James Russell Lowell, A Biography; vol 2/2

by Horace Elisha Scudder

Hence he identified himself with the Republican party, in its early days, with cheerful alacrity, supporting it by his pen and his vote, and hence, also, as the lines were drawn more closely at the time of the election of Mr. Lincoln, his political articles in the Atlantic became more direct and more charged with a statesmanlike rather than with a merely opportune character. In October, 1860, he printed a paper on “The Election in November,” which is preserved in his “Political Essays.” It is a survey of the field on the eve of the great election, in which he aims to present the issue clearly. He finds it in the death struggle of the slaveholding interest, which has so long dominated national politics, but it is to him not a question of political preponderancy, but of the moral integrity of the non-slaveholding States. “We believe,” he says, “that this election is a turning-point in our history; for, although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them.... The cardinal question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn—a question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the other—is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the Constitution.” After a witty analysis of the parties which trade most in the term “conservative,” he makes a keen inquiry into the basis of Southern civilization, with the purpose of considering what degree of permanence there is in the society which rests on it, and reaches the conclusion that “in such communities the seeds of an ‘irrepressible conflict’ are surely, if slowly, ripening, and signs are daily multiplying that the true peril to their social organization is looked for, less in a revolt of the owned labor than in an insurrection of intelligence in the labor that owns itself and finds itself none the richer for it. To multiply such communities is to multiply weakness. The election in November turns on the single and simple question, Whether we shall consent to the indefinite multiplication of them; and the only party which stands plainly and unequivocally pledged against such a policy, nay, which is not either openly or impliedly in favor of it;—is the Republican party.”

It is interesting to note that Lowell frankly expresses in this article his regret that Lincoln instead of Seward should have been selected as candidate for the presidency. He saw in Seward a reasonable and persistent exponent of the cardinal doctrines of the party, and hence he wished him at the front as the most conspicuous representative. “It was assumed that his nomination would have embittered the contest, and tainted the Republican creed with radicalism; but we doubt it. We cannot think that a party gains by not hitting its hardest, or by sugaring its opinions. Republicanism is not a conspiracy to obtain office under false pretences. It has a definite aim, an earnest purpose, and the unflinching tenacity of profound conviction.” Evidently he had not yet, as very few at the East had, made the acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln, but he accepts the nomination with confidence. “Mr. Lincoln,” he says, “has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.... He represents a party who know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments, but who know also that it is wiser to stamp out evil in the spark than to wait till there is no help but in fighting fire with fire. They are the only conservative party, because they are the only one that is not willing to pawn to-morrow for the means to gamble with to-day. They have no hostility to the South, but a determined one to doctrines of whose ruinous tendency every day more and more convinces them.” And again he emphatically declares of the members of the party which he believes about to triumph at the polls: “They believe that slavery is a wrong morally, a mistake politically, and a misfortune practically, wherever it exists; that it has nullified our influence abroad and forced us to compromise with our better instincts at home; that it has perverted our government from its legitimate objects, weakened the respect for the laws by making them the tools of its purposes, and sapped the faith of men in any higher political morality than interest or any better statesmanship than chicane. They mean in every lawful way to hem it within its present limits.”

Lowell confessed in a letter to Mr. Nordhoff, [3] written a few weeks after the election, when it will be remembered there was very little evidence to show that the Republican party had not recoiled from its own success, that he was greatly puzzled to gauge the actual mind of the public. “But one thing seems to me clear,” he says, “that we have been running long enough by dead reckoning, and that it is time to take the height of the sun of righteousness.” It was the time of Buchanan’s attitude of helplessness, the logical result of a life spent in adjustment of principle to occasion. “Is it the effect of democracy,” Lowell asks, “to make all our public men cowards? An ounce of pluck just now were worth a king’s ransom. There is one comfort, though a shabby one, in the feeling that matters will come to such a pass that courage will be forced upon us, and that when there is no hope left we shall learn a little self-confidence from despair. That in such a crisis the fate of the country should be in the hands of a sneak! If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment of democracy.”

When he wrote this letter, he had already written and indeed printed his paper on “The Question of the Hour” in the Atlantic for January, 1861. However apparently inert and even dazed the North might be, and however paralyzed the federal government, there was little indecision at the South. South Carolina had already taken steps to “withdraw from the Union,” and the Southern public men were in a high state of activity. In this article, which has not been reprinted, Lowell considers briefly the possibility of disunion through the action of the South. He is somewhat incredulous of the imminence of this danger, and the real question of the hour to him is whether the Free States, having taken a stand for freedom, will maintain their self-possession and spirit. He groans over the miserable straits to which the nation is reduced by having at its head in this critical hour a man of such mediocrity as Mr. Buchanan. Again he makes his familiar point that the political training of the party in power has caused a distinct degeneration in politics, and thus has brought about a state of things which renders resistance to the treasonable conduct of the leaders of secession weak and ineffective; and he points out with sagacity a source of weakness, which nearly a generation later was to draw from him a new political moral.

“It has been the misfortune of the United States that the conduct of their public affairs has passed more and more exclusively into the hands of men who have looked on politics as a game to be played rather than as a trust to be administered, and whose capital, whether of personal consideration or of livelihood, has been staked on a turn of the cards. A general skepticism has been induced, exceedingly dangerous in times like these. The fatal doctrine of rotation in office has transferred the loyalty of the numberless servants of the Government, and of those dependent on or influenced by them, from the nation to a party. For thousands of families, every change in the National Administration is as disastrous as revolution, and the Government has thus lost that influence which the idea of permanence and stability would exercise in a crisis like the present. At the present moment, the whole body of office-holders at the South is changed from a conservative to a disturbing element by a sense of the insecurity of their tenure. Their allegiance having always been to the party in power at Washington, and not to the Government of the Nation, they find it easy to transfer it to the dominant faction at home.”

Even granting that the secessionists carry out their schemes, the losers, he points out, would not be the Free States. “The laws of trade cannot be changed, and the same causes which have built up their agriculture, commerce, and manufactures will not cease to be operative. The real wealth and strength of states, other things being equal, depends upon homogeneousness of population and variety of occupation, with a common interest and common habits of thought. The cotton-growing States, with their single staple, are at the mercy of chance. India, Australia, nay Africa herself, may cut the thread of their prosperity. Their population consists of two hostile races, and their bone and muscle, instead of being the partners, are the unwilling tools of their capital and intellect. The logical consequence of this political theory is despotism, which the necessity of coercing the subject race will make a military one.”

A month later the situation had become still more serious, and in his article “E Pluribus Unum,” which is reprinted in “Political Essays,” Lowell writes with an earnestness which appears even in the wit and humor that play over the surface. After discussing with an impatient scorn the sophisms of secession, he inquires if any new facts have come to light since the election which would lead the people to reconsider the resolution then made. “Since the election of Mr. Lincoln, not one of the arguments has lost its force, not a cipher of the statistics has been proved mistaken, on which the judgment of the people was made up.” And then, after reaffirming the limitations of the power to be assumed by the Republican party, he bursts forth:—

“But the present question is one altogether transcending all limits of party and all theories of party policy. It is a question of national existence; it is a question whether Americans shall govern America, or whether a disappointed clique shall nullify all government now, and render a stable government difficult hereafter; it is a question, not whether we shall have civil war under certain contingencies, but whether we shall prevent it under any. It is idle, and worse than idle, to talk about Central Republics that can never be formed. We want neither Central Republics nor Northern Republics, but our own Republic and that of our fathers, destined one day to gather the whole continent under a flag that shall be the most august in the world. Having once known what it was to be members of a grand and peaceful constellation, we shall not believe, without further proof, that the laws of our gravitation are to be abolished, and we flung forth into chaos, a hurly-burly of jostling and splintering stars, whenever Robert Toombs or Robert Rhett, or any other Bob of the secession kite, may give a flirt of self-importance. The first and greatest benefit of government is that it keeps the peace, that it insures every man his right, and not only that but the permanence of it. In order to do this, its first requisite is stability; and this once firmly settled, the greater the extent of conterminous territory that can be subjected to one system and one language and inspired by one patriotism, the better.... Slavery is no longer the matter in debate, and we must beware of being led off upon that side-issue. The matter now in hand is the reëstablishment of order, the reaffirmation of national unity, and the settling once for all whether there can be such a thing as a government without the right to use its power in self-defence.” And he closes with the solemn words: “Peace is the greatest of blessings, when it is won and kept by manhood and wisdom; but it is a blessing that will not long be the housemate of cowardice. It is God alone who is powerful enough to let His authority slumber; it is only His laws that are strong enough to protect and avenge themselves. Every human government is bound to make its laws so far resemble His that they shall be uniform, certain, and unquestionable in their operations; and this it can do only by a timely show of power, and by an appeal to that authority which is of divine right, inasmuch as its office is to maintain that order which is the single attribute of that Infinite Reason which we can clearly apprehend and of which we have hourly example.”

The article headed “The Pickens-and-Stealins’ Rebellion,” which appeared in the Atlantic for June, 1861, was the latest of the political articles contributed by Lowell to the magazine while he was editor, and appeared just as he surrendered his charge to Mr. Fields. It was written immediately after the attack on Fort Sumter and in the glow of that popular rising which swept away all the flimsy structure of the politicians and showed the might of that conviction which Lowell never doubted to lie in the minds of the American people. He longed then for a great leader. Major Anderson served for a brief hour to typify the spirit of uncompromising fidelity to duty, but Lowell was disappointed in Lincoln’s public utterances. He was impatient at the President’s caution, and especially at the temporizing policy which he pursued toward the Border States, and he traced the course of events before the first gun was fired on Sumter with the evident conviction that a firmer policy would have been surer to defeat the plans of the Confederacy; but the splendid assertion of the Union spirit fills him with an almost awed sense of joy. “We have no doubt of the issue,” he writes. “We believe that the strongest battalions are always on the side of God. The Southern army will be fighting for Jefferson Davis, or at most for the liberty of self-misgovernment, while we go forth for the defence of principles which alone make government august and civil society possible. It is the very life of the nation that is at stake. There is no question here of dynasties, races, religions, but simply whether we will consent to include in our Bill of Rights—not merely as of equal validity with all other rights, whether natural or acquired, but by its very nature transcending and abrogating them all—the Right of Anarchy. We must convince men that treason against the ballot-box is as dangerous as treason against a throne, and that, if they play so desperate a game, they must stake their lives on the hazard.... A ten years’ war would be cheap that gave us a country to be proud of, and a flag that should command the respect of the world because it was the symbol of the enthusiastic unity of a great nation.... We cannot think that the war we are entering on can end without some radical change in the system of African slavery. Whether it be doomed to a sudden extinction, or to a gradual abolition through economical causes, this war will not leave it where it was before. As a power in the state its reign is already over. The fiery tongue of the batteries in Charleston harbor accomplished in one day a conversion which the constancy of Garrison and the eloquence of Phillips had failed to bring about in thirty years. And whatever other result this war is destined to produce, it has already won for us a blessing worth everything to us as a nation in emancipating the public opinion of the North.” Thus in his last sentence he reiterates the judgment which he had over and over again pronounced in the whole series of these political papers, for he never lost sight of the fundamental fact that freedom resides in the spirit of man and is but recorded in his institutions.

Once more he wrote a prose paper for the Atlantic, moved by the attitude in England, for with others of his kind Lowell took grievously to heart the comments of the English press and the actions of the British government. In this paper, published December, 1861, entitled “Self-Possession vs. Prepossession,” he finds unmistakable symptoms of reaction in England, since 1848, against liberalism in politics, and tries the criticism of the United States government in which the press indulged by the action of England toward Ireland and India; and finally he points out the restrictions imposed on any constitutional government by the very conditions of its existence, forbidding it to act in advance of the convictions of its people. This he does to defend the administration against the charge that it is indifferent to the question of emancipation. He is impatient indeed of the extreme caution of Mr. Lincoln and his associates, but he is nevertheless of the opinion that the time has not yet come for turning the war into a crusade. It is interesting to mark how uppermost in Lowell’s mind is the cause of national unity. Time was when he drew near to the position taken by some of his anti-slavery associates that disunion was preferable to complicity with slavery; but as the conflict between the two opposing forces deepened, he took more and more steadily the larger view, and his democratic principles became bound up with the unity of the nation, and at last with the supremacy of law as represented by the national cause.