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Abraham Lincoln

James Lowell

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Section 1 of 3
Abraham Lincoln
by James Russell Lowell


THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of
South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a
crime whose assured retribution was to leave them either at the
mercy of the nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had
summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful American
opened his morning paper without dreading to find that he had no
longer a country to love and honor.  Whatever the result of the
convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there
would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but
that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct
and tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his
thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would
be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more.  Men
might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless
associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent
up messages of courage and security from every sod of it would
have evaporated beyond recall.  We should be irrevocably cut off
from our past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives
upon whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.

We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism
of our people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the
proportions of national peril.  We felt an only too natural distrust of
immense public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.

That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which
the war was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that the
slackening of public spirit should be proportionate to the previous
over-tension, might well be foreseen by all who had studied human
nature or history.  Men acting gregariously are always in extremes;
as they are one moment capable of higher courage, so they are
liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a matter of
chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or
discouragement.  Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust of
men, than self-deception to suspicion of principles.  The only faith
that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is
woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the statesman needs
something more durable to work in,--must be able to rely on the
deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people, without
which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral than
of material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment.  Would this
fervor of the Free States hold out?  Was it kindled by a just feeling
of the value of constitutional liberty?  Had it body enough to
withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays?
Had our population intelligence enough to comprehend that the
choice was between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of
a government by law and the tussle of misrule by
*pronunciamiento?*  Could a war be maintained without the
ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal
loyalty of principle?  These were serious questions, and with no
precedent to aid in answering them.

At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for the
most anxious apprehension.  A President known to be infected with
the political heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason,
of the Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will
not say of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the
representative of a party whose leaders, with long training in
opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs; an empty treasury
was called on to supply resources beyond precedent in the history
of finance; the trees were yet growing and the iron unmined with
which a navy was to be built and armored; officers without
discipline were to make a mob into an army; and, above all, the
public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced with every vague
hint and every specious argument of despondency by a powerful
faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or actively
hostile.  It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter
element of disintegration and discouragement among a people
where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a
reader of newspapers.  The peddlers of rumor in the North were the
most effective allies of the rebellion.  A nation can be liable to no
more insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly
its electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the
community, till the excited imagination makes every real danger
loom heightened with its unreal double.

And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem
to be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate
relations and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution
were so intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and
uncontrollable contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope
or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of arrangement under
any of the categories of historical precedent, that there were
moments of crisis when the firmest believer in the strength and
sufficiency of the democratic theory of government might well hold
his breath in vague apprehension of disaster.  Our teachers of
political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of some
petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods of
aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward parentheses of
mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable of the
sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-
reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient
of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural
nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always
on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural
almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism.
Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely
from books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton,
who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had
written to *The Times* demanding redress, and drawing a
mournful inference of democratic instability.  Nor were men
wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in
London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European culture,
and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view,
and who, owing all they had an all they were to democracy, thought
it had an air of high-breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that
our bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid
or the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity
against any over-confidence of hope.  A war--which, whether we
consider the expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into
the field, or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be
reckoned the most momentous of modern times--was to be waged
by a people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of peace,
under a chief magistrate without experience and without reputation,
whose every measure was sure to be cunningly hampered by a
jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with
unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile neutrality
abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war.  All this was to be
done without warning and without preparation, while at the same
time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the political
condition of four millions of people, by softening the prejudices,
allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their
unwilling liberators.  Surely, if ever there were an occasion when
the heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny visibly
intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears.
Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three
years; never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that
strength be so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the
people,--to that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of
public opinion possible only under the influence of a political
framework like our own.  We find it hard to understand how even a
foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the combat of ideas
that has been going on here,--to the heroic energy, persistency, and
self-reliance of a nation proving that it knows how much dearer
greatness is than mere power; and we own that it is impossible for
us to conceive the mental and moral condition of the American who
does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by being even a
spectator of such qualities and achievements.  That a steady
purpose and a definite aim have been given to the jarring forces
which, at the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the
discussion of schemes which could only become operative, if at all,
after the war was over; that a popular excitement has been slowly
intensified into an earnest national will; that a somewhat
impracticable moral sentiment has been made the unconscious
instrument of a practical moral end; that the treason of covert
enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been
made not only useless for mischief, but even useful for good; that
the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil
conflict has been prevented from complicating a domestic with a
foreign war;--all these results, any one of which might suffice to
prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense,
the good-humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness, and the
unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it
seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous and
difficult eminence of modern times.  It is by presence of mind in
untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested; it is by
the sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of
truth there may be in an adverse opinion, in order more
convincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that a
reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a fact the force of
argument; it is by a wise forecast which allows hostile combinations
to go so far as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of his
own power, that a politician proves his genius for state-craft; and
especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment that he seems
to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points that he can be firm
without seeming obstinate in essential ones, and thus gain the
advantages of compromise without the weakness of concession; by
so instinctively comprehending the temper and prejudices of a
people as to make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom
of his freedom from temper and prejudice,--it is by qualities such as
these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief in a
commonwealth of freemen.  And it is for qualities such as these that
we firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most
prudent of statesmen and the most successful of rulers.  If we wish
to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the inevitable chaos in
which we should now be weltering, had a weak man or an unwise
one been chosen in his stead.

"Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it;"
and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy.  The
hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the
inexhaustible resources of *prestige,* of sentiment, of superstition,
of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully
create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by
superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by
sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive
sympathy with the national character.  Mr. Lincoln's task was one
of peculiar and exceptional difficulty.  Long habit had accustomed
the American people to the notion of a party in power, and of a
President as its creature and organ, while the more vital fact, that
the executive for the time being represents the abstract idea of
government as a permanent principle superior to all party and all
private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar.  They had so long
seen the public policy more or less directed by views of party, and
often even of personal advantage, as to be ready to suspect the
motives of a chief magistrate compelled, for the first time in our
history, to feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and to
act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that
the first duty of a government is to depend and maintain its own
existence.  Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into
the hands of the opposition by the necessity under which the
administration found itself of applying this old truth to new
relations.  Nor were the opposition his only nor his most dangerous
opponents.

The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in which
ethics were more directly and visibly mingled with politics than
usual.  Their leaders were trained to a method of oratory which
relied for its effect rather on the moral sense than the
understanding.  Their arguments were drawn, not so much from
experience as from general principles of right and wrong.  When the
war came, their system continued to be applicable and effective, for
here again the reason of the people was to be reached and kindled
through their sentiments.  It was one of those periods of
excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last,
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
*country, human rights, democracy,* a meaning and a force beyond
that of sober and logical argument.  They were convictions,
maintained and defended by the supreme logic of passion.  That
penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make
their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind.  What is called the
great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something
which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or
the most brutish unreason.  But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be
warmed over into anything better than cant,--and phrases, when
once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has
ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables
them to supplant reason in hasty minds.  Among the lessons taught
by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more striking than
this, that you may make everything else out of the passions of men
except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so
pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into
dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain of sentiment
over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction; and perhaps
the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a tendency of
his own supporters which chimed with his own private desires,
while wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be wise
policy.

The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable
to be passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to
be laid to heart.  Never did a President enter upon office with less
means at his command, outside his own strength of heart and
steadiness of understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people,
and so winning it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln.  All that was known
of him was that he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his
*availability,*--that is, because he had no history,--and chosen by a
party with whose more extreme opinions he was not in sympathy.
It might well be feared that a man past fifty, against whom the
ingenuity of hostile partisans could rake up no accusation, must be
lacking in manliness of character, in decision of principle, in
strength of will; that a man who was at best only the representative
of a party, and who yet did not fairly represent even that, would fail
of political, much more of popular, support.  And certainly no one
ever entered upon office with so few resources of power in the
past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as Mr.
Lincoln.  Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as
President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous, minority,
that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and even in the party
that elected him there was also a large minority that suspected him
of being secretly a communicant with the church of Laodicea.(1)
All he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side; all
that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness and
backsliding by the other.  Meanwhile he was to carry on a truly
colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the country
from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbed
by the help or the hindrance of either, and to win from the crowning
dangers of his administration, in the confidence of the people, the
means of his safety and their own.  He has contrived to do it, and
perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so firm
in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration.

(1) See *Revelation,* chapter 3, verse 15.

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly so.  He laid
down no programme which must compel him to be either
inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which
circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless to his
ends.  He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's motto, *Le temps et
moi.*(1)   The *moi,* to be sure, was not very prominent at first;
but it has grown more and more so, till the world is beginning to be
persuaded that it stands for a character of marked individuality and
capacity for affairs.  Time was his prime-minister, and, we began to
think, at one period, his general-in-chief also.  At first he was so
slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress but
in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took the
breath away from those who think there is no getting on safety
while there is a spark of fire under the boilers.  God is the only
being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to
seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he
needs.  Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career,
though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise,
has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment
brought up all his reserves.  *Semper nocuit differre paratis,*(2) is
a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure to
know when he is *not* ready, and be firm against all persuasion
and reproach till he is.

(1) Time and I.   Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis
XIV. of France.  Time, Mazarin said, was his prime-minister.
(2)  It is always bad for those who are ready to put off action.

One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on
Mr. Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in
principle, that the chief object of a statesman should be rather to
proclaim his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their
triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends.  In our opinion, there is
no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid *doctrinaire,*
nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of
policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies.  True, there is a
popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose
commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful
pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the men
who control circumstances, as it is called, are those who have
learned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerve
to turn them to account at the happy instant.  Mr. Lincoln's perilous
task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids,
making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and
the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to
run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his
setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that.
He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness
of eye will bring him out right at last.

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might be drawn
between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern
history,--Henry IV. of France.  The career of the latter may be more
picturesque, as that of a daring captain always is; but in all its
vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that sudden
change, as by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the attorney's office in a
country town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation in times like
these.  The analogy between the characters and circumstances of
the two men is in many respects singularly close.  Succeeding to a
rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's chief material dependence
was the Huguenot party, whose doctrines sat upon him with a
looseness distasteful certainly, if not suspicious, to the more
fanatical among them.  King only in name over the greater part of
France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet gradually
became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party that
he was the only centre of order and legitimate authority round
which France could reorganize itself.  While preachers who held the
divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with
declamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to the
heretic dog of Bearnois,(1)--much as our *soi-disant* Democrats
have lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and
denouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Independence,--
Henry bore both parties in hand till he was convinced that only one
course of action could possibly combine his own interests and those
of France.  Meanwhile the Protestants believed somewhat
doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat
doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned aside
remonstrance, advice and curiosity alike with a jest or a proverb (if
a little *high,* he liked them none the worse), joking continually as
his manner was.  We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously
compared to Sancho Panza by persons incapable of appreciating
one of the deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romance
ever written; namely, that, while Don Quixote was incomparable in
theoretic and ideal statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock of
proverbs, the ready money of human experience, made the best
possible practical governor.  Henry IV. was as full of wise saws and
modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the
thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly earnest man, around
whom the fragments of France were to gather themselves till she
took her place again as a planet of the first magnitude in the
European system.  In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate
than Henry.  However some may think him wanting in zeal, the
most fanatical can find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his,
nor can the most bitter charge him with being influenced by motives
of personal interest.  The leading distinction between the policies of
the two is one of circumstances.  Henry went over to the nation;
Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation over to him.  One left a
united France; the other, we hope and believe, will leave a reunited
America.  We leave our readers to trace the further points of
difference and resemblance for themselves, merely suggesting a
general similarity which has often occurred to us.  One only point of
melancholy interest we will allow ourselves to touch upon.  That
Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from certain
English tourists who would consider similar revelations in regard to
Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in the want of
*bienseance.*   It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitness
for the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is certainly as
fortunate as Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trust
contemporary evidence.  Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with
Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all
deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or
see in it any reason why he should govern Americans the less
wisely.

(1) One of Henry's titles was Prince of Bearn, that being the old
province of France from which he came.
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