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 Frémont 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."