It must be, then, as chief magistrate of the republic that he won the title of “great.” That, in fact, is the case. He was a great chief executive. As such, he deserves immortality. Because he sealed his work with his life-blood, his memory will always be sacred. But, is it absolutely certain that no other American would have succeeded in piloting the vessel of state through the storm of the Civil War? Is it quite certain that Stephen A. Douglas, himself, would not have succeeded where Mr. Lincoln succeeded? Who knows and can dogmatically say that Thaddeus Stevens or Oliver Morton, or Zach Chandler, or Ben Wade could not have done it? What was it that Mr. Lincoln did during the Civil War that was so much greater and grander than what might have been expected from Andrew Jackson in the same crisis? Somehow I fail to see it. He did not lose courage, but there were brave men before Agamemnon, and the world has never been lacking in heroic types that stand forth and meet emergencies.
In studying Mr. Lincoln’s course during the Civil War we can discover a great deal of patience, a great deal of tact, a great deal of diplomacy, a great deal of determination to win, a great deal of consecration to patriotic duty. He struck the right key-note when he said that he was fighting not to free the negroes but to preserve the Union. This insight into the situation which enabled him to take the strongest possible position showed political genius of a high order. This alone would entitle him to be classed as a great statesman, a great chief magistrate, a great national leader.
When we calmly reflect upon what he had to do, and the means which were at his command for doing it, we see nothing in the result that borders upon the miraculous. All the advantage was on his side. The fire-eaters of the South played into his hands beautifully. They were so very blind to what was necessary for their success that they even surrendered possession of Washington City, when they might just as well have held it and rushed their troops to it, thus making sure not only of Baltimore, but of the whole State of Maryland—to say nothing of the enormous moral advantage of holding possession of the capital of the nation. It was a clever strategy which, while talking peace, adopted those measures which compelled the Confederate authorities to fire upon the flag at Fort Sumter. But that most effective bit of strategy appears to have had its birth in the fertile brain of William H. Seward. The diplomacy which kept dangling before the eyes of the border states the promise to pay for the slaves until the necessity of duping the waverers had passed, was clever in its way; but there is no evidence that the fine Italian hand of Mr. Seward was not in this policy also.
After the battle of Bull Run, Congress passed a resolution declaring that the war was being waged for the sole purpose of preserving the Union, and that the Federal Government had no intention of interfering with slavery. This was subtle politics and it had the desired effect upon the doubtful Southern States; but there is no evidence that Mr. Lincoln was the first to suggest the resolution.
Was Mr. Lincoln sincere in making the beautiful and touching plea for peace, in his first inaugural? Unquestionably. Yet he would make no concessions, nor encourage any efforts at reconciliation. He opposed the Crittenden Compromise, which demanded no sacrifice of principle by the North and which surrendered much that had been claimed by the South. Of the 1,200,000 square miles of public domain, the Southern leaders offered to close 900,000 square miles to slavery, leaving it to the people of the remaining 300,000 square miles to decide for or against slavery when they came to frame their state constitutions. Democrats, North and South, favored this Compromise. The Republicans rejected it. Then, the last hope of peaceable settlement was gone.
Mr. Lincoln threw his influence as President-elect against the Peace Congress, and rejected the South’s offer to adjust the sectional differences by a restoration and extension of the old Missouri Compromise line.
The proclamation in which Mr. Lincoln assured the seceding states that slavery should not be disturbed provided the insurgents laid down their arms by the 1st of January, 1863, proves that Mr. Lincoln is not entitled to the very great credit that is given him for signing the Emancipation Act. Mr. Lincoln was never a rabid abolitionist, and was an eleventh hour man, at that; he bore none of the brunt of the pioneers’ fight; he could show no such scars as Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison and Cassius M. Clay carried; he never ran the risk of becoming a martyr, like Lovejoy; he stood aside, a good Whig, until the abolition movement was sweeping his own section, and then he fell into line with it like a practical, sensible, adjustable politician. He himself joked about the manner in which Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin Wade and Charles Sumner nagged at him from week to week, and month to month, because of his luke-warmness in the matter of emancipation. Of and concerning those three more rabid abolitionists, Mr. Lincoln told his somewhat celebrated anecdote of the little Sunday School boy and those “same three damn fellows, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.”
Not until it became a military necessity to do it, did Mr. Lincoln sign the Emancipation Act. Therefore, his hand having been forced by military policy rather than by the dictates of philanthropy, it does not seem just to class him with the crusaders of the abolition government.
If he meant what he said in his famous letter to Alexander H. Stephens, if he meant what he said even in his last inaugural,—to say nothing of the first,—it was never Lincoln’s intention to go farther than to combat the South in her efforts to extend slavery into the free states and territories.
In guiding the non-seceding states through the perils of civil strife, Mr. Lincoln’s position was never so difficult as was that of Mazarin, nor that of Richelieu; not so difficult as that of Cromwell; not so difficult as that of William the Silent, or William of Orange, and very much less difficult than that of the younger Pitt,-“the pilot that weathered the storm” of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Mr. Lincoln’s achievements as chief magistrate and as a statesman certainly do not outrank those of George Washington, nor even those of Cavour, to whom modern Italy owes her existence; nor of Bismarck, creator of the German Empire. Finally, it should be remembered that the South was combating the Spirit of the Age and the Conscience of Mankind. This fact lightened Mr. Lincoln’s task, immensely.