There! I've conciliated him!'"
It is idle, however, to think of allaying angry feeling or appeasing resentment while the war lasts, and idler to hope for any permanent settlement, except in the complete subjugation of the rebellion. There are persons who profess to be so much shocked at the word subjugation as to be willing that we should have immediate experience of the thing, by receiving back the Rebels on their own conditions. Mr. Lincoln has already proclaimed an amnesty wide enough to satisfy the demands of the most exacting humanity, and they must reckon on a singular stupidity in their hearers who impute ferocious designs to a man who cannot nerve his mind to the shooting of a deserter or the hanging of a spy. 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 more flimsy texture to a blaze 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. That he should be accused of playing Cromwell by the Opposition, and reproached with not being Cromwellian enough by the more ardent of his own supporters, is proof enough that his action has been of that firm but deliberate temper best suited to troublous times and to constitutional precedents. One of these accusations is the unworthy fetch of a party at a loss for argument, and the other springs from that exaggerated notion of the power of some exceptional characters upon events which Carlyle has made fashionable, but which was never even approximately true except in times when there was no such thing as public opinion, and of which there is no record personal enough to assure us what we are to believe. A more sincere man than Cromwell never lived, yet they know little of his history who do not know that his policy was forced to trim between Independents and Presbyterians, and that he so far healed the wounds of civil war as to make England dreaded without satisfying either. 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 greatness of his country.
But fortunately it is no trial of the personal merits of opposing candidates on which the next election is to pronounce a verdict. The men set up by the two parties represent principles utterly antagonistic, and so far-reaching in their consequences that all personal considerations and contemporary squabbles become as contemptible in appearance as they always are in reality. However General McClellan may equivocate and strive to hide himself in a cloud of ink, the man who represents the party that deliberately and unanimously adopted the Chicago Platform is the practical embodiment of the principles contained in it. By ignoring the platform, he seems, it is true, to nominate himself; but this, though it may be good evidence of his own presumption, affords no tittle of proof that he could have been successful at Chicago without some distinct previous pledges of what his policy would be. If no such pledges were given, then the Convention nominated him with a clear persuasion that he was the sort of timber out of which tools are made. If they were not given, does not the acceptance of the nomination under false pretences imply a certain sacrifice of personal honor? And will the honor of the country be safe in the hands of a man who is careless of his own? General McClellan's election will be understood by the South and by the whole country as an acknowledgment of the right of secession,—an acknowledgment which will resolve the United States into an association for insurance against any risk of national strength and greatness by land or sea. Mr. Lincoln, on the other hand, is the exponent of principles vital to our peace, dignity, and renown,—of all that can save America from becoming Mexico, and insure popular freedom for centuries to come.
It is the merest electioneering trick to say that the war has been turned from its original intention, as if this implied that a cheat had thereby been put upon the country. The truth is, that the popular understanding has been gradually enlightened as to the real causes of the war, and, in consequence of that enlightenment, a purpose has grown up, defining itself slowly into clearer consciousness, to finish the war in the only way that will keep it finished, by rooting out the evil principle from which it sprang. The country has been convinced that a settlement which should stop short of this would be nothing more than a truce favorable only to the weaker party in the struggle, to the very criminals who forced it upon us. The single question is, Shall we have peace by submission or by victory? General McClellan's election insures the one, Mr. Lincoln's gives us our only chance of the other. It is Slavery, and not the Southern people, that is our enemy; we must conquer this to be at peace with them. With the relations of the several States of the Rebel Confederacy to the Richmond government we have nothing to do; but to say that, after being beaten as foreign enemies, they are to resume their previous relations to our own government as if nothing had happened, seems to us a manifest absurdity. From whom would General McClellan, if elected under his plan of conciliation, exact the penalties of rebellion? The States cannot be punished, and the only merciful way in which we can reach the real criminals is by that very policy of emancipation whose efficacy is proved by the bitter opposition of all the allies of the Rebellion in the North. This is a punishment which will not affect the independence of individual States, which will improve the condition of the mass of the Southern population, and which alone will remove the rock of offence from the pathway of democratic institutions. So long as slavery is left, there is antipathy between the two halves of the country, and the recurrence of actual war will be only a question of time. It is the nature of evil to be aggressive. Without moral force in itself, it is driven, by the necessity of things, to seek material props. It cannot make peace with truth, if it would. Good, on the other hand, is by its very nature peaceful. Strong in itself, strong in the will of God and the sympathy of man, its conquests are silent and beneficent as those of summer, warming into life, and bringing to blossom and fruitage, whatever is wholesome in men and the institutions of men.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
1864-1865.
There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of our people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions of national peril. We felt an only too natural distrust of immense public meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which the war was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that the slackening of public spirit should be proportionate to the previous over-tension, might well be foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history. Men acting gregariously are always in extremes. As they are one moment capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust of men than self-deception to suspicion of principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the statesman needs something more durable to work in,—must be able to rely on the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people, without which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral than of material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment. Would this fervor of the Free States hold out? Was it kindled by a just feeling of the value of constitutional liberty? Had it body enough to withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our population intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government by law and the tussle of misrule by pronunciamiento? Could a war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious questions, and with no precedent to aid in answering them.