Lincoln, the Politician

by T. Aaron Levy

Though zealous for action, for a time, he was in the gloom of despair. Most men were lost in their own affairs. The furtive Abolitionist raised his voice as in a wilderness. The busy world took mean note of the cry of anguished slave. About this time Herndon states that Lincoln was speculating with him about the deadness of things, and deeply regretted that his human strength was limited by his nature to rouse the world, and despairingly exclaimed that it was hard to die and to leave one's country no better than if one had never lived for it.[266] Here is again communion with the soul whose thoughts were of the despised and the lowly. To Lamon and other men who cannot rise to kinship with him in such an hour, he must forever remain a mystery. It is for this reason that some who were near him seldom comprehended the extensiveness of his sympathy, seldom knew the divinity of his hopes, and his surpassing love of kind.

Lincoln was a stumbling student in the domain of eulogy. His mind scorned fanciful statement. He was no hero worshipper. Washington, alone, remained the shrine of his homage. He mastered indiscriminate devotion to person in his loyalty to principle. For this reason, to many, he seemed impassive and self centered. It is strange that the man so little prone to adulation should, himself, be the recipient of almost universal adoration. So his address in 1852 on the death of Clay shows little of the devotional element. Even in the shadow of the grave of the great Compromiser, there is no chant of an admiring friend—no speech leaping from the heart. Lincoln himself felt its limitations.[267] In this address, he called attention to the striking fact that Clay never spoke merely to be heard, that his eloquence was always directed to practical action.

It is only when Lincoln approached the discussion of the slavery question that he ceased commonplace commendation. He gave much time to that issue. That he brooded over the solemn statement of the patriots of the Republic is shown in his use of the far-famed utterance of Jefferson: "I had for a long time ceased to read newspapers or to pay any attention to public affairs, confident that they were in good hands and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. But this momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for a moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated, and every irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."[268]

He likewise dwelt on the exulting protest of Clay against the enemies of liberty and ultimate emancipation, who would go back to the era of our liberty and independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return, who would blow out the moral light and penetrate the human soul, and eradicate the light of reason and the love of liberty.[269]

We learn something of the trend of his thoughts in his discussion of the colonization proposal of Clay that there was a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors had been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence, who, transplanted in a foreign land, would carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law and liberty. Lincoln passes this benediction on the plan: "May it indeed be realized. Pharaoh's country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were lost in the Red Sea, for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us! If, as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by any means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and at the same time in restoring a captive people to their long-lost fatherland with bright prospects for the future, and this too so gradually that neither races nor individuals shall have suffered by the change, it will indeed be a glorious consummation."[270]

Lincoln was seeking no temporary expedient. He saw that abolitionism was only a step in the problem, that beyond freedom was the greater question that still terrifies the Union. Statesmanlike, he was not willing merely to trifle with the casual remedy. Like Clay, he would have put an end to the baffling issue by an operation titanic in contemplation and astounding in sweep. So this eulogy on Clay is largely a discussion of a looming problem of his time, a safe sign that he was awake to the gathering storm.

The campaign of 1852 was colorless. Both parties were arrayed on the side maintaining the sacredness of the Compromise Measures. All slavery agitation was severely deprecated. While the South feared and shunned the triumph of the Whig party, there was still scant surface appearance of a sectional contest. There was little in the issues involved to awaken moral vitality. Lincoln took no glowing part in the electoral contest. Lamon declares that his speeches during the campaign were coarse, strained in humor, petulant, unworthy of the orator, and pervasive with jealousy at the success of his rival—Douglas.[271]

Though Lincoln was sure from the first, of the sin of slavery, still, even at this period, he continued in conduct with slow paced movement as if half afraid of being ahead of the sweep of events. Herndon aided in helping him keep abreast with advanced abolition literature, and sought to win him to a championship of the radical school. Like Washington, he marked out his own path. Neither friend nor foe could swerve him, hasten or check his advance. Broad-minded, open to appeal, no man was less influenceable in final judgment. Herndon's weighty statement confirms this distinctiveness of Lincoln's individuality. "I was never conscious of having made this impression on Mr. Lincoln, nor do I believe I ever changed his views. I will go further and say, that, from the profound nature of his conclusions and the labored method by which he arrived at them, no man is entitled to the credit of having either changed or greatly modified them."[272]

At first, he began in his office in plain speech to comment upon the virulent contest between freedom and slavery, contending that delay was intensifying the ultimate clash, that like two wild beasts in sight of each other, but chained and held apart, the deadly antagonists would some day break their bonds, and then the question would be settled.[273]

He spoke bitterly of the attitude of the judiciary, the men who should have been in the very front of the fight; who seemed more zealous of the right of property than that of personal liberty. He said that it was singular that the Courts would hold that a man never lost his right to his property that has been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost his right to himself if he was stolen.[274] Thus his mind moved faster than public sentiment, and thus he became prepared for decisive action before the culminating Kansas and Nebraska affair threw the North into commotion. He seemed the barometer of the national conscience, and though his slow progress appeared painful to the radical yet it was genuine and far more remorseless than immature reform. When the conservative mind of Lincoln was stirred to action, it was a definite sign of progress. He saw that the steady march of slavery was slowly perverting the very principles of democracy, that it was a challenge to the integrity of the republic, that sooner or later it would subvert the government or be subverted by the government.