon after: "Executive force and vigour are rare qualities;
the President is the best of us."  And Lincoln's generosity was no less;
his private secretary, Nicolay, saw these papers; but no other man knew
anything of Seward's abortive rebellion against Lincoln till after they
both were dead.  The story needs no explanation, but the more attentively
all the circumstances are considered, the more Lincoln's handling of this
emergency, which threatened the ruin of his Government, throws into shade
the weakness he had hitherto shown.

Lincoln was thus in a stronger position when he finally decided as to
Fort Sumter.  It is unnecessary to follow the repeated consultations that
took place.  There were preparations for possible expeditions both to
Fort Sumter and to Fort Pickens, and various blunders about them, and
Seward made some trouble by officious interference about them.  An
announcement was sent to the Governor of South Carolina that provisions
would be sent to Fort Sumter and he was assured that if this was
unopposed no further steps would be taken.  What chiefly concerns us is
that the eventual decision to send provisions but not troops to Fort
Sumter was Lincoln's decision; but that it was not taken till after
Senators and Congressmen had made clear to him that Northern opinion
would support him.  It was the right decision, for it conspicuously
avoided the appearance of provocation, while it upheld the right of the
Union; but it was taken perilously late, and the delay exposed the
Government to the risk of a great humiliation.

An Alabama gentleman had urged Jefferson Davis that the impending
struggle must not be delayed.  "Unless," he said, "you sprinkle blood in
the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in
ten days."  There is every reason to suppose that the gentleman's
statement as to the probable collapse of the South was mere rhetoric, but
it seems that his advice led to orders being sent to Beauregard to reduce
Fort Sumter.  Beauregard sent a summons to Anderson; Anderson, now all
but starved out, replied that unless he received supplies or instructions
he would surrender on April 15.  Whether by Beauregard's orders or
through some misunderstanding, the Confederate batteries opened fire on
Fort Sumter on April 12.  Fort Sumter became untenable on the next day,
when the relief ships, which Anderson had been led to expect sooner, but
which could in no case really have helped him, were just appearing in the
offing.  Anderson very properly capitulated.  On Sunday, April 14, 1861,
he marched out with the honours of war.  The Union flag had been fired
upon in earnest by the Confederates, and, leaving Virginia and the States
that went with it to join the Confederacy if they chose, the North sprang
to arms.

In the events which had led up to the outbreak of war Abraham Lincoln had
played a part more admirable and more decisive in its effect than his
countrymen could have noted at the time or perhaps have appreciated
since.  He was confronted now with duties requiring mental gifts of a
different kind from those which he had hitherto displayed, and with
temptations to which he had not yet been exposed.  In a general sense the
greatness of mind and heart which he unfolded under fierce trial does not
need to be demonstrated to-day.  Yet in detail hardly an action of his
Presidency is exempt from controversy; nor is his many-sided character
one of those which men readily flatter themselves that they understand.
There are always, moreover, those to whom it is a marvel how any great
man came by his name.  The particular tribute, which in the pages that
follow it is desired to pay to him, consists in the careful examination
of just those actions and just those qualities of his upon which candid
detraction has in fact fastened, or on which candid admiration has
pronounced with hesitancy.




CHAPTER VII

THE CONDITIONS OF THE WAR

In recounting the history of Lincoln's Presidency, it will be necessary
to mark the course of the Civil War stage by stage as we proceed.
There are, however, one or two general features of the contest with
which it may be well to deal by way of preface.

It has seldom happened that a people entering upon a great war have
understood at the outset what the character of that war would be.  When
the American Civil War broke out the North expected an easy victory,
but, as disappointment came soon and was long maintained, many clever
people adopted the opinion, which early prevailed in Europe, that there
was no possibility of their success at all.  At the first the
difficulty of the task was unrecognised; under early and long-sustained
disappointment the strength by which those difficulties could be
overcome began to be despaired of without reason.

The North, after several slave States, which were at first doubtful,
had adhered to it, had more than double the population of the South; of
the Southern population a very large part were slaves, who, though
industrially useful, could not be enlisted.  In material resources the
superiority of the North was no less marked, and its material wealth
grew during the war to a greater extent than had perhaps ever happened
to any other belligerent power.  These advantages were likely to be
decisive in the end, if the North could and would endure to the end.
But at the very beginning these advantages simply did not tell at all,
for the immediately available military force of the North was
insignificant, and that of the South clearly superior to it; and even
when they began to tell, it was bound to be very long before their full
weight could be brought to bear.  And the object which was to be
obtained was supremely difficult of attainment.  It was not a defeat of
the South which might result in the alteration of a frontier, the
cession of some Colonies, the payment of an indemnity, and such like
matters; it was a conquest of the South so complete that the Union
could be restored on a firmer basis than before.  Any less result than
this would be failure in the war.  And the country, to be thus
completely conquered by an unmilitary people of nineteen millions, was
of enormous extent: leaving out of account the huge outlying State of
Texas, which is larger than Germany, the remaining Southern States
which joined in the Confederacy have an area somewhat larger than that
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Holland, and Belgium put together; and
this great region had no industrial centres or other points of such
great strategic importance that by the occupation of them the remaining
area could be dominated.  The feat which the Northern people eventually
achieved has been said by the English historians of the war (perhaps
with some exaggeration) to have been "a greater one than that which
Napoleon attempted to his own undoing when he invaded Russia in 1812."

On the other hand, the South was in some respects very favourably
placed for resisting invasion from the North.  The Southern forces
during most of the war were, in the language of military writers,
operating on interior lines; that is, the different portions of them
lay nearer to one another than did the different portions of the
Northern forces, and could be more quickly brought to converge on the
same point; the country abounded in strong positions for defence which
could be held by a relatively small force, while in every invading
movement the invaders had to advance long distances from the base, thus
exposing their lines of communication to attack.  The advantage of this
situation, if competent use were made of it, was bound to go very far
towards compensating for inferiority of numbers; the North could not
make its superior numbers on land tell in any rapidly decisive fashion
without exposing itself to dangerous counter-strokes.  In naval
strength its superiority was asserted almost from the first, and by
cutting off foreign supplies caused the Southern armies to suffer
severe privations before the war was half through; but its full effect
could only be produced very slowly.  Thus, if its people were brave and
its leaders capable, the South was by no means in so hopeless a case as
might at first have appeared; with good fortune it might hope to strike
its powerful antagonist some deadly blow before that antagonist could
bring its strength to bear; and even if this hope failed, a
sufficiently tenacious defence might well wear down the patience of the
North.

As soldiers the Southerners started with a superiority which the
Northerners could only overtake slowly.  If each people were taken in
the mass, the proportion of Southerners bred to an outdoor life was
higher.  Generally speaking, if not exactly more frugal, they were far
less used to living comfortably.  Above all, all classes of people
among them were still accustomed to think of fighting as a normal and
suitable occupation for a man; while the prevailing temper of the North
thought of man as meant for business, and its higher temper was apt to
think of fighting as odious and war out of date.  This, like the other
advantages of the South, was transitory; before very long Northerners
who became soldiers at a sacrifice of inclination, from the highest
spirit of patriotism or in the methodic temper in which business has to
be done, would become man for man as good soldiers as the Southerners;
but the original superiority of the Southerners would continue to have
a moral effect in their own ranks and on the mind of the enemy, more
especially of the enemy's generals, even after its cause had ceased to
exist; and herein the military advantage of the South was undoubtedly,
through the first half of the war, considerable.

In the matter of leadership the South had certain very real and certain
other apparent but probably delusive advantages.  The United States had
no large number of trained military officers, still capable of active
service.  The armies of the North and South alike had to be commanded
and staffed to a great extent by men who first studied their profession
in that war; and the lack of ripe military judgment was likely to be
felt most in the higher commands where the forces to be employed and
co-ordinated were largest.  The South secured what may be called its
fair proportion of the comparatively few officers, but it was of
tremendous moment that, among the officers who, when the war began,
were recognised as competent, two, who sadly but in simple loyalty to
the State of Virginia took the Southern side, were men of genius.  The
advantages of the South would have been no advantages without skill and
resolution to make use of them.  The main conditions of the war--the
vast space, the difficulty in all parts of it of moving troops, the
generally low level of military knowledge--were all such as greatly
enhance the opportunities of the most gifted commander.  Lee and
"Stonewall" Jackson thus became, the former throughout the war, the
latter till he was killed in the summer of 1863, factors of primary
importance in the struggle.  Wolseley, who had, besides studying their
record, conversed both with Lee and with Moltke, thought Lee even
greater than Moltke, and the military writers of our day speak of him
as one of the great commanders of history.  As to Jackson, Lee's belief
in him is sufficient testimony to his value.  And the good fortune of
the South was not confined to these two signal instances.  Most of the
Southern generals who appeared early in the war could be retained in
important commands to the end.

The South might have seemed at first equally fortunate in the character
of the Administration at the back of the generals.  An ascendency was
at once conceded to Jefferson Davis, a tried political leader, to which
Lincoln had to win his way, and the past experiences of the two men had
been very different.  The operations of war in which Lincoln had taken
part were confined, according to his own romantic account in a speech
in Congress, to stealing ducks and onions from the civil population;
his Ministers were as ignorant in the matter as he; their military
adviser, Scott, was so infirm that he had soon to retire, and it proved
most difficult to replace him.  Jefferson Davis, on the other hand,
started with knowledge of affairs, including military affairs; he had
been Secretary of War in Pierce's Cabinet and Chairman of the Senate
Committee on War since then; above all, he had been a soldier and had
commanded a regiment with some distinction in the Mexican War.  It is
thought that he would have preferred a military command to the
Presidency of the Confederacy, and as his own experience of actual war
was as great as that of his generals, he can hardly be blamed for a
disposition to interfere with them at the beginning.  But military
historians, while criticising (perhaps a little hastily) all Lincoln's
interventions in the affairs of war up to the time when he found
generals whom he trusted, insist that Davis' systematic interference
was far more harmful to his cause; and Wolseley, who watched events
closely from Canada and who visited the Southern Army in 1863, is most
emphatic in this opinion.  He interfered with Lee to an extent which
nothing but Lee's devoted friendship and loyalty could have made
tolerable.  He put himself into relations of dire hostility with Joseph
Johnston, and in 1864 suspended him in the most injudicious manner.
Above all, when the military position of the South had begun to be
acutely perilous, Jefferson Davis neither devised for himself, nor
allowed his generals to devise, any bold policy by which the chance
that still remained could be utilised.  His energy of will showed
itself in the end in nothing but a resolution to protract bloodshed
after it had certainly become idle.

If we turn to the political conditions, on which, in any but a short
war, so much depends, the South will appear to have had great
advantages.  Its people were more richly endowed than the mixed and
crudely democratic multitude of the North, in the traditional aptitude
for commanding or obeying which enables people to pull together in a
crisis.  And they were united in a cause such as would secure the
sustained loyalty of any ordinary people under any ordinary leader.
For, though it was nothing but slavery that led to their assertion of
independence, from the moment that they found themselves involved in
war, they were fighting for a freedom to which they felt themselves
entitled, and for nothing else whatever.   A few successful encounters
at the start tempted the ordinary Southerner to think himself a better
man than the ordinary Northerner, even as the Southern Congressmen felt
themselves superior to the persons whom the mistaken democracy of the
North too frequently elected.  This claim of independence soon acquired
something of the fierce pride that might have been felt by an ancient
nation.  But it would have been impossible that the Northern people as
a whole should be similarly possessed by the cause in which they
fought.  They did not seem to be fighting for their own liberty, and
they would have hated to think that they were fighting for conquest.
They were fighting for the maintenance of a national unity which they
held dear.  The question how far it was worth fighting a formidable
enemy for the sake of eventual unity with him, was bound to present
itself.  Thus, far from wondering that the cause of the Union aroused
no fuller devotion than it did in the whole lump of the Northern
people, we may wonder that it inspired with so lofty a patriotism men
and women in every rank of life who were able to leaven that lump.  But
the political element in this war was of such importance as to lead to
a startling result; the North came nearest to yielding at a time when
in a military sense its success had become sure.  To preserve a united
North was the greatest and one of the hardest of the duties of
President Lincoln.

To a civilian reader the history of the war, in spite of the
picturesque incidents of many battles, may easily be made dreary.  Till
far on in the lengthy process of subjecting the South, we might easily
become immersed in some futile story of how General X. was superseded
by General Y. in a command, for which neither discovered any purpose
but that of not co-operating with General Z.  And this impression is
not merely due to our failure to understand the difficulties which
confronted these gallant officers.  The dearth of trained military
faculty, which was felt at the outset, could only be made good by the
training which the war itself supplied.  Such commanders as Grant and
Sherman and Sheridan not only could not have been recognised at the
beginning of the war; they were not then the soldiers that they
afterwards became.  And the want was necessarily very serious in the
case of the higher commands which required the movement of large
forces, the control of subordinates each of whom must have a wide
discretion, and the energy of intellect and will necessary for
resolving the more complex problems of strategy.  We are called upon to
admire upon both sides the devotion of forgotten thousands, and to
admire upon the side of the South the brilliant and daring operations
by which in so many battles Lee and Jackson defeated superior forces.
On the Northern side, later on, great generals came to view, but it is
in the main a different sort of achievement which we are called upon to
appreciate.  An Administration appointed to direct a stupendous
operation of conquest was itself of necessity ill prepared for such a
task; behind it were a Legislature and a public opinion equally ill
prepared to support and to assist it.  There were in its military
service many intelligent and many enterprising men, but none, at first,
so combining intelligence and enterprise that he could grapple with any
great responsibility or that the civil power would have been warranted
in reposing complete confidence in him.  The history of the war has to
be recounted in this volume chiefly with a view to these difficulties
of the Administration.

One of the most interesting features of the war would, in any military
study of it, be seen to be the character of the troops on both sides.
On both sides their individual quality was high; on both, circumstances
and the disposition of the people combined to make discipline weak.
This character, common to the two armies, was conspicuous in many
battles of the war, but a larger interest attaches to the policy of the
two administrations in raising and organising their civilian armies.
The Southern Government, if its proceedings were studied in detail,
would probably seem to have been better advised at the start on matters
of military organisation; for instance, it had early and long retained
a superiority in cavalry which was not a mere result of good fortune.
But here, too, there was an inherent advantage in the very fact that
the South had started upon a desperate venture.  There can hardly be a
more difficult problem of detail for statesmen than the co-ordination
of military and civil requirements in the raising of an army.  But in
the South all civil considerations merged themselves in the paramount
necessity of a military success for which all knew the utmost effort
was needed.  The several States of the South, claiming as they did a
far larger independence than the Northern States, knew that they could
only make that claim good by being efficient members of the
Confederacy.  Thus it was comparatively easy for the Confederate
Government to adopt and maintain a consecutive policy in this matter,
and though, from the conditions of a widely spread agricultural
population, voluntary enlistment produced poor results at the beginning
of the war, it appears to have been easy to introduce quite early an
entirely compulsory system of a stringent kind.

The introduction of compulsory service in the North has its place in
our subsequent story.  The system that preceded it need not be dwelt
upon here, because, full of instruction as a technical study of it
(such as has been made by Colonel Henderson) must be, no brief survey
by an amateur could be useful.  It is necessary, however, to understand
the position in which Lincoln's Administration was placed, without much
experience In America, or perhaps elsewhere in the world, to guide it.
It must not be contended, for it cannot be known that the problem was
fully and duly envisaged by Lincoln on his Cabinet, but it would
probably in any case have been impossible for them to pursue from the
first a consecutive and well-thought-out policy for raising an army and
keeping up its strength.  The position of the North differed
fundamentally from that of the South; the North experienced neither the
ardour nor the throes of a revolution; it was never in any fear of
being conquered, only of not conquering.  There was nothing, therefore,
which at once bestowed on the Government a moral power over the country
vastly in excess of that which it exercised in normal times.  This,
however, was really necessary to it if the problem of the Army was to
be handled in the way which was desirable from a military point of
view.  Compulsory service could not at first be thought of.  It was
never supposed that the tiny regular Army of the United States
Government could be raised to any very great size by voluntary
enlistment, and the limited increase of it which was attempted was not
altogether successful.  The existing militia system of the several
States was almost immediately found faulty and was discarded.  A great
Volunteer Force had to be raised which should be under the command of
the President, who by the Constitution is Commander-in-Chief of the
forces of the Union, but which must be raised in each State by the
State Governor (or, if he was utterly wanting, by leading local
citizens).  Now State Governors are not--it must be recalled--officers
under the President, but independent potentates acting usually in as
much detachment from him as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford or Cambridge
from the Board of Education or a Presbyterian minister from a bishop.
This group of men, for the most part able, patriotic, and determined,
were there to be used and had to be consulted.  It follows that the
policy of the North in raising and organising its armies had at first
to be a policy evolved between numerous independent authorities which
never met and were held together by a somewhat ignorant public opinion,
sometimes much depressed and sometimes, which was worse, oversanguine.
It is impossible to judge exactly how ill or how well Lincoln, under
such circumstances, grappled with this particular problem, but many
anomalies which seem to us preposterous--the raising of raw new
regiments when fine seasoned regiments were short of half their
strength, and so forth--were in these circumstances inevitable.  The
national system of recruiting, backed by compulsion, which was later
set up, still required for its success the co-operation of State and
local authorities of this wholly independent character.

Northern and Southern armies alike had necessarily to be commanded to a
great extent by amateur officers; the number of officers, in the
service or retired, who had been trained at West Point, was
immeasurably too small for the needs of the armies.  Amateurs had to be
called in, and not only so, but they had in some cases to be given very
important commands.  The not altogether unwholesome tradition that a
self-reliant man can turn his hand to anything was of course very
strong in America, and the short military annals of the country had
been thought to have added some illustrious instances to the roll of
men of peace who have distinguished themselves in arms.  So a political
leader, no matter whether he was Democrat or Republican, who was a man
of known general capacity, would sometimes at first seem suitable for
an important command rather than the trained but unknown professional
soldier who was the alternative.  Moreover, it seemed foolish not to
appoint him, when, as sometimes happened, he could bring thousands of
recruits from his State.  The Civil War turned out, however, to show
the superiority of the duly trained military mind in a marked degree.
Some West-Pointers of repute of course proved incapable, and a great
many amateur colonels and generals, both North and South, attained a
very fair level of competence in the service (the few conspicuous
failures seem to have been quite exceptional); but, all the same, of
the many clever and stirring men who then took up soldiering as novices
and served for four years, not one achieved brilliant success; of the
generals in the war whose names are remembered, some had indeed passed
years in civil life, but every one had received a thorough military
training in the years of his early manhood.  It certainly does not
appear that the Administration was really neglectful of professional
merit; it hungered to find it; but many appointments must at first have
been made in a haphazard fashion, for there was no machinery for
sifting claims.  A zealous but unknown West-Pointer put under an
outsider would be apt to write as Sherman did in early days: "Mr.
Lincoln meant to insult me and the Army"; and a considerable jealousy
evidently arose between West-Pointers and amateurs.  It was aggravated
by the rivalry between officers of the Eastern army and those of the,
more largely amateur, Western army.  The amateurs, too, had something
to say on their side; they were apt to accuse West-Pointers as a class
of a cringing belief that the South was invincible.  There was nothing
unnatural or very serious in all this, but political influences which
arose later caused complaints of this nature to be made the most of,
and a general charge to be made against Lincoln's Administration of
appointing generals and removing them under improper political
influences.  This general charge, however, rests upon a limited number
of alleged instances, and all of these which are of any importance will
necessarily be examined in later chapters.

It may be useful to a reader who wishes to follow the main course of
the war carefully, if the chief ways in which geographical facts
affected it are here summarised--necessarily somewhat dryly.  Minor
operations at outlying points on the coast or in the Far West will be
left out of account, so also will a serious political consideration,
which we shall later see caused doubt for a time as to the proper
strategy of the North.

It must be noted first, startling as it may be to Englishmen who
remember the war partly by the exploits of the _Alabama_, that the
naval superiority of the North was overwhelming.  In spite of many
gallant efforts by the Southern sailors, the North could blockade their
coasts and could capture most of the Southern ports long before its
superiority on land was established.  Turning then to land, we may
treat the political frontier between the two powers, after a short
preliminary stage of war, as being marked by the southern boundaries of
Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, just as they are seen
on the map to-day.  In doing so, we must note that at the commencement
of large operations parts of Kentucky and Missouri were occupied by
Southern invading forces.  This frontier is cut, not far from the
Atlantic, by the parallel mountain chains which make up the Alleghanies
or Appalachians.  These in effect separated the field of operations
into a narrow Eastern theatre of war, and an almost boundless Western
theatre; and the operations in these two theatres were almost to the
end independent of each other.

In the Eastern theatre of war lies Washington, the capital of the
Union, a place of great importance to the North for obvious reasons,
and especially because if it fell European powers would be likely to
recognise the Confederacy.  It lies, on the Potomac, right upon the
frontier; and could be menaced also in the rear, for the broad and
fertile trough between the mountain chains formed by the valley of the
Shenandoah River, which flows northward to join the Potomac at a point
north-west of Washington, was in Confederate hands and formed a sort of
sally-port by which a force from Richmond could get almost behind
Washington.  A hundred miles south of Washington lay Richmond, which
shortly became the capital of the Confederates, instead of Montgomery
in Alabama.  As a brand-new capital it mattered little to the
Confederates, though at the very end of the war it became their last
remaining stronghold.  The intervening country, which was in Southern
hands, was extraordinarily difficult.  The reader may notice on the map
the rivers with broad estuaries which are its most marked features, and
with the names of which we shall become familiar.  The rivers
themselves were obstacles to an invading Northern army; their
estuaries, on the other hand, soon afforded it safe communication by
sea.

In the Western theatre of war we must remember first the enormous
length of frontier in proportion to the population on either side.
This necessarily made the progress of Northern invasion slow, and its
proper direction hard to determine, for diversions could be created by
a counter-invasion elsewhere along the frontier or a stroke at the
invaders' communications.  The principal feature of the whole region is
the great waterways, on which the same advantages which gave the sea to
the North gave it also an immense superiority in the river warfare of
flotillas of gunboats.  When the North with its gunboats could get
control of the Mississippi the South would be deprived of a
considerable part of its territory and resources, and cut off from its
last means of trading with Europe (save for the relief afforded by
blockade-runners) by being cut off from Mexico and its ports.  Further,
when the North could control the tributaries of the Mississippi,
especially the Cumberland and the Tennessee which flow into the great
river through the Ohio, it would cut deep into the internal
communications of the South.  Against this menace the South could only
contend by erecting powerful fortresses on the rivers, and the capture
of some of them was the great object of the earlier Northern operations.

The railway system of the South must also be taken into account in
connection with their waterways.  This, of course, cannot be seen on a
modern map.  Perhaps the following may make the main points clear.  The
Southern railway system touched the Mississippi and the world beyond it
at three points only: Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans.  A traveller
wishing to go, say, from Richmond by rail towards the West could have,
if distance were indifferent to him, a choice of three routes for part
of the way.  He could go through Knoxville in Tennessee to Chattanooga
in that State, where he had a choice of routes further West, or he
could take one of two alternative lines south into Georgia and thence
go either to Atlanta or to Columbus in the west of that State.  Arrived
at Atlanta or Columbus, he could proceed further West either by making
a detour northwards through Chattanooga or by making a detour
southwards through the seaport town of Mobile, crossing the harbour by
boat.  Thus the capture of Chattanooga from the South would go far
towards cutting the whole Southern railway system in two, and the
capture of Mobile would complete it.  Lastly, we may notice two lines
running north and south through the State of Mississippi, one through
Corinth and Meridian, and the other nearer the great river.  From this
and the course of the rivers the strategic importance of some of the
towns mentioned may be partly appreciated.

The subjugation of the South in fact began by a process, necessarily
slow and much interrupted, whereby having been blockaded by sea it was
surrounded by land, cut off from its Western territory, and deprived of
its main internal lines of communication.  Richmond, against which the
North began to move within the first three months of the war, did not
fall till nearly four years later, when the process just described had
been completed, and when a Northern army had triumphantly progressed,
wasting the resources of the country as it went, from Chattanooga to
Atlanta, thence to the Atlantic coast of Georgia, and thence northward
through the two Carolinas till it was about to join hands with the army
assailing Richmond.  Throughout this time the attention of a large part
of the Northern public and of all those who watched the war from Europe
was naturally fastened to a great extent upon the desperate fighting
which occurred in the region of Washington and of Richmond and upon the
ill success of the North in endeavours of unforeseen difficulty against
the latter city.  We shall see, however, that the long and humiliating
failure of the North in this quarter was neither so unaccountable nor
nearly so important as it appeared.




CHAPTER VIII

THE OPENING OF THE WAR AND LINCOLN'S ADMINISTRATION

1. _Preliminary Stages_.

On the morning after the bombardment of Fort Sumter there appeared a
Proclamation by the President calling upon the Militia of the several
States to furnish 75,000 men for the service of the United States in
the suppression of an "unlawful combination."  Their service, however,
would expire by law thirty days after the next meeting of Congress,
and, in compliance with a further requirement of law upon this subject,
the President also summoned Congress to meet in extraordinary session
upon July 4.  The Army already in the service of the United States
consisted of but 16,000 officers and men, and, though the men of this
force, being less affected by State ties than their officers, remained,
as did the men of the Navy, true almost without exception to their
allegiance, all but 3,000 of them were unavailable and scattered in
small frontier forts in the West.  A few days later, when it became
plain that the struggle might long outlast the three months of the
Militia, the President called for Volunteers to enlist for three years'
service, and perhaps (for the statements are conflicting) some 300,000
troops of one kind and another had been raised by June.

The affair of Fort Sumter and the President's Proclamation at once
aroused and concentrated the whole public opinion of the free States in
the North and, in an opposite sense, of the States which had already
seceded.  The border slave States had now to declare for the one side
or for the other.  Virginia as a whole joined the Southern Confederacy
forthwith, but several Counties in the mountainous region of the west
of that State were strongly for the Union.  These eventually succeeded
with the support of Northern troops in separating from Virginia and
forming the new State of West Virginia.  Tennessee also joined the
South, though in Eastern Tennessee the bulk of the people held out for
the Union without such good fortune as their neighbours in West
Virginia.  Arkansas beyond the Mississippi followed the same example,
though there were some doubt and division in all parts of that State.
In Delaware, where the slaves were very few, the Governor did not
formally comply with the President's Proclamation, but the people as a
whole responded to it.  The attitude of Maryland, which almost
surrounds Washington, kept the Government at the capital in suspense
and alarm for a while, for both the city of Baltimore and the existing
State legislature were inclined to the South.  In Kentucky and Missouri
the State authorities were also for the South, and it was only after a
struggle, and in Missouri much actual fighting, that the Unionist
majority of the people in each State had its way.  The secession of
Virginia had consequences even more important than the loss to the
Union of a powerful State.  General Robert E. Lee, a Virginian, then in
Washington, was esteemed by General Scott to be the ablest officer in
the service.  Lincoln and his Secretary of War desired to confer on him
the command of the Army.  Lee's decision was made with much reluctance
and, it seems, hesitation.  He was not only opposed to the policy of
secession, but denied the right of a State to secede; yet he believed
that his absolute allegiance was due to Virginia.  He resigned his
commission in the United States Army, went to Richmond, and, in
accordance with what Wolseley describes as the prevailing principle
that had influenced most of the soldiers he met in the South, placed
his sword at the disposal of his own State.  The same loyalty to
Virginia governed another great soldier, Thomas J. Jackson, whose
historic nickname, "Stonewall," fails to convey the dashing celerity of
his movements.  While they both lived these two men were to be linked
together in the closest comradeship and mutual trust.  They sprang from
different social conditions and were of contrasting types.  The epithet
Cavalier has been fitly enough applied to Lee, and Jackson, after
conversion from the wild courses of his youth, was an austere Puritan.
To quote again from a soldier's memoirs, Wolseley calls Lee "one of the
few men who ever seriously impressed and awed me with their natural,
their inherent, greatness"; he speaks of his "majesty," and of the
"beauty," of his character, and of the "sweetness of his smile and the
impressive dignity of the old-fashioned style of his address"; "his
greatness," he says, "made me humble."  "There was nothing," he tells
us, "of these refined characteristics in Stonewall Jackson," a man with
"huge hands and feet."  But he possessed "an assured self-confidence,
the outcome of his sure trust in God.  How simple, how humble-minded a
man.  As his impressive eyes met yours unflinchingly, you knew that his
was an honest heart."  To this he adds touches less to be expected
concerning a Puritan warrior, whose Puritanism was in fact inclined to
ferocity--how Jackson's "remarkable eyes lit up for the moment with a
look of real enthusiasm as he recalled the architectural beauty of the
seven lancet windows in York Minster," how "intense" was the
"benignity" of his expression, and how in him it seemed that "great
strength of character and obstinate determination were united with
extreme gentleness of disposition and with absolute tenderness towards
all about him."  Men such as these brought to the Southern cause
something besides their military capacity; but as to the greatness of
that capacity, applied in a war in which the scope was so great for
individual leaders of genius, there is no question.  A civilian reader,
looking in the history of war chiefly for the evidences of personal
quality, can at least discern in these two famous soldiers the moral
daring which in doubtful circumstances never flinches from the
responsibility of a well-considered risk, and, in both their cases as
in those of some other great commanders, can recognise in this rare and
precious attribute the outcome of their personal piety.  We shall
henceforth have to do with the Southern Confederacy and its armies, not
in their inner history but with sole regard to the task which they
imposed upon Lincoln and the North.  But at this parting of the ways a
tribute is due to the two men, pre-eminent among many devoted people,
who, in their soldier-like and unreflecting loyalty to their cause,
gave to it a lustre in which, so far as they can be judged, neither its
statesmen nor its spiritual guides had a share.

There were Virginian officers who did not thus go with their State.  Of
these were Scott himself, and G. H. Thomas; and Farragut, the great
sailor, was from Tennessee.

Throughout the free States of the North there took place a national
uprising of which none who remember it have spoken without feeling anew
its spontaneous ardour.  Men flung off with delight the hesitancy of
the preceding months, and recruiting went on with speed and enthusiasm.
Party divisions for the moment disappeared.  Old Buchanan made public
his adhesion to the Government.  Douglas called upon Lincoln to ask how
best he could serve the public cause, and, at his request, went down to
Illinois to guide opinion and advance recruiting there; so employed,
the President's great rival, shortly after, fell ill and died, leaving
the leadership of the Democrats to be filled thereafter by more
scrupulous but less patriotic men.  There was exultant confidence in
the power of the nation to put down rebellion, and those who realised
the peril in which for many days the capital and the administration
were placed were only the more indignantly determined.  Perhaps the
most trustworthy record of popular emotions is to be found in popular
humorists.  Shortly after these days Artemus Ward, the author who
almost vied with Shakespeare in Lincoln's affections, relates how the
confiscation of his show in the South led him to have an interview with
Jefferson Davis.  "Even now," said Davis, in this pleasant fiction, "we
have many frens in the North."  "J. Davis," is the reply, "there's your
grate mistaik.  Many of us was your sincere frends, and thought certin
parties amung us was fussin' about you and meddlin' with your consarns
intirely too much.  But, J. Davis, the minit you fire a gun at the
piece of dry goods called the Star-Spangled Banner, the North gits up
and rises en massy, in defence of that banner.  Not agin you as
individooals--not agin the South even--but to save the flag.  We should
indeed be weak in the knees, unsound in the heart, milk-white in the
liver, and soft in the hed, if we stood quietly by and saw this glorus
Govyment smashed to pieces, either by a furrin or a intestine foe.  The
gentle-harted mother hates to take her naughty child across her knee,
but she knows it is her dooty to do it.  So we shall hate to whip the
naughty South, but we must do it if you don't make back tracks at onct,
and we shall wallup you out of your boots!"  In the days which
followed, when this prompt chastisement could not be effected and it
seemed indeed as if the South would do most of the whipping, the
discordant elements which mingled in this unanimity soon showed
themselves.  The minority that opposed the war was for a time silent
and insignificant, but among the supporters of the war there were those
who loved the Union and the Constitution and who, partly for this very
reason, had hitherto cultivated the sympathies of the South.
These--adherents mainly of the Democratic party--would desire that
civil war should be waged with the least possible breach of the
Constitution, and be concluded with the least possible social change;
many of them would wish to fight not to a finish but to a compromise.
On the other hand, there were those who loved liberty and hated alike
the slave system of the South and the arrogance which it had
engendered.  These--the people distinguished within the Republican
party as Radicals--would pay little heed to constitutional restraints
in repelling an attack on the Constitution, and they would wish from
the first to make avowed war upon that which caused the war--slavery.
In the border States there was of course more active sympathy with the
South, and in conflict with this the Radicalism of some of these States
became more stalwart and intractable.  To such causes of dissension was
added as time went on sheer fatigue of the war, and strangely enough
this influence was as powerful with a few Radicals as it was with the
ingrained Democratic partisans.  They despaired of the result when
success at last was imminent, and became sick of bloodshed when it
passed what they presumably regarded as a reasonable amount.

It was the task of the Administration not only to conduct the war, but
to preserve the unity of the North in spite of differences and its
resolution in spite of disappointments.  Lincoln was in more than one
way well fitted for this task.  Old experience in Illinois and Kentucky
enabled him to understand very different points of view in regard to
the cause of the South.  The new question that was now to arise about
slavery was but a particular form of the larger question of principle
to which he had long thought out an answer as firm and as definite as
it was moderate and in a sense subtle.  He had, moreover, a quality of
heart which, as it seemed to those near him, the protraction of the
conflict, with its necessary strain upon him, only strengthened.  In
him a tenacity, which scarcely could falter in the cause which he
judged to be right, was not merely pure from bitterness towards his
antagonists, it was actually bound up with a deep-seated kindliness
towards them.  Whatever rank may be assigned to his services and to his
deserts, it is first and foremost in these directions, though not in
these directions alone, that the reader of his story must look for
them.  Upon attentive study he will probably appear as the embodiment,
in a degree and manner which are alike rare, of the more constant and
the higher judgment of his people.  It is plainer still that he
embodied the resolute purpose which underlay the fluctuations upon the
surface of their political life.  The English military historians, Wood
and Edmonds, in their retrospect over the course of the war, well sum
up its dramatic aspect when they say: "Against the great military
genius of certain of the Southern leaders fate opposed the unbroken
resolution and passionate devotion to the Union, which he worshipped,
of the great Northern President.  As long as he lived, and ruled the
people of the North, there could be no turning back."

There are plenty of indications in the literature of the time that
Lincoln's determination soon began to be widely felt and to be
appreciated by common people.  Literally, crowds of people from all
parts of the North saw him, exchanged a sentence or two, and carried
home their impressions; and those who were near him record the constant
fortitude of his bearing, noting as marked exceptions the unrestrained
words of impatience and half-humorous despondency which did on rare
occasions escape him.  In a negative way, too, even the political world
bore its testimony to this; his administration was charged with almost
every other form of weakness, but there was never a suspicion that he
would give in.  Nor again, in the severest criticisms upon him by
knowledgeable men that have been unearthed and collected, does the
suggestion of petty personal aims or of anything but unselfish devotion
ever find a place.  The belief that he could be trusted spread itself
among plain people, and, given this belief, plain people liked him the
better because he was plain.  But if at the distance at which we
contemplate him, and at which from the moment of his death all America
contemplated him, certain grand traits emerge, it is not for a moment
to be supposed that in his life he stood out in front of the people as
a great leader, or indeed as a leader at all, in the manner, say, of
Chatham or even of Palmerston.  Lincoln came to Washington doubtless
with some deep thoughts which other men had not thought, doubtless also
with some important knowledge, for instance of the border States, which
many statesmen lacked, but he came there a man inexperienced in
affairs.  It was a part of his strength that he knew this very well,
that he meant to learn, thought he could learn, did not mean to be
hurried where he had not the knowledge to decide, entirely appreciated
superior knowledge in others, and was entirely unawed by it.  But
Senators and Representatives in Congress and journalists of high
standing, as a rule, perceived the inexperience and not the strength.
The deliberation with which he acted, patiently watching events, saying
little, listening to all sides, conversing with a naivete which was
genuine but not quite artless, seemingly obdurate to the pressure of
wise counsels on one side and on the other--all this struck many
anxious observers as sheer incompetence, and when there was just and
natural cause for their anxiety, there was no established presumption
of his wisdom to set against it.  And this effect was enhanced by what
may be called his plainness, his awkwardness, and actual eccentricity
in many minor matters.  To many intelligent people who met him they
were a grievous stumbling-block, and though some most cultivated men
were not at all struck by them, and were pleased instead by his
"seeming sincere, and honest, and steady," or the like, it is clear
that no one in Washington was greatly impressed by him at first
meeting.  His oddities were real and incorrigible.  Young John Hay,
whom Nicolay, his private secretary, introduced as his assistant, a
humorist like Lincoln himself, but with leanings to literary elegance
and a keen eye for social distinctions, loved him all along and came to
worship him, but irreverent amusement is to be traced in his recently
published letters, and the glimpses which he gives us of "the Ancient"
or "the Tycoon" when quite at home and quite at his ease fully justify
him.  Lincoln had great dignity and tact for use when he wanted them,
but he did not always see the use of them.  Senator Sherman was
presented to the new President.  "So you're John Sherman?" said
Lincoln.  "Let's see if you're as tall as I am.  We'll measure."  The
grave politician, who was made to stand back to back with him before
the company till this interesting question was settled, dimly perceived
that the intention was friendly, but felt that there was a lack of
ceremony.  Lincoln's height was one of his subjects of harmless vanity;
many tall men had to measure themselves against him in this manner, and
probably felt like John Sherman.  On all sorts of occasions and to all
sorts of people he would "tell a little story," which was often enough,
in Lord Lyons' phrase, an "extreme" story.  This was the way in which
he had grown accustomed to be friendly in company; it served a purpose
when intrusive questions had to be evaded, or reproofs or refusals to
be given without offence.  As his laborious and sorrowful task came to
weigh heavier upon him, his capacity for play of this sort became a
great resource to him.  As his fame became established people
recognised him as a humorist; the inevitable "little story" became to
many an endearing form of eccentricity; but we may be sure it was not
so always or to everybody.

"Those," says Carl Schurz, a political exile from Prussia, who did good
service, military and political, to the Northern cause--"those who
visited the White House--and the White House appeared to be open to
whosoever wished to enter--saw there a man of unconventional manners,
who, without the slightest effort to put on dignity, treated all men
alike, much like old neighbours; whose speech had not seldom a rustic
flavour about it; who always seemed to have time for a homely talk and
never to be in a hurry to press business; and who occasionally spoke
about important affairs of State with the same nonchalance--I might
almost say irreverence--with which he might have discussed an every-day
law case in his office at Springfield, Illinois."

Thus Lincoln was very far from inspiring general confidence in anything
beyond his good intentions.  He is remembered as a personality with a
"something" about him--the vague phrase is John Bright's--which widely
endeared him, but his was by no means that "magnetic" personality which
we might be led to believe was indispensable in America.  Indeed, it is
remarkable that to some really good judges he remained always
unimpressive.  Charles Francis Adams, who during the Civil War served
his country as well as Minister in London as his grandfather had done
after the War of Independence, lamented to the end that Seward, his
immediate chief, had to serve under an inferior man; and a more
sympathetic man, Lord Lyons, our representative at Washington, refers
to Lincoln with nothing more than an amused kindliness.  No detail of
his policy has escaped fierce criticism, and the man himself while he
lived was the subject of so much depreciation and condescending
approval, that we are forced to ask who discovered his greatness till
his death inclined them to idealise him.  The answer is that precisely
those Americans of trained intellect whose title to this description is
clearest outside America were the first who began to see beneath his
strange exterior.  Lowell, watching the course of public events with
ceaseless scrutiny; Walt Whitman, sauntering in Washington in the
intervals of the labour among the wounded by which he broke down his
robust strength, and seeing things as they passed with the sure
observation of a poet; Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic,
studying affairs in the thick of them at the outset of the war, and not
less closely by correspondence when he went as Minister to Vienna--such
men when they praised Lincoln after his death expressed a judgment
which they began to form from the first; a judgment which started with
the recognition of his honesty, traced the evidence of his wisdom as it
appeared, gradually and not by repentant impulse learned his greatness.
And it is a judgment large enough to explain the lower estimate of
Lincoln which certainly had wide currency.  Not to multiply witnesses,
Motley in June, 1861, having seen him for the second time, writes: "I
went and had an hour's talk with Mr. Lincoln.  I am very glad of it,
for, had I not done so, I should have left Washington with a very
inaccurate impression of the President.  I am now satisfied that he is
a man of very considerable native sagacity; and that he has an
ingenuous, unsophisticated, frank, and noble character.  I believe him
to be as true as steel, and as courageous as true.  At the same time
there is doubtless an ignorance about State matters, and particularly
about foreign affairs, which he does not attempt to conceal, but which
we must of necessity regret in a man placed in such a position at such
a crisis.  Nevertheless his very modesty in this respect disarms
criticism.  We parted very affectionately, and perhaps I shall never
set eyes on him again, but I feel that, so far as perfect integrity and
directness of purpose go, the country will be safe in his hands."
Three years had passed, and the political world of America was in that
storm of general dissatisfaction in which not a member of Congress
would be known as "a Lincoln man," when Motley writes again from Vienna
to his mother, "I venerate Abraham Lincoln exactly because he is the
true, honest type of American democracy.  There is nothing of the
shabby-genteel, the would-be-but-couldn't-be fine gentleman; he is the
great American Demos, honest, shrewd, homely, wise, humorous, cheerful,
brave, blundering occasionally, but through blunders struggling onwards
towards what he believes the right."  In a later letter he observes,
"His mental abilities were large, and they became the more robust as
the more weight was imposed upon them."

This last sentence, especially if in Lincoln's mental abilities the
qualities of his character be included, probably indicates the chief
point for remark in any estimate of his presidency.  It is true that he
was judged at first as a stranger among strangers.  Walt Whitman has
described vividly a scene, with "a dash of comedy, almost farce, such
as Shakespeare puts in his blackest tragedies," outside the hotel in
New York where Lincoln stayed on his journey to Washington; "his look
and gait, his perfect composure and coolness," to cut it short, the
usually noted marks of his eccentricity, "as he stood looking with
curiosity on that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces returned
the look with similar curiosity, not a single one" among the crowd "his
personal friend."  He was not much otherwise situated when he came to
Washington.  It is true also that in the early days he was learning his
business.  "Why, Mr. President," said some one towards the end of his
life, "you have changed your mind."  "Yes, I have," said he, "and I
don't think much of a man who isn't wiser to-day than he was
yesterday."  But it seems to be above all true that the exercise of
power and the endurance of responsibility gave him new strength.  This,
of course, cannot be demonstrated, but Americans then living, who
recall Abraham Lincoln, remark most frequently how the man grew to his
task.  And this perhaps is the main impression which the slight record
here presented will convey, the impression of a man quite unlike the
many statesmen whom power and the vexations attendant upon it have in
some piteous way spoiled and marred, a man who started by being tough
and shrewd and canny and became very strong and very wise, started with
an inclination to honesty, courage, and kindness, and became, under a
tremendous strain, honest, brave, and kind to an almost tremendous
degree.

The North then started upon the struggle with an eagerness and
unanimity from which the revulsion was to try all hearts, and the
President's most of all; and not a man in the North guessed what the
strain of that struggle was to be.  At first indeed there was alarm in
Washington for the immediate safety of the city.  Confederate flags
could be seen floating from the hotels in Alexandria across the river;
Washington itself was full of rumours of plots and intended
assassinations, and full of actual Southern spies; everything was
disorganised; and Lincoln himself, walking round one night, found the
arsenal with open doors, absolutely unguarded.

By April 20, first the Navy Yard at Gosport, in Virginia, had to be
abandoned, then the Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and on the day of this
latter event Lee went over to the South.  One regiment from
Massachusetts, where the State authorities had prepared for war before
the fall of Sumter, was already in Washington; but it had had to fight
its way through a furious mob in Baltimore, with some loss of life on
both sides.  A deputation from many churches in that city came to the
President, begging him to desist from his bloodthirsty preparations,
but found him "constitutionally genial and jovial," and "wholly
inaccessible to Christian appeals."  It mattered more that a majority
of the Maryland Legislature was for the South, and that the Governor
temporised and requested that no more troops should pass through
Baltimore.  The Mayor of Baltimore and the railway authorities burned
railway bridges and tore up railway lines, and the telegraph wires were
cut.  Thus for about five days the direct route to Washington from the
North was barred.  It seemed as if the boast of some Southern orator
that the Confederate flag would float over the capital by May 1 might
be fulfilled.  Beauregard could have transported his now drilled troops
by rail from South Carolina and would have found Washington isolated
and hardly garrisoned.  As a matter of fact, no such daring move was
contemplated in the South, and the citizens of Richmond, Virginia, were
themselves under a similar alarm; but the South had a real opportunity.

The fall of Washington at that moment would have had political
consequences which no one realised better than Lincoln.  It might well
have led the Unionists in the border States to despair, and there is
evidence that even then he so fully realised the task which lay before
the North as to feel that the loss of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri
would have made it impossible.  He was at heart intensely anxious, and
quaintly and injudiciously relieved his feelings by the remark to the
"6th Massachusetts" that he felt as if all other help were a dream, and
they were "the only real thing."  Yet those who were with him testify
to his composure and to the vigour with which he concerted with his
Cabinet the various measures of naval, military, financial, postal, and
police preparation which the occasion required, but which need not here
be detailed.  Many of the measures of course lay outside the powers
which Congress had conferred on the public departments, but the
President had no hesitation in "availing himself," as he put it, "of
the broader powers conferred by the Constitution in cases of
insurrection," and looking for the sanction of Congress afterwards,
rather than "let the Government at once fall into ruin."  The
difficulties of government were greatly aggravated by the uncertainty
as to which of its servants, civil, naval, or military, were loyal, and
the need of rapidly filling the many posts left vacant by unexpected
desertion.  Meanwhile troops from New England, and also from New York,
which had utterly disappointed some natural expectations in the South
by the enthusiasm of its rally to the Union, quickly arrived near
Baltimore.  They repaired for themselves the interrupted railway tracks
round the city, and by April 25 enough soldiers were in Washington to
put an end to any present alarm.  In case of need, the law of "habeas
corpus" was suspended in Maryland.  The President had no wish that
unnecessary recourse should be had to martial law.  Naturally, however,
one of his generals summarily arrested a Southern recruiting agent in
Baltimore.  The ordinary law would probably have sufficed, and Lincoln
is believed to have regretted this action, but it was obvious that he
must support it when done.  Hence arose an occasion for the old Chief
Justice Taney to make a protest on behalf of legality, to which the
President, who had armed force on his side, could not give way, and
thus early began a controversy to which we must recur.  It was gravely
urged upon Lincoln that he should forcibly prevent the Legislature of
Maryland from holding a formal sitting; he refused on the sensible
ground that the legislators could assemble in some way and had better
not assemble with a real grievance in constitutional law.  Then a
strange alteration came over Baltimore.  Within three weeks all active
demonstration in favour of the South had subsided; the disaffected
Legislature resolved upon neutrality; the Governor, loyal at heart--if
the brief epithet loyal may pass, as not begging any profound legal
question--carried on affairs in the interest of the Union; postal
communication and the passage of troops were free from interruption by
the middle of May; and the pressing alarm about Maryland was over.
These incidents of the first days of war have been recounted in some
detail, because they may illustrate the gravity of the issue in the
border States, in others of which the struggle, though further removed
from observation, lasted longer; and because, too, it is well to
realise the stress of agitation under which the Government had to make
far-reaching preparation for a larger struggle, while Lincoln, whose
will was decisive in all these measures, carried on all the while that
seemingly unimportant routine of a President's life which is in the
quietest times exacting.

The alarm in Washington was only transitory, and it was generally
supposed in the North that insurrection would be easily put down.  Some
even specified the number of days necessary, agreeably fixing upon a
smaller number than the ninety days for which the militia were called
out.  Secretary Seward has been credited with language of this kind,
and even General Scott, whose political judgment was feeble, though his
military judgment was sound, seems at first to have rejected proposals,
for example, for drilling irregular cavalry, made in the expectation of
a war of some length.  There is evidence that neither Lincoln nor
Cameron, the Secretary of War, indulged in these pleasant fancies.
Irresistible public opinion, in the East especially, demanded to see
prompt activity.  The North had arisen in its might; it was for the
Administration to put forth that might, capture Richmond, to which the
Confederate Government had moved, and therewith make an end of
rebellion.  The truth was that the North had to make its army before it
could wisely advance into the assured territory of the South; the
situation of the Southern Government in this respect was precisely the
same.  The North had enough to do meantime in making sure of the States
which were still debatable ground.  Such forces as were available must
of necessity be used for this purpose, but for any larger operations of
war military considerations, especially on the side which had the
larger resources at its back, were in favour of waiting and perfecting
the instrument which was to be used.  But in the course of July the
pressure of public opinion and of Congress, which had then assembled,
overcame, not without some reason, the more cautious military view, and
on the 21st of that month the North received its first great lesson in
adversity at the battle of Bull Run.

Before recounting this disaster we may proceed with the story of the
struggle in the border States.  At an early date the rising armies of
the North had been organised into three commands, called the Department
of the Potomac, on the front between Washington and Richmond, the
Department of the Ohio, on the upper watershed of the river of that
name, and the Department of the West.  Of necessity the generals
commanding in these two more Western Departments exercised a larger
discretion than the general at Washington.  The Department of the Ohio
was under General McClellan, before the war a captain of Engineers, who
had retired from active service and had been engaged as a railway
manager, in which capacity he has already been noticed, but who had
earned a good name in the Mexican War, had been keen enough in his
profession to visit the Crimea, and was esteemed by General Scott.  The
people of West Virginia, who, as has been said, were trying to organise
themselves as a new State, adhering to the Union, were invaded by
forces despatched by the Governor of their old State.  They lay mainly
west of the mountains, and help could reach them up tributary valleys
of the Ohio.  They appealed to McClellan, and the successes quickly won
by forces despatched by him, and afterwards under his direct command,
secured West Virginia, and incidentally the reputation of McClellan.
In Kentucky, further west, the Governor endeavoured to hold the field
for the South with a body known as the State Guard, while Unionist
leaders among the people were raising volunteer regiments for the
North.  Nothing, however, was determined by fighting between these
forces.  The State Legislature at first took up an attitude of
neutrality, but a new Legislature, elected in June, was overwhelmingly
for the Union.  Ultimately the Confederate armies invaded Kentucky, and
the Legislature thereupon invited the Union armies into the State to
expel them, and placed 40,000 Kentucky volunteers at the disposal of
the President.  Thenceforward, though Kentucky, stretching as it does
for four hundred miles between the Mississippi and the Alleghanies,
remained for long a battle-ground, the allegiance of its people to the
Union was unshaken.  But the uncertainty about their attitude continued
till the autumn of 1861, and while it lasted was an important element
in Lincoln's calculations.  (It must be remembered that slavery existed
in Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri.)  In Missouri the strife of
factions was fierce.  Already in January there had been reports of a
conspiracy to seize the arsenal at St. Louis for the South when the
time came, and General Scott had placed in command Captain Nathaniel
Lyon, on whose loyalty he relied the more because he was an opponent of
slavery.  The Governor was in favour of the South--as was also the
Legislature, and the Governor could count on some part of the State
Militia; so Lincoln, when he called for volunteers, commissioned Lyon
to raise them in Missouri.  In this task a Union State Committee in St.
Louis greatly helped him, and the large German population in that city
was especially ready to enlist for the Union.  Many of the German
immigrants of those days had come to America partly for the sake of its
free institutions.  A State Convention was summoned by the Governor to
pass an Ordinance of Secession, but its electors were minded otherwise,
and the Convention voted against secession.  In several encounters
Lyon, who was an intrepid soldier, defeated the forces of the Governor;
in June he took possession of the State capital, driving the Governor
and Legislature away; the State Convention then again assembled and set
up a Unionist Government for the State.  This new State Government was
not everywhere acknowledged; conspiracies in the Southern interest
continued to exist in Missouri; and the State was repeatedly molested
by invasions, of no great military consequence, from Arkansas.  Indeed,
in the autumn there was a serious recrudescence of trouble, in which
Lyon lost his life.  But substantially Missouri was secured for the
Union.  Naturally enough, a great many of the citizens of Missouri who
had combined to save their State to the Union became among the
strongest of the "Radicals" who will later engage our attention.  Many,
however, of the leading men who had done most in this cause, including
the friends of Blair, Lincoln's Postmaster-General, adhered no less
emphatically to the "Conservative" section of the Republicans.


2. _Bull Run_.

Thus, in the autumn of 1861, North and South had become solidified into
something like two countries.  In the month of July, which now concerns
us, this process was well on its way, but it is to be marked that the
whole long tract of Kentucky still formed a neutral zone, which the
Northern Government did not wish to harass, and which perhaps the South
would have done well to let alone, while further west in Missouri the
forces of the North were not even as fully organised as in the East.
So the only possible direction in which any great blow could be struck
was the direction of Richmond, now the capital, and it might seem,
therefore, the heart, of the Confederacy.  The Confederate Congress was
to meet there on July 20.  The _New York Tribune_, which was edited by
Mr. Horace Greeley, a vigorous writer whose omniscience was unabated by
the variation of his own opinion, was the one journal of far-reaching
influence in the North; and it only gave exaggerated point to a general
feeling when it declared that the Confederate Congress must not meet.
The Senators and Congressmen now in Washington were not quite so
exacting, but they had come there unanimous in their readiness to vote
taxes and support the war in every way, and they wanted to see
something done; and they wanted it all the more because the three
months' service of the militia was running out.  General Scott, still
the chief military adviser of Government, was quite distinct in his
preference for waiting and for perfecting the discipline and
organisation of the volunteers, who had not yet even been formed into
brigades.  On the militia he set no value at all.  For long he refused
to countenance any but minor movements preparatory to a later advance.
It is not quite certain, however, that Congress and public opinion were
wrong in clamouring for action.  The Southern troops were not much, if
at all, more ready for use than the Northerners; and Jefferson Davis
and his military adviser, Lee, desired time for their defensive
preparations.  It was perhaps too much to expect that the country after
its great uprising should be content to give supplies and men without
end while nothing apparently happened; and the spirit of the troops
themselves might suffer more from inaction than from defeat.  A further
thought, while it made defeat seem more dangerous, made battle more
tempting.  There was fear that European Powers might recognise the
Southern Confederacy and enter into relations with it.  Whether they
did so depended on whether they were confirmed in their growing
suspicion that the North could not conquer the South.  Balancing the
military advice which was given them as to the risk against this
political importunity, Lincoln and his Cabinet chose the risk, and
Scott at length withdrew his opposition.  Lincoln was possibly more
sensitive to pressure than he afterwards became, more prone to treat
himself as a person under the orders of the people, but there is no
reason to doubt that he acted on his own sober judgment as well as that
of his Cabinet.  Whatever degree of confidence he reposed in Scott,
Scott was not very insistent; the risk was not overwhelming; the battle
was very nearly won, would have been won if the orders of Scott had
been carried out.  No very great harm in fact followed the defeat of
Bull Run; and the danger of inaction was real.  He was probably then,
as he certainly was afterwards, profoundly afraid that the excessive
military caution which he often encountered would destroy the cause of
the North by disheartening the people who supported the war.  That is
no doubt a kind of fear to which many statesmen are too prone, but
Lincoln's sense of real popular feeling throughout the wide extent of
the North is agreed to have been uncommonly sure.  Definite judgment on
such a question is impossible, but probably Lincoln and his Cabinet
were wise.

However, they did not win their battle.  The Southern army under
Beauregard lay near the Bull Run river, some twenty miles from
Washington, covering the railway junction of Manassas on the line to
Richmond.  The main Northern army, under General McDowell, a capable
officer, lay south of the Potomac, where fortifications to guard
Washington had already been erected on Virginian soil.  In the
Shenandoah Valley was another Southern force, under Joseph Johnston,
watched by the Northern general Patterson at Harper's Ferry, which had
been recovered by Scott's operations.  Each of these Northern generals
was in superior force to his opponent.  McDowell was to attack the
Confederate position at Manassas, while Patterson, whose numbers were
nearly double Johnston's, was to keep him so seriously occupied that he
could not join Beauregard.  With whatever excuse of misunderstanding or
the like, Patterson made hardly an attempt to carry out his part of
Scott's orders, and Johnston, with the bulk of his force, succeeded in
joining Beauregard the day before McDowell's attack, and without his
gaining knowledge of this movement.  The battle of Bull Run or Manassas
(or rather the earlier and more famous of two battles so named) was an
engagement of untrained troops in which up to a certain point the high
individual quality of those troops supplied the