An Estimate of Abraham Lincoln
(The Editor of a Northern magazine applied to me for an article on Abraham Lincoln.
After some hesitation, I decided to comply with the request. In doing so, my rule of SAYING WHAT I THINK was followed. Mr. Lincoln was “sized up”, just as I would try to measure the proportions of Cromwell, of Robert Bruce or of Gladstone, or any other historical character.
But the Northern editor was “afraid” my article would stir up “sectional feeling.” He, therefore, returned it with the polite letter which follows.
Whosoever reads this rejected Lincoln article, which the Jeffersonian Magazine now presents, will probably feel some surprise that so liberal an estimate of Mr. Lincoln was ruled out, as contraband, by a non-political Northern magazine.
It is proper for me to say that so much of the article as follows the paragraph in which the South’s feeling toward Mr. Lincoln is expressed, was written after the MS came back. Even with these additions, I fear that my Northern brother would have been afraid to publish my estimate of Lincoln.
“New York, November 21, 1908.
“The Hon. Thomas E. Watson,
“Dear Sir: We have read your estimate of Abraham Lincoln. We tried our best to figure out some way by which it could be shaped around in a manner that would be suitable for our magazine. You see, first of all, in dealing with Lincoln or any Civil War subject we cannot afford in any way to stir up sectional feeling. I am afraid your article is open to criticism in this respect. If you were only in New York, and we could go over this thing personally, I have no doubt but what we might frame up an article that would be mutually satisfactory. The time is so limited that I suppose we will just have to give it up. Yours very truly,
Editorial Department.”)
When the editor of —— Magazine applied to me for an article on Abraham Lincoln, my first inclination was to decline the commission. Although it is high time that some one should strike a note of sanity in the universal laudation of Mr. Lincoln, a Southern man is not, perhaps, the proper person to do it. On further consideration, however, it occurred to me that my position was radically different from that of any other public man in the South. People on the other side of Mason and Dixon’s line cannot be ignorant or oblivious of the fact that for the last twenty years I have waged warfare upon the Bourbonism of my own section and the narrowness of my own people. In every possible way I have appealed to them to rise above sectional prejudice and party bigotry. While I, myself, have suffered terribly during this long series of years, some good has followed my work. Twenty years ago, a white man in the South who openly professed himself a member of the Republican party was socially ostracised. Every one realizes how completely that state of things has been revolutionized,—we see it in the heavy Republican vote cast in Southern States in the recent election; we see it in the ovations given to Mr. Roosevelt and to Mr. Taft in the Southern cities.
My part in bringing about this change for the better is so well known in the North that no well informed man or woman will attribute to sectionalism anything in my estimate of Mr. Lincoln which may appear to be harsh or unjust.
Let us see to what extent the adulation of Mr. Lincoln has gone.
In Harper’s Weekly for November 7th, 1908, a British gentleman of the name of P. D. Ross offers to amend the high estimate which Colonel Harvey had already placed upon Mr. Lincoln by classing our martyred President as “The greatest man the world has produced.” Colonel Harvey soberly accepts the amendment,—thus Miss Ida Tarbell is left far behind, and Hay and Nicolay eclipsed.
One of the more recent biographers of Mr. Lincoln hotly denounced as untrue the statement that “He used to sit around and tell anecdotes like a traveling man.”
Do we not all remember how, as children, we were fascinated with the story of “The Scottish Chiefs”, by Miss Jane Porter? Did not the Sir William Wallace of that good lady’s romance appeal to us as a perfect hero, an ideal knight, exemplifying in himself the loftiest type of chivalry? Yet, when we grew to be older, we were not surprised to learn that Sir Walter Scott—certainly a good judge of such matters, and certainly a patriotic Scotchman—wrathfully and contemptuously found fault with Miss Porter because she had made “a fine gentleman” out of a great, rugged, national hero. Every well balanced American, North and South, ought to feel the same way toward those authors who take Abraham Lincoln into their hands, dress him up, tone him down, polish him and change him until he is no longer the same man.
The outpouring of Lincolnian eulogy which will greet the country in February will probably be all of a sort—indiscriminate praise—each orator and speaker straining and struggling to carry the high water mark of laudation higher than it has ever yet gone.
Let us study Mr. Lincoln with an earnest desire to find out what he was. Let it be remembered that the biography of him written by his law partner, Mr. Herndon, was that biography in which the best picture of him might have been expected. His law partner was his friend, personally and politically. It was that law partner who converted him to abolitionism. To the task of writing the biography of the deceased member of the firm, Mr. Herndon brought devotion to the memory of a man whom he had respected and loved; yet, being honest, he told the truth about Mr. Lincoln,—painting his portrait with the warts on. The fact that this record, written by a sorrowing friend, was destroyed, and a spurious, after-thought Herndon biography put in its place, must always be a fact worthy of serious consideration.
I can imagine one of the reasons for the suppression of Herndon’s original manuscript when I note, with amusement, the vigor and indignation with which a later biographer defends Mr. Lincoln from the terrible accusation of “sitting around and telling anecdotes to amuse a crowd.”
Those who take the least pains to ascertain the facts as to Mr. Lincoln’s story telling habits soon convince themselves that nothing said upon the subject could well be an exaggeration. In his day, the broadest, vulgarest anecdotes were current in the South and West, and thousands of public men, who ought to have been ashamed of themselves for doing so, made a practice of repeating these stories to juries in the court house, to crowds on the hustings, and to groups in the streets, stores and hotels.
Upon one occasion, while I was in conversation with Thomas H. Tibbles, a surviving personal acquaintance of John Brown and Abraham Lincoln, I interrogated him eagerly as to both. Directing his attention to this matter of Mr. Lincoln’s alleged fondness for the relation of smutty stories, Mr. Tibbles very promptly replied that the very first time he ever saw Mr. Lincoln he was directed to his room in the hotel by a series of bursts of loud laughter. Mr. Tibbles’ curiosity was aroused by the continuous hilarity which resounded from this particular room and he went to it. There he found a great, long, raw-boned man seated in a chair with his big feet up on the table, telling smutty yarns to a circle of men who were exploding with laughter at the end of each story.
Every man must be judged by the standards of his time. People of elegance and refinement, according to the standards of the Elizabethan age, listened to comedies which were considered in good taste then, but which would not be tolerated in any decent community now. The manners of the West and of the rural South in Mr. Lincoln’s day, were quite different from what they are now. Even now, however, there are men who call themselves gentlemen, and women who think they are ladies, that make a specialty of cultivating a talent for the relation of doubtful stories. The fact that Mr. Lincoln let his gift of entertainment and his fondness for the humorous lead him down to the low plane of his audience does not by any means indicate a defect of heart or mind. As a lawyer and as a politician, it was a part of his business to cultivate popularity. He made friends in just such circles as that into which Mr. Tibbles walked. The men who laughed with Mr. Lincoln, enjoying the inimitable way in which he related anecdotes, naturally warmed to him, and they gave him verdicts and votes.
Mr. P. D. Ross, Editor of the Ottawa (Canada) National, claims that Mr. Lincoln was “The greatest man the world has produced”, and the editor of Harper’s Weekly soberly falls into line.
Well, there should be some standard by which one is enabled to measure a man’s greatness. Mr. Lincoln was a lawyer, a statesman, and a chief magistrate of a republic. In each of these capacities let us see what was his rank.
Does any one claim that he was the greatest lawyer that ever lived? Surely not. There is not the slightest doubt that Mr. Lincoln was a famous verdict getter. He could do about as much with a jury as any advocate in the West, but he certainly never won any court house victories that were more famous than those of Dan Voorhees, Emory Storrs, Bob Ingersoll, Matt Carpenter, Sargent Prentiss, Robert Toombs and of scores of other lawyers who could easily be named. In knowledge of the law, force of mental power of the judicial sort,—such as Chief Justice John Marshall and Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate had,—does anybody for a moment claim that Mr. Lincoln out-ranks all other lawyers? Surely not. He is not to be named in the same class as Reverdy Johnson, Jeremiah Black, or Senator Edmunds, Charles O’Connor,—to say nothing of Jeremiah Mason, of Massachusetts, and Luther Martin, of Maryland, William Pinckney, of the same State, and Edmund Randolph, of Virginia.
Mr. Lincoln served in Congress. Did he cut any figure there? None whatever. He appeared to be out of his element. His Congressional record is not to be compared to that of Thaddeus Stevens or Stephen A. Douglas. We look into the lives of such men as Benjamin Franklin, the elder Adams, of Thomas Jefferson, of Clay, Calhoun and Webster, of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, and there is no trouble in finding their foot-prints on the sands of time; but in the achievements of statesmanship where are the foot-prints of Mr. Lincoln? You will look into the statute-books in vain to find them. We have a great financial policy, born of the creative, forceful statesmanship of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay; we have a great protective system, owing its origin to the same two statesmen; we have a great homestead policy, which owes its birth to Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee; we have a great national policy of internal improvements, but Mr. Lincoln was not its father. Consequently, there is not a single national line of policy which owes its paternity to this statesman whom Mr. Ross classes as “The greatest man the world has produced.”
In the State of Illinois, compare Mr. Lincoln’s work with Mr. Jefferson’s work in the State of Virginia. Did Mr. Lincoln leave his impress any where upon the established order in Illinois? I have never heard of it. In Virginia, Jefferson found the church and state united, both taxing the people and dividing the spoils. Mr. Jefferson divorced the church from the state, confiscated the church’s ill-gotten wealth, devoting it to charitable and educational purposes; and put an end to legalized religious intolerance. In Virginia there was a land monopoly, perpetuated by entails and primogenitures. Mr. Jefferson made war upon it, broke it up, and thus overthrew the local aristocracy. He formulated a school system and established in America its first modern college. Can anything which Mr. Lincoln, the statesman, did in Illinois compare with Mr. Jefferson’s work in Virginia?
So far as national statesmanship is concerned, Mr. Lincoln is not to be classed with either of “The Great Trio”, nor with Mr. Jefferson, nor with Alexander Hamilton. Each of the five named were statesmen of the first order, possessing original, creative ability in that field of work. There is no evidence whatever that Mr. Lincoln possessed that talent.
It must be, then, as chief magistrate of the republic that he won the title of “great.” That, in fact, is the case. He was a great chief executive. As such, he deserves immortality. Because he sealed his work with his life-blood, his memory will always be sacred. But, is it absolutely certain that no other American would have succeeded in piloting the vessel of state through the storm of the Civil War? Is it quite certain that Stephen A. Douglas, himself, would not have succeeded where Mr. Lincoln succeeded? Who knows and can dogmatically say that Thaddeus Stevens or Oliver Morton, or Zach Chandler, or Ben Wade could not have done it? What was it that Mr. Lincoln did during the Civil War that was so much greater and grander than what might have been expected from Andrew Jackson in the same crisis? Somehow I fail to see it. He did not lose courage, but there were brave men before Agamemnon, and the world has never been lacking in heroic types that stand forth and meet emergencies.
In studying Mr. Lincoln’s course during the Civil War we can discover a great deal of patience, a great deal of tact, a great deal of diplomacy, a great deal of determination to win, a great deal of consecration to patriotic duty. He struck the right key-note when he said that he was fighting not to free the negroes but to preserve the Union. This insight into the situation which enabled him to take the strongest possible position showed political genius of a high order. This alone would entitle him to be classed as a great statesman, a great chief magistrate, a great national leader.
When we calmly reflect upon what he had to do, and the means which were at his command for doing it, we see nothing in the result that borders upon the miraculous. All the advantage was on his side. The fire-eaters of the South played into his hands beautifully. They were so very blind to what was necessary for their success that they even surrendered possession of Washington City, when they might just as well have held it and rushed their troops to it, thus making sure not only of Baltimore, but of the whole State of Maryland—to say nothing of the enormous moral advantage of holding possession of the capital of the nation. It was a clever strategy which, while talking peace, adopted those measures which compelled the Confederate authorities to fire upon the flag at Fort Sumter. But that most effective bit of strategy appears to have had its birth in the fertile brain of William H. Seward. The diplomacy which kept dangling before the eyes of the border states the promise to pay for the slaves until the necessity of duping the waverers had passed, was clever in its way; but there is no evidence that the fine Italian hand of Mr. Seward was not in this policy also.
After the battle of Bull Run, Congress passed a resolution declaring that the war was being waged for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, and that the Federal Government had no intention of interfering with slavery. This was subtle politics and it had the desired effect upon the doubtful Southern States; but there is no evidence that Mr. Lincoln was the first to suggest the resolution.
Was Mr. Lincoln sincere in making the beautiful and touching plea for peace, in his first inaugural? Unquestionably. Yet he would make no concessions, nor encourage any efforts at reconciliation. He opposed the Crittenden Compromise, which demanded no sacrifice of principle by the North and which surrendered much that had been claimed by the South. Of the 1,200,000 square miles of public domain, the Southern leaders offered to close 900,000 square miles to slavery, leaving it to the people of the remaining 300,000 square miles to decide for or against slavery when they came to frame their state constitutions. Democrats, North and South, favored this Compromise. The Republicans rejected it. Then, the last hope of peaceable settlement was gone.
Mr. Lincoln threw his influence as President-elect against the Peace Congress, and rejected the South’s offer to adjust the sectional differences by a restoration and extension of the old Missouri Compromise line.
The proclamation in which Mr. Lincoln assured the seceding states that slavery should not be disturbed provided the insurgents laid down their arms by the 1st of January, 1863, proves that Mr. Lincoln is not entitled to the very great credit that is given him for signing the Emancipation Act. Mr. Lincoln was never a rabid abolitionist, and was an eleventh hour man, at that; he bore none of the brunt of the pioneers’ fight; he could show no such scars as Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison and Cassius M. Clay carried; he never ran the risk of becoming a martyr, like Lovejoy; he stood aside, a good Whig, until the abolition movement was sweeping his own section, and then he fell into line with it like a practical, sensible, adjustable politician. He himself joked about the manner in which Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade and Charles Sumner nagged at him from week to week, and month to month, because of his luke-warmness in the matter of emancipation. Of and concerning those three more rabid abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln told his somewhat celebrated anecdote of the little Sunday School boy and those “same three damn fellows, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.”
Not until it became a military necessity to do it, did Mr. Lincoln sign the Emancipation Act. Therefore, his hand having been forced by military policy rather than by the dictates of philanthropy, it does not seem just to class him with the crusaders of the abolition government.
If he meant what he said in his famous letter to Alexander H. Stephens, if he meant what he said even in his last inaugural,—to say nothing of the first,—it was never Lincoln’s intention to go farther than to combat the South in her efforts to extend slavery into the free states and territories.
In guiding the non-seceding states through the perils of civil strife, Mr. Lincoln’s position was never so difficult as was that of Mazarin, nor that of Richelieu; not so difficult as that of Cromwell; not so difficult as that of William the Silent, or William of Orange, and very much less difficult than that of the younger Pitt,-“the pilot that weathered the storm” of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Mr. Lincoln’s achievements as chief magistrate and as a statesman certainly do not outrank those of George Washington, nor even those of Cavour, to whom modern Italy owes her existence; nor of Bismarck, creator of the German Empire. Finally, it should be remembered that the South was combating the Spirit of the Age and the Conscience of Mankind. This fact lightened Mr. Lincoln’s task, immensely.
How do the people of the South feel toward Lincoln? Kindly. We honor his memory. We think that he was broad-minded, free from vindictiveness, free from sectionalism, free from class-hatred. We think he was a strong man, a sagacious man, and a very determined man. We have always regarded his assassination as the worst blow the South got after Appomattox. We think that he, alone, could have stemmed the torrent of sectional hatred, and could have worked out a simple plan of restoring the seceding states to the Union which would have reunited the family without that carnival of debauchery and crime known as the “Reconstruction period.”
We think that the man who made the appeal to the South which he made in his first inaugural, and the man who at Gettysburg, soon after the battle, praised the courage of the troops who made the effort to storm such heights as those, and who on the night of Lee’s surrender called upon the bands to play “Dixie,” was not a bitter partizan of the Thaddeus Stevens stripe, who, after the guns had been stacked and the flags furled, would have used all of the tremendous and irresistible power of the Federal Government to humiliate, outrage, despoil and drive to desperation a people who were already in the dust.
It is not true that Mr. Lincoln offered generous terms to the South at the Hampton Roads Conference. He did not say to the Confederate Commissioners, “Write the word ‘Union’ first and you may write whatever you please after that.”
It is not true that he offered payment for the slaves.
The official reports made to both Governments, as well as Mr. Stephens’ story of the celebrated Conference, conclusively prove that Mr. Lincoln demanded the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy as a preliminary to any discussion of terms.
In fact, at the close of the Conference of four hours, Mr. R. M. T. Hunter, one of the Confederate Commissioners, feelingly complained of the harshness and humiliation involved in the “unconditional surrender” demanded of the seceding states.
Mr. Lincoln declined to commit himself, officially, to the proposition that the South, by laying down her arms and submitting to the restoration of the national authority throughout her limits, could resume her former relations to the Government. Personally, he thought she could. He refused officially to commit himself on the subject of paying the slave-owners for their slaves. Personally, he was willing to be taxed for that purpose, and he believed that the Northern people held the same views. He knew of some who favored a Congressional appropriation of $400,000,000 for that purpose. But give any pledges? Oh, no. The Confederacy must first abolish itself,—then there would be a discussion of terms!
Fort Fisher, North Carolina, had recently fallen; the Confederacy was reeling under the shock of repeated disaster, the thin battle lines of the Gray were almost exhausted,—and Mr. Lincoln was now certain that secession was doomed.
In the “Recollections” of J. R. Gilmore, there is a curious account of an informal mission undertaken by himself and Col. J. F. Jaquess for the purpose of ending the war. According to Gilmore, he went to Washington, had an interview with Mr. Lincoln, and drew from him a statement of the terms which he was willing to offer the Confederate Government.
The gist of his several propositions was that the Confederacy should dissolve, the armies disband, the seceding states acknowledge national authority and come back into Congress with their representatives, that slavery should be abolished and that $500,000,000 be paid the South for the slaves. This was in June 1864.
Gilmore and Colonel Jaquess were given passage through the lines, went to Richmond and saw Mr. Davis. After listening to the unofficial proposals of the self-appointed envoys, Mr. Davis declared that the South was not struggling to maintain slavery, but to make good “our right to govern ourselves.”
As the terms offered took away this fundamental right from the South, Mr. Davis declined to treat.
How hopeless, at that time, must have seemed the cause for which Jefferson Davis stood! How eternally assured that of Mr. Lincoln! Yet, see how old Father Time works his miracles,—the Jefferson Davis principle has risen from the ashes, a very Phoenix of life immortal. The Lincoln position has been abandoned by the Party which made him its first President. The cause of Home Rule is stronger throughout the world than when the fugitive President of the broken Confederacy faced his official family, at its last Cabinet meeting, in the village of Washington, Georgia, and asked, despairingly, “Is it all over?”
The hateful Amendments, which struck so foul and cruel a blow at “our right to govern ourselves,” are now nothing more than monuments reared by political partisans to their own vindictive passions. The better element throughout the North would be glad to forget them. They have been distorted by the Federal Judiciary and have proven to be a curse to the whole country, in that they are the refuge of the corporations which plunder the people.
Republican leaders look on, acquiescent, while state after state that seceded from the Union puts into practice the principle for which the South fought in the Civil War,—the right to regulate our own domestic concerns.
A Republican President has made an Ex-Confederate soldier the official head of the military establishment of the United States; a Republican President has stood his ground against negro resentment upon the proposition that the South may disfranchise the negroes if she likes; a Republican President-elect manfully held the same position throughout a heated campaign in which niggerites and Bryanites assaulted both Taft and Roosevelt because of this pro-Southern attitude.
“We are fighting, not for slavery, but for the right to govern ourselves.” So said our President; so said our Statesmen; so said our soldiers; so said our civilians. And today we are vindicated.
The insanest war in history, as one studies it, is seen to have been fought for a principle which both sides now admit to have been right, and which Mr. Lincoln repeatedly and most earnestly declared was right, before a shot was fired.
