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Abraham Lincoln
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.*