His religion flowered in his later temper. It did not, to be sure, overcome his melancholy. That was too deeply laid. Furthermore, we fail to discover in the surviving evidences any certainty that it was a glad phase of religion. Neither the ecstatic joy of the wild women, which his mother had; nor the placid joy of the ritualist, which he did not understand; nor those other variants of the joy of faith, were included in his portion. It was a lofty but grave religion that matured in his final stage. Was it due to far-away Puritan ancestors? Had austere, reticent Iron-sides, sure of the Lord, but taking no liberties with their souls, at last found out their descendant? It may be. Cromwell, in some ways, was undeniably his spiritual kinsman. In both, the same aloofness of soul, the same indifference to the judgments of the world, the same courage, the same fatalism, the same encompassment by the shadow of the Most High. Cromwell, in his best mood, had he been gifted with Lincoln's literary power, could have written the Fast Day Proclamation of 1863 which is Lincoln's most distinctive religious fragment.
However, Lincoln's gloom had in it a correcting element which the old Puritan gloom appears to have lacked. It placed no veto upon mirth. Rather, it valued mirth as its only redeemer. And Lincoln's growth in the religious sense was not the cause of any diminution of his surface hilarity. He saved himself from what otherwise would have been intolerable melancholy by seizing, regardless of the connection, anything whatsoever that savored of the comic.
His religious security did not destroy his superstition. He continued to believe that he would die violently at the end of his career as President. But he carried that belief almost with gaiety. He refused to take precautions for his safety. Long lonely rides in the dead of night; night walks with a single companion, were constant anxieties to his intimates. To the President, their fears were childish. Although in the sensibilities he could suffer all he had ever suffered, and more; in the mind he had attained that high serenity in which there can be no flagging of effort because of the conviction that God has decreed one's work; no failure of confidence because of the twin conviction that somehow, somewhere, all things work together for good. "I am glad of this interview," he said in reply to a deputation of visitors, in September, 1862, "and glad to know that I have your sympathy and your prayers. . I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out His great purpose. . . . I have sought His aid; but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me He wills it otherwise. If I had my way, this war would never have commenced. If I had been allowed my way, this war would have been ended before this; but it still continues and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we can not but believe that He who made the world still governs it."(9)
XXIV. GAMBLING IN GENERALS
On July 22, 1862, there was a meeting of the Cabinet. The sessions of Lincoln's Council were the last word for informality. The President and the Ministers interspersed their great affairs with mere talk, story-telling, gossip. With one exception they were all lovers of their own voices, especially in the telling of tales. Stanton was the exception. Gloomy, often in ill-health, innocent of humor, he glowered when the others laughed. When the President, instead of proceeding at once to business, would pull out of his pocket the latest volume of Artemus Ward, the irate War Minister felt that the overthrow of the nation was impending. But in this respect, the President was incorrigible. He had been known to stop the line of his guests at a public levee, while he talked for some five minutes in a whisper to an important personage; and though all the room thought that jupiter was imparting state secrets, in point of fact, he was making sure of a good story the great man had told him a few days previous.(1) His Cabinet meetings were equally careless of social form. The Reverend Robert Collyer was witness to this fact in a curious way. Strolling through the White House grounds, "his attention was suddenly arrested by the apparition of three pairs of feet resting on the ledge of an open window in one of the apartments of the second story and plainly visible from below." He asked a gardener for an explanation. The brusk reply was: "Why, you old fool, that's the Cabinet that is a-settin', and them thar big feet are ole Abe's."(2)
When the Ministers assembled on July twenty-second they had no intimation that this was to be a record session. Imagine the astonishment when, in his usual casual way, though with none of that hesitancy to which they had grown accustomed, Lincoln announced his new policy, adding that he "wished it understood that the question was settled in his own mind; that he had decreed emancipation in a certain contingency and the responsibility of the measure was his."(3) President and Cabinet talked it over in their customary offhand way, and Seward made a suggestion that instantly riveted Lincoln's attention. Seward thought the moment was ill-chosen. "If the Proclamation were issued now, it would be received and considered as a despairing cry—a shriek from and for the Administration, rather than for freedom."(4) He added the picturesque phrase, "The government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the government." This idea struck Lincoln with very great force. It was an aspect of the case "which he had entirely overlooked."(5) He accepted Seward's advice, laid aside the proclamation he had drafted and turned again with all his energies to the organization of victory.
The next day Halleck arrived at Washington. He was one of Lincoln's mistakes. However, in his new mood, Lincoln was resolved to act on his own opinion of the evidence before him, especially in estimating men. It is just possible that this epoch of his audacities began in a reaction; that after too much self-distrust, he went briefly to the other extreme, indulging in too much self-confidence. Be that as it may, he had formed exaggerated opinions of both these Western generals, Halleck and Pope. Somehow, in the brilliant actions along the Mississippi they had absorbed far more than their fair share of credit. Particularly, Lincoln went astray with regard to Pope. Doubtless a main reason why he accepted the plan of campaign suggested by Halleck was the opportunity which it offered to Pope. Perhaps, too, the fatality in McClellan's character turned the scale. He begged to be left where he was with his base on James River, and to be allowed to renew the attack on Richmond.1 But he did not take the initiative. The government must swiftly hurry up reinforcements, and then—the old, old story! Obviously, it was a question at Washington either of superseding McClellan and leaving the army where it was, or of shifting the army to some other commander without in so many words disgracing McClellan. Halleck's approval of the latter course jumped with two of Lincoln's impulses—his trust in Pope, his reluctance to disgrace McClellan. Orders were issued transferring the bulk of the army of the Potomac to the new army of Virginia lying south of Washington under the command of Pope. McClellan was instructed to withdraw his remaining forces from the Peninsula and retrace his course up the Potomac.(6)
Lincoln had committed one of his worst blunders. Herndon has a curious, rather subtle theory that while Lincoln's judgments of men in the aggregate were uncannily sure, his judgments of men individually were unreliable. It suggests the famous remark of Goethe that his views of women did not derive from experience; that they antedated experience; and that he corrected experience by them. Of the confessed artist this may be true. The literary concept which the artist works with is often, apparently, a more constant, more fundamental, more significant thing, than is the broken, mixed, inconsequential impression out of which it has been wrought. Which seems to explain why some of the writers who understand human nature so well in their books, do not always understand people similarly well in life. And always it is to be remembered that Lincoln was made an artist by nature, and made over into a man of action by circumstance. If Herndon's theory has any value it is in asserting his occasional danger—by no means a constant danger—of forming in his mind images of men that were more significant than it was possible for the men themselves to be. John Pope was perhaps his worst instance. An incompetent general, he was capable of things still less excusable. Just after McClellan had so tragically failed in the Seven Days, when Lincoln was at the front, Pope was busy with the Committee, assuring them virtually that the war had been won in the West, and that only McClellan's bungling had saved the Confederacy from speedy death.(7) But somehow Lincoln trusted him, and continued to trust him even after he had proved his incompetency in the catastrophe at Manassas.
During August, Pope marched gaily southward issuing orders that were shot through with bad rhetoric, mixing up army routine and such irrelevant matters as "the first blush of dawn."