General McClellan's mind seems to be equally incapable of appreciating the value of time as the material of action, and its power in changing the relations of facts, and thus modifying the basis of opinion. He is a good maker of almanacs, but no good judge of the weather. Judging by the political counsel which he more than once felt called upon to offer the President, and which, as he has included it in his Report, we must presume to represent his present opinions, he does not seem even yet to appreciate the fact that this is not a war between two nations, but an attempt at revolution within ourselves, which can be adequately met only by revolutionary measures. And yet, if he were at this moment elevated to the conduct of our affairs, he would find himself controlled by the same necessities which have guided Mr. Lincoln, and must either adopt his measures, or submit to a peace dictated by the South. No side issue as to how the war shall be conducted is any longer possible. The naked question is one of war or submission, for compromise means surrender; and if the choice be war, we cannot afford to give the enemy fifty in the game, by standing upon scruples which he would be the last to appreciate or to act upon. It is one of the most terrible features of war that it must be inexorable by its very nature.

Great statesmanship and great generalship have been more than once shown by the same man, and, naturally enough, because they both result from the same qualities of mind, an instant apprehension of the demand of the moment, and a self-confidence that can as instantly meet it, so that every energy of the man is gathered to one intense focus. It is the faculty of being a present man, instead of a prospective one; of being ready, instead of getting ready. Though we think great injustice has been done by the public to General McClellan's really high merits as an officer, yet it seems to us that those very merits show precisely the character of intellect to unfit him for the task just now demanded of a statesman. His capacity for organization may be conspicuous; but, be it what it may, it is one thing to bring order out of the confusion of mere inexperience, and quite another to retrieve it from a chaos of elements mutually hostile, which is the problem sure to present itself to the next administration. This will constantly require precisely that judgment on the nail, and not to be drawn for at three days' sight, of which General McClellan has shown least.

Is our path to be so smooth for the next four years that a man whose leading characteristic is an exaggeration of difficulties is likely to be our surest guide? If the war is still to be carried on,—and surely the nation has shown no symptoms of slackening in its purpose,—what modifications of it would General McClellan introduce? The only information that is vouchsafed us is, that he is to be the "conservative" candidate, a phrase that may mean too little or too much. As well as we can understand it, it is the convenient formula by which to express the average want of opinions of all who are out of place, out of humor, or dislike the dust which blinds and chokes whoever is behind the times. Sometimes it is used as the rallying-cry of an amiable class of men, who still believe, in a vague sort of way, that the rebels can be conciliated by offering them a ruler more comme il faut than Mr. Lincoln, a country where a flatboat-man may rise to the top, by virtue of mere manhood, being hardly the place for people of truly refined sensibilities. Or does it really mean nothing more nor less than that we are to try to put slavery back again where it was before (only that it is not quite convenient just now to say so), on the theory that teleologically the pot of ointment was made to conserve the dead fly?

In the providence of God the first thoughtless enthusiasm of the nation has settled to deep purpose, their anger has been purified by trial into a conviction of duty, and they are face to face with one of those rare occasions where duty and advantage are identical. The man who is fit for the office of President in these times should be one who knows how to advance, an art which General McClellan has never learned. He must be one who comprehends that three years of war have made vast changes in the relative values of things. He must be one who feels to the very marrow of his bones that this is a war, not to conserve the forms, but the essence, of free institutions. He must be willing to sacrifice everything to the single consideration of success, because success means truth and honor; to use every means, though they may alarm the fears of men who are loyal with a reservation, or shock the prejudices of would-be traitors. No middle course is safe in troubled times, and the only way to escape the dangers of revolution is by directing its forces and giving it useful work to do.

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THE REBELLION: ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

1864

In spite of the popular theory that nothing is so fallacious as circumstantial evidence, there is no man of observation who would not deem it more trustworthy than any human testimony, however honest, which was made up from personal recollection. The actors in great affairs are seldom to be depended on as witnesses, either to the order of events or their bearing upon results; for even where selfish interest is not to be taken into account, the mythic instinct erelong begins to shape things as they ought to have been, rather than as they were. This is true even of subjects in which we have no personal interest, and not only do no two men describe the same street-scene in the same way, but the same man, unless prosaic to a degree below the freezing-point of Tupper, will never do it twice in the same way. Few men, looking into their old diaries, but are astonished at the contrast, sometimes even the absolute unlikeness, between the matters of fact recorded there and their own recollection of them. Shortly after the battle of Lexington it was the interest of the Colonies to make the British troops not only wanton, but unresisted, aggressors; and if primitive Christians could be manufactured by affidavit, so large a body of them ready to turn the other cheek also was never gathered as in the minute-men before the meeting-house on the 19th of April, 1775. The Anglo-Saxon could not fight comfortably without the law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Redcoats under Pitcairn almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is, perhaps, nothing on which so little reliance is to be placed as facts, especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to his prejudices, and is stone-blind to whatever he did not expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part, of what goes on under their eyes. The ballad which was hawked about the streets at the execution of Captain Kidd, and which was still to be bought at street-stalls within a few years, affirms three times in a single stanza that the pirate's name was Robert. Yet he was commissioned, indicted, convicted, and hanged as William Kidd. Nor was he, as is generally supposed, convicted of piracy, but of murder. The marvels of Spiritualism are supernatural to the average observer, who is willing to pay for that dulness from another world which he might have for nothing in this, while they seem mere legerdemain, and not of the highest quality, to the trained organs of scientific men.

History, we are told, is philosophy teaching by example. But how if the example does not apply? Le Verrier discovers Neptune when, according to his own calculations, the planet should not have been in the place where his telescope found it. Does the example redound to the credit of luck or of mathematics? The historian may give a thoroughly false view of an event by simply assuming that after means in consequence of, or even by the felicitous turn of a sentence. Style will find readers and shape convictions, while mere truth only gathers dust on the shelf. The memory first, and by degrees the judgment, is enslaved by the epigrams of Tacitus or Michelet. Our conception of scenes and men is outlined and colored for us by the pictorial imagination of Carlyle. Indeed, after reading history, one can only turn round, with Montaigne, and say, What know I? There was a time when the reputation of Judas might have been thought past mending, but a German has whitewashed him as thoroughly as Malone did Shakespeare's bust, and an English poet made him the hero of a tragedy, as the one among the disciples who believed too much. Call no one happy till he is dead? Rather call no one safe, whether in good repute or evil, after he has been dead long enough to have his effigy done in historical wax-work. Only get the real clothes, that is, only be careful to envelop him in a sufficiently probable dressing of facts, and the public will be entirely satisfied. What's Hecuba to us, or we to Hecuba? Or is Thackeray's way any nearer the truth, who strips Louis the Great of all his stage-properties, and shows him to us the miserable forked radish of decrepitude?

There are many ways of writing what is called history. The earliest and simplest was to record in the form of annals, without investigating, whatever the writer could lay hold of, the only thread of connection being the order of time, so that events have no more relation to each other than so many beads on a string. Higher then this, because more picturesque, and because living men take the place of mere names, are the better class of chronicles, like Froissart's, in which the scenes sometimes have the minute vividness of illumination, and the page seems to take life and motion as we read. The annalist still survives, a kind of literary dodo, in the "standard" historian, respectable, immitigable,—with his philosophy of history, and his stereotyped phrase, his one Amurath succeeding another, so very dead, so unlike anything but historical characters, that we can scarce believe they ever lived,—and only differing from his ancient congener of the monastery by his skill in making ten words do the duty of one. His are the fatal books without which no gentleman's library can be complete; his the storied pages which ingenuous youth is invited to turn, and is apt to turn four or five together. With him something is still always sure to transpire in the course of these negotiations, still the traditional door is opened to the inroad of democratic innovation, still it is impossible to interpret the motives which inspired the conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those Sirens, keeping safe that sobriety of style which his fellow-men call by another name. Unhappy books, which we know by heart before we read them, and which a mysterious superstition yet compels many unoffending persons to read! What has not the benevolent reader had to suffer at the hands of the so-called impartial historian, who, wholly disinterested and disinteresting, writes with as mechanic an industry and as little emotion as he would have brought to the weaving of calico or the digging of potatoes, under other circumstances! Far truer, at least to nature and to some conceivable theory of an immortal soul in man, is the method of the poet, who makes his personages luminous from within by an instinctive sympathy with human motives of action, and a conception of the essential unity of character through every change of fate.