CHAPTER X
LOWELL AND THE WAR FOR THE UNION
1858-1865
When the Atlantic Monthly was founded, its conductors did not conceal their intention to make it a political magazine. It bore as its sub-head a title it has never relinquished, “A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics.” The combination under Lowell’s superintendence did not denote that articles were to be grouped under these heads; it intimated that in the attitude taken by the magazine both art and politics were to be discussed by men having the literary faculty, and that apprehension of subjects which finds its natural training not exclusively in practice and affairs but in acquaintance with great literature which is, after all, the express image of art and politics. Thus, the magazine did not become, as it might in lesser hands, a mere propaganda of reform, or the organ of a political party, neither did it assume the air of philosophical absenteeism. If one examines the early numbers he is struck with the preponderance of imaginative literature aid of that artistic element which finds expression in historical narrative or in the essay. The space given to discussion of affairs is not considerable, but evidently the subjects are chosen with deliberation, and they are treated if not with distinction yet with a good deal more than merely newspaper care.
Such articles are found at the latter end of the magazine, a place indeed naturally adapted to them, since in the practice of printing opportunity would thus be given for the latest possible consideration of current events; still, though the latest articles in the successive numbers, they were written at least a month, and more likely six weeks or two months even before they could come into the hands of readers, so that the authors were compelled to see things in the large far more than writers who might change their judgments over night on the receipt of a telegram.
These articles, corresponding, as far as a monthly could parallel a daily, to the leader of a journal, were usually one to a number. In the November, 1857, Atlantic, the first to be issued, was “The Financial Flurry,” by Mr. Parke Godwin, who had been an important writer on the staff of Putnam’s Monthly. In December appeared “Where will it End?” by Edmund Quincy, an enquiry into the outcome of slavery in America, somewhat in the nature of that gentleman’s contributions to the Anti-Slavery Standard, when he and Lowell were associated there, though somewhat more moderate in manner. It was vigorous, pointed, and a reasonable summary of the situation politically, but it was an appeal to fundamental principles, not to temporary political conditions. In January Mr. Godwin again wrote the political leader, this time on “The President’s Message,” which had been delivered by Mr. Buchanan at the coming together of Congress early in December, and the paper could therefore be regarded as a prompt consideration of the policy of the new administration. The article was brief and passed in review the three main topics of the currency, our foreign relations, and the Kansas-Nebraska difficulties. In February Mr. Godwin took up more in detail an examination of the Kansas Usurpation; there was no political article in March, but in April Lowell took a hand in a characteristic fashion.
Mr. Buchanan had been in office a year, and the momentous hour was approaching when the forces for and against the Union, with all that the Union stood for in the progress of freedom, were to be marshalled. The preliminary test of strength was already offered in Kansas, and the moral and intellectual debate was apparent in Washington. The principles for which the Atlantic stood were those for which the Anti-Slavery Standard had stood ten years before, but Lowell was now on a broader platform, since the Atlantic represented freedom, history, law, and civilization, where the Standard had represented the attack upon a pernicious system. Mr. Godwin was again called on to review the first year of the Buchanan administration, which he did in an article of about eight Atlantic pages, with the caption “Mr. Buchanan’s Administration.” The review was methodical and severe. It examined the record upon four leading points, the Mormon question, the Financial question, the Filibuster question, and the Kansas question. Mr. Godwin, a trained journalist of the older school, a man of resources in reading and scholarship, and a vigorous thinker, handled his subject with skill and analyzed the situation with clearness, giving the results in an incisive manner. The article accomplished what it set out to do, and is a capital example of a shrewd, forcible political leader.
Then Lowell took up the parable, and it is hardly likely that any observant reader of the April Atlantic failed to note that in stepping over the white line which separated the first eight from the latter six pages of the article, he had passed from the domain of one writer to that of another. It is quite as likely that, however he may have been impressed with the good sense and virility of the former part of the article, he was not so piqued by curiosity to know who wrote it, as he was in the case of the latter part, for that portion is instinct with a vivid personal note. If the reader of that day were familiar with Lowell’s political writings of ten years before, he would not fail to attribute these pages to the editor of the magazine. The same note is struck in each, though the insouciance of wit is somewhat hidden by a fiery earnestness here, as if the author could not stop to play by the way, as he was wont to do when the political thunder-clouds were not gathering so ominously in the west.
Lowell did not preserve his share of the article among his “Political Essays,” and this is not strange, not only because his writing was a detachment of a fuller article, but because with all its undoubted eloquence it was not so careful and rounded a piece of work as his later essays in the same field. In the absence of any correspondence on the subject, it is reasonable to conjecture that, having received Mr. Godwin’s article and assigned it to the number, he was constrained to think that forcible as it was in its indictment of Mr. Buchanan’s administration for errors and blunders, it might well afford the starting-point for a further arraignment, not of the administration in particular but of the nation itself so far as that was particeps criminis with the administration in its rôle of attorney for the slave-power.
But any such indictment as this must be drawn under the provisions of the moral law and find its precedents in history, and make its appeal to the conscience of the people as the final court. Into this business, therefore, Lowell threw himself with vehemence. He knew his own country’s history, he knew also the history of man; and the moral ardor, the almost prophetic power which had been both his inheritance, and the characteristic of his early manhood when he was almost persuaded to be a Reformer, now flamed out. It was as if he had been storing energy during the ten years of comparative silence since the issue of the “Biglow Papers” and the contributions to the Standard.
“Looking at the administration of Mr. Buchanan,” he begins, “from the point of view of enlightened statesmanship” (which was Mr. Godwin’s), “we find nothing in it that is not contemptible; but when we regard it as the accredited exponent of the moral sense of a majority of our people, it is saved from contempt, indeed, but saved only because contempt is merged in a deeper feeling of humiliation and apprehension. Unparallelled as the outrages in Kansas have been, we regard them as insignificant in comparison with the deadlier fact that the Chief Magistrate of the Republic should strive to defend them by the small wiles of a village attorney,—that, when the honor of a nation and the principle of self-government are at stake, he should show himself unconscious of a higher judicature or a nobler style of pleading than those which would serve for a case of petty larceny,—and that he should be abetted by more than half the national representatives, while he brings down a case of public conscience to the moral level of those who are content with the maculate safety which they owe to a flaw in an indictment, or with the dingy innocence which is certified to by the disagreement of a jury.”
Regarding this as a logical consequence of the profound national demoralization which followed the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and warming to his subject as he rehearses that deplorable business, he clears the way for his first proposition, by which he aims to lift the discussion into the higher air of history and elemental morality. “The capacity of the English race for self-government,” he proceeds, “is measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. We are forced to think that there must be a bend sinister in the escutcheon of the descendants of such men, when we find them setting the form above the substance, and accepting as law that which is deadly to the spirit while it is true to the letter of legality. It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years’ experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault.... There is a Fate which spins and cuts the threads of national as of individual life, and the case of God against the people of these United States is not to be debated before any such petty tribunal as Mr. Buchanan and his advisers seem to suppose.”