Though he wrote hopefully in his public articles, Lowell’s letters show alternations of hope and discouragement, and intimate how much the war disturbed his peace of mind. He wrote to Mr. Norton, midway between the July and October numbers: “I shall say nothing about politics, my dear Charles, for I feel rather down in the mouth, and moreover I have not had an idea so long that I should not know one if I saw it. The war and its constant expectation and anxiety oppress me. I cannot think. If I had enough to leave behind me, I could enlist this very day and get knocked in the head. I hear bad things about Mr. Lincoln and try not to believe them.”
In July the two candidates for the presidency had not been formally named, but when Lowell came to prepare his article for the October number, which would appear on the eve of the election, the contest was at its height, though events were rapidly throwing their votes against the losing party. Lowell makes capital use of this fact in his article “McClellan or Lincoln?” which gains in wit through the evident elation which possesses the writer over the almost certain results. He had written Motley at the end of July: “My own feeling has always been confident, and it is now hopeful. If Mr. Lincoln is re-chosen, I think the war will soon be over.... So far as I can see, the opposition to Mr. Lincoln is both selfish and factious, but it is much in favor of the right side that the Democratic party have literally not so much as a single plank of principle to float on, and the sea runs high. They don’t know what they are in favor of—hardly what they think it safe to be against. And I doubt if they gain much by going into an election on negatives.” By a series of eliminations, he leaves, in his article, the single point of difference between the policy of Lincoln and that which McClellan, according to his own showing, would pursue, namely, the policy of conciliation concerning which McClellan made loud protestations; and then he proceeds to riddle that assumption. The article, however, is interesting chiefly for another summary of Lowell’s judgment of Lincoln:—
“Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been sometimes slow in making up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of being hasty to change it when once made up, and he has waited till the gradual movement of the popular sentiment should help him to his conclusions and sustain him in them. To be moderate and unimpassioned in revolutionary times that kindle natures of a more flimsy texture, may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes with those massive understandings on which a solid structure of achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,—a secret General McClellan never learned.... We have seen no reason to change our opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won him the applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at last convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the other. We will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to history and the future; but an honest one we believe him to be, and with no aim save to repair the glory and the greatness of his country.”
The reëlection of Lincoln with a convincing majority, and the rapid crushing of the shell of the Confederacy, conspired at once to give Lowell a spirit of exultation, tempered with profound regret, and a keen interest in the results of the war. The one mood appears in the striking paper on “Reconstruction” which he contributed to the North American for April, 1865, the other in the new “Biglow Paper” which he contributed to the Atlantic for the same month. The latter was written earlier and apparently was drawn out of him by the golden persuasion of Mr. Fields, for we find Lowell writing him 2 February, 1865, when he sends him No. X. of the “Biglow Papers,” “Mr. Hosea Biglow to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly:”
“You pulled the string of this cold shower-bath, so you can’t complain. But if you don’t like it, I am willing to take back my machine. If on the other hand you do,—and if you don’t, by Jove, count on my undying hate,—why, suppose you send me the canvas—greenback, I mean, before you print it. This would give us both a sensation which is desirable in a world where an Emperor offered a kingdom for a new one. Remember in future that asking poets for verses is almost as fatal as asking them to read them. ‘Thyself art the cause of this anguish.’ Item. I have been mulling over a fairy story, of which something may come and something may not.[14] I begin to suspect the egg may be chalk. I have heard of such things. Even the muses in this degenerate age have learned to sophisticate. The devil tempts me to tell you I have also a novel in progress, and an epic poem and a tragedy—also a satire in which those who don’t like the foregoing are ground to powder. But I have scared you enough for once, and I really haven’t begun one of ’em, unless it may be the tragedy which one goes on composing all his life.”
The ground-swell of emotion which stirs the verses written in that winter of 1865, just before spring came, and when the buds of peace were already beginning to open, is expressive of that strong personal feeling which entered into Lowell’s measure of the sacrifice which had been made when he reckoned on the great gain that was to accrue to the nation. Poetry, and especially that cast in a homely mould, was his vent for this feeling. He rarely showed emotion in his prose, but in the article which he wrote a few weeks later when the end was just in sight, he discloses in another way, and almost as strongly, the depth of his nature, for in this article on “Reconstruction” there is scarcely any of that play of wit which marks his earlier political papers.
“Come, while our country feels the lift
Of a gret instinct shoutin’ ‘Forwards!’”
Hosea Biglow had just sung with tearful eyes and firm set lips, and Lowell’s whole nature seemed to rise in an eager desire to grapple with the great problem which was to confront the nation as soon as the last gun had been fired. The quiet, stately opening of the subject as he recounts with deep pride the attitude of the country, and the splendid attestation it had given of the staying power of democracy, is followed by a close examination of the main lines of policy to be followed in the reconstruction of the insurgent states. “We did not enter,” he says, “upon war to open a new market, or fresh fields for speculators, or an outlet for redundant population, but to save the experiment of democracy from destruction, and put it in a fairer way of success by removing the single disturbing element. Our business now is not to allow ourselves to be turned aside from a purpose which our experience thus far has demonstrated to have been as wise as it was necessary, and to see to it that, whatever be the other conditions of reconstruction, democracy, which is our real strength, receive no detriment.”
Hence, after some wise words regarding the treatment of the governing class at the South, and a penetrating exposition of the relation between these and the non-slaveholding class, he applies himself most closely to a study of the situation as regards the blacks, with the conclusion that the prime necessity is to make them land-holders and to give them the ballot. There are some sentences which have a mournful sound read to-day, thirty-five years after the discussion. “We believe the white race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufficient ascendancy to prevent any serious mischief from the new order of things.” “As to any prejudices which should prevent the two races from living together, it would soon yield to interest and necessity.” He is aware of the difficulties which beset the subject, but he contends that the large way is the only way. “If we are to try the experiment of democracy fairly, it must be tried in its fullest extent, and not halfway.... The opinion of the North is made up on the subject of emancipation, and Mr. Lincoln has announced it as the one essential preliminary to the readmission of the insurgent States. To our mind, citizenship is the necessary consequence, as it is the only effectual warranty, of freedom; and accordingly we are in favor of distinctly settling beforehand some conditional right of admission to it. We have purposely avoided any discussion on gradualism as an element in emancipation, because we consider its evil results to have been demonstrated in the British West Indies. True conservative policy is not an anodyne hiding away our evil from us in a brief forgetfulness. It looks to the long future of a nation, and dares the heroic remedy where it is scientifically sure of the nature of the disease.”
Then came the triumphant close in the surrender of Lee, and he writes to Mr. Norton: “The news, my dear Charles, is from Heaven. I felt a strange and tender exaltation. I wanted to laugh and I wanted to cry, and ended by holding my peace and feeling devoutly thankful. There is something magnificent in having a country to love. It is almost like what one feels for a woman. Not so tender, perhaps, but to the full as self-forgetful. I worry a little about reconstruction, but am inclined to think that matters will very much settle themselves.” He closed his political articles of the war period with one in July, entitled “Scotch the Snake, or kill it?” which is in a lighter vein than “Reconstruction,” and is in its way a quick survey of the underlying character of the great contest, suggested by an examination of that scrapbook of the war, Frank Moore’s The Rebellion Record. This mirror gives so many varied reflections that Lowell writes a little at random, making felicitous comments, but coming back, as so often before, to the paramount question of slavery and the treatment of the negro. As the title of his article intimates, he contends for a radical solution of the problem. “The more thought we bestow on the matter, the more thoroughly are we persuaded that the only way to get rid of the negro is to do him justice. Democracy is safe because it is just, and safe only when it is just to all. Here is no question of white or black, but simply of man. We have hitherto been strong in proportion as we dared be true to the sublime thought of our own Declaration of Independence, which for the first time proposed to embody Christianity in human laws, and announced the discovery that the security of the state is based on the moral instinct and the manhood of its members.”