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Abraham Lincoln

James Lowell

People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are
glad that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us
forever from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs
a man whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the very
earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much
truth, how much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await the
call of opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justice
of God and the worth of man.  Conventionalities are all very well in
their proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of nature like
stubble in the fire.  The genius that sways a nation by its arbitrary
will seems less august to us than that which multiplies and
reinforces itself in the instincts and convictions of an entire people.
Autocracy may have something in it more melodramatic than this,
but falls far short of it in human value and interest.

Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improved
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,
which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and
great powers, at least demands the long and steady application of
the best powers of such men as it can command to master even its
first principles.  It is curious, that, in a country which boasts of its
intelligence the theory should be so generally held that the most
complicated of human contrivances, and one which every day
becomes more complicated, can be worked at sight by any man able
to talk for an hour or two without stopping to think.

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-made
ruler.  But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that he
was a man of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of
wisdom, he had in his profession a training precisely the opposite of
that to which a partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyer
compelled him not only to see that there is a principle underlying
every phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always two
sides to every question, both of which must be fully understood in
order to understand either, and that it is of greater advantage to an
advocate to appreciate the strength than the weakness of his
antagonist's position.  Nothing is more remarkable than the unerring
tact with which, in his debate with Mr. Douglas, he went straight to
the reason of the question; nor have we ever had a more striking
lesson in political tactics than the fact, that opposed to a man
exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice and bigotry to his
purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to those baser
motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of barbarians, he
should yet have won his case before a jury of the people.  Mr.
Lincoln was as far as possible from an impromptu politician.  His
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as of men;
his sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honest
acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that the
only durable triumph of political opinion is based, not on any
abstract right, but upon so much of justice, the highest attainable at
any given moment in human affairs, as may be had in the balance of
mutual concession.  Doubtless he had an ideal, but it was the ideal
of a practical statesman,--to aim at the best, and to take the next
best, if he is lucky enough to get even that.  His slow, but singularly
masculine, intelligence taught him that precedent is only another
name for embodied experience, and that it counts for even more in
the guidance of communities of men than in that of the individual
life.  He was not a man who held it good public economy to pull
down on the mere chance of rebuilding better.  Mr. Lincoln's faith
in God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom
of man.  perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that more than
anything else won him the unlimited confidence of the people, for
they felt that there would be no need of retreat from any position he
had deliberately taken.  The cautious, but steady, advance of his
policy during the war was like that of a Roman army.  He left
behind him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; he
took America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied,
and his advanced posts became colonies.  The very homeliness of
his genius was its distinction.  His kingship was conspicuous by its
workday homespun.  Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little
conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the
people.  With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness
touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there
was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action.  He seems to
have had one rule of conduct, always that of practical and
successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they
were sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by what
seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at
the desirable, a longer road.

Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and
more permanent concerns.  But it is on the understanding, and not
on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the
tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly
is not true of governments.  It is by a multitude of such
considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that
the framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable and
therefore wise.  The imputation of inconsistency is one to which
every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later
subject himself.  The foolish and the dead alone never change their
opinion.  The course of a great statesman resembles that of
navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of
concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men
soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost
imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at
direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and
sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human
commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.  It is
loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and
opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the
anchored cling to solid principles of duty and action, which knows
how to swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it,--that we
demand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a
conscientious persistency in what is impracticable.  For the
impracticable, however theoretically enticing, is always politically
unwise, sound statesmanship being the application of that prudence
to the public business which is the safest guide in that of private
men.

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

It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and
repeated here by people who measure their country rather by what
is thought of it than by what is, that our war has not been distinctly
and avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for the
preservation of our national power and greatness, in which the
emancipation of the negro has been forced upon us by
circumstances and accepted as a necessity.  We are very far from
denying this; nay, we admit that it is so far true that we were slow
to renounce our constitutional obligations even toward those who
had absolved us by their own act from the letter of our duty.  We
are speaking of the government which, legally installed for the
whole country, was bound, so long as it was possible, not to
overstep the limits of orderly prescription, and could not, without
abnegating its own very nature, take the lead off a Virginia reel.
They forgot, what should be forgotten least of all in a system like
ours, that the administration for the time being represents not only
the majority which elects it, but the minority as well,--a minority in
this case powerful, and so little ready for emancipation that it was
opposed even to war.  Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as general
agent of the an anti-slavery society, but President of the United
States, to perform certain functions exactly defined by law.
Whatever were his wishes, it was no less duty than policy to mark
out for himself a line of action that would not further distract the
country, by raising before their time questions which plainly would
soon enough compel attention, and for which every day was making
the answer more easy.

Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new Sphinx, or be
devoured.  Though Mr. Lincoln's policy in this critical affair has not
been such as to satisfy those who demand an heroic treatment for
even the most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat
according to their cloth, unless they can borrow the scissors of
Atropos,(1) it has been at least not unworthy of the long-headed
king of Ithaca.(2)  Mr. Lincoln had the choice of Bassanio(3)
offered him.  Which of the three caskets held the prize that was to
redeem the fortunes of the country?  There was the golden one
whose showy speciousness might have tempted a vain man; the
silver of compromise, which might have decided the choice of a
merely acute one; and the leaden,--dull and homely-looking, as
prudence always is,--yet with something about it sure to attract the
eye of practical wisdom.  Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision
perhaps longer than seemed needful to those on whom its awful
responsibility was not to rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of
his cautious but sure-footed understanding.  The moral of the
Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in the childish simplicity of
the solution.  Those who fail in guessing it, fail because they are
over-ingenious, and cast about for an answer that shall suit their
own notion of the gravity of the occasion and of their own dignity,
rather than the occasion itself.

In a matter which must be finally settled by public opinion, and in
regard to which the ferment of prejudice and passion on both sides
has not yet subsided to that equilibrium of compromise from which
alone a sound public opinion can result, it is proper enough for the
private citizen to press his own convictions with all possible force
of argument and persuasion; but the popular magistrate, whose
judgment must become action, and whose action involves the whole
country, is bound to wait till the sentiment of the people is so far
advanced toward his own point of view, that what he does shall find
support in it, instead of merely confusing it with new elements of
division.  It was not unnatural that men earnestly devoted to the
saving of their country, and profoundly convinced that slavery was
its only real enemy, should demand a decided policy round which all
patriots might rally,--and this might have been the wisest course for
an absolute ruler.  But in the then unsettled state of the public mind,
with a large party decrying even resistance to the slaveholders'
rebellion as not only unwise, but even unlawful; with a majority,
perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long accustomed to regard
the Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to the South their own
judgment as to policy and instinct as to right, that they were in
doubt at first whether their loyalty were due to the country or to
slavery; and with a respectable body of honest and influential men
who still believed in the possibility of conciliation,--Mr. Lincoln
judged wisely, that, in laying down a policy in deference to one
party, he should be giving to the other the very fulcrum for which
their disloyalty had been waiting.

(1) One of the three Fates.
(2) Odysseus, or Ulysses, the hero of Homer's Odyssey.
(3) See Shakespeare's *Merchant of Venice.*
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