LINCOLN
Abraham Lincoln,
An Account of His Personal Life,
Especially of Its Springs of Action as
Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War
By Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
Authority for all important statements of facts in the following pages may be found in the notes; the condensed references are expanded in the bibliography. A few controversial matters are discussed in the notes.
I am very grateful to Mr. William Roscoe Thayer for enabling me to use the manuscript diary of John Hay. Miss Helen Nicolay has graciously confirmed some of the implications of the official biography. Lincoln's only surviving secretary, Colonel W. O. Stoddard, has given considerate aid. The curious incident of Lincoln as counsel in an action to recover slaves was mentioned to me by Professor Henry Johnson, through whose good offices it was confirmed and amplified by Judge John H. Marshall. Mr. Henry W. Raymond has been very tolerant of a stranger's inquiries with regard to his distinguished father. A futile attempt to discover documentary remains of the Republican National Committee of 1864 has made it possible, through the courtesy of Mr. Clarence B. Miller, at least to assert that there is nothing of importance in possession of the present Committee. A search for new light on Chandler drew forth generous assistance from Professor Ulrich B. Phillips, Mr. Floyd B. Streeter and Mr. G. B. Krum. The latter caused to be examined, for this particular purpose, the Blair manuscripts in the Burton Historical Collection. Much illumination arose out of a systematic resurvey of the Congressional Globe, for the war period, in which I had the stimulating companionship of Professor John L. Hill, reinforced by many conversations with Professor Dixon Ryan Fox and Professor David Saville Muzzey. At the heart of the matter is the resolute criticism of Mrs. Stephenson and of a long enduring friend, President Harrison Randolph. The temper of the historical fraternity is such that any worker in any field is always under a host of incidental obligations. There is especial propriety in my acknowledging the kindness of Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, Professor James A. Woodburn, Professor Herman V. Ames, Professor St. George L. Sioussat and Professor Allen Johnson.
CONTENTS
[ I. ] THE CHILD OF THE FOREST
[ II. ] THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH
[ III. ] A VILLAGE LEADER
[ IV. ] REVELATIONS
[ V. ] PROSPERITY
[ VI. ] UNSATISFYING RECOGNITION
[ VII. ] THE SECOND START
[ VIII. ] A RETURN TO POLITICS
[ IX. ] THE LITERARY STATESMAN
[ X. ] THE DARK HORSE
[ XI. ] SECESSION
[ XII. ] THE CRISIS
[ XIII. ] ECLIPSE
[ XIV. ] THE STRANGE NEW MAN
[ XV. ] PRESIDENT AND PREMIER
[ XVI. ] "ON TO RICHMOND!"
[ XVII. ] DEFINING THE ISSUE
[ XVIII. ] THE JACOBIN CLUB
[ XIX. ] THE JACOBINS BECOME INQUISITORS
[ XX. ] IS CONGRESS THE PRESIDENT'S MASTER?
[ XXI. ] THE STRUGGLE TO CONTROL THE ARMY
[ XXII. ] LINCOLN EMERGES
[ XXIII. ] THE MYSTICAL STATESMAN
[ XXIV. ] GAMBLING IN GENERALS
[ XXV. ] A WAR BEHIND THE SCENES
[ XXVI. ] THE DICTATOR, THE MARPLOT AND THE LITTLE MEN
[ XXVII. ] THE TRIBUNE OF THE PEOPLE
[ XXVIII. ] APPARENT ASCENDENCY
[ XXIX. ] CATASTROPHE
[ XXX. ] THE PRESIDENT VERSUS THE VINDICTIVES
[ XXXI. ] A MENACING PAUSE
[ XXXII. ] THE AUGUST CONSPIRACY
[ XXXIII. ] THE RALLY TO THE PRESIDENT
[ XXXIV. ] "FATHER ABRAHAM"
[ XXXV. ] THE MASTER OF THE MOMENT
[ XXXVI. ] PREPARING A DIFFERENT WAR
[ XXXVII. ] FATE INTERPOSES
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author and publisher make grateful acknowledgement to Ginn and
Company, Boston, for the photograph of St. Gaudens' Statue; to The
Century Company of New York for the Earliest Portrait of Lincoln, which
is from an engraving by Johnson after a daguerreotype in the possession
of the Honorable Robert T. Lincoln; and for Lincoln and Tad, which is
from the famous photograph by Brady; to The Macmillan Company of New
York for the portrait of Mrs. Lincoln and also for The Review of the
Army of the Potomac, both of which were originally reproduced in Ida M.
Tarbell's Life of Abraham Lincoln. For the rare and interesting portrait
entitled The Last Phase of Lincoln acknowledgment is made to Robert
Bruce, Esquire, Clinton, Oneida County, New York. This photograph was
taken by Alexander Gardner, April 9, 1865, the glass plate of which is
now in Mr. Bruce's collection.
I. THE CHILD OF THE FOREST
Of first importance in the making of the American people is that great forest which once extended its mysterious labyrinth from tide-water to the prairies when the earliest colonists entered warily its sea-worn edges a portion of the European race came again under a spell it had forgotten centuries before, the spell of that untamed nature which created primitive man. All the dim memories that lay deep in subconsciousness; all the vague shadows hovering at the back of the civilized mind; the sense of encompassing natural power, the need to struggle single-handed against it; the danger lurking in the darkness of the forest; the brilliant treachery of the forest sunshine glinted through leafy secrecies; the Strange voices in its illimitable murmur; the ghostly shimmer of its glades at night; the lovely beauty of the great gold moon; all the thousand wondering dreams that evolved the elder gods, Pan, Cybele, Thor; all this waked again in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon penetrating the great forest. And it was intensified by the way he came,—singly, or with but wife and child, or at best in very small company, a mere handful. And the surrounding presences were not only of the spiritual world. Human enemies who were soon as well armed as he, quicker of foot and eye, more perfectly noiseless in their tread even than the wild beasts of the shadowy coverts, the ruthless Indians whom he came to expel, these invisible presences were watching him, in a fierce silence he knew not whence. Like as not the first signs of that menace which was everywhere would be the hiss of the Indian arrow, or the crack of the Indian rifle, and sharp and sudden death.
Under these conditions he learned much and forgot much. His deadly need made him both more and less individual than he had been, released him from the dictation of his fellows in daily life while it enforced relentlessly a uniform method of self-preservation. Though the unseen world became more and more real, the understanding of it faded. It became chiefly a matter of emotional perception, scarcely at all a matter of philosophy. The morals of the forest Americans were those of audacious, visionary beings loosely hound together by a comradeship in peril. Courage, cautiousness, swiftness, endurance, faithfulness, secrecy,—these were the forest virtues. Dreaming, companionship, humor,—these were the forest luxuries.
From the first, all sorts and conditions were ensnared by that silent land, where the trails they followed, their rifles in their hands, had been trodden hard generation after generation by the feet of the Indian warriors. The best and the worst of England went into that illimitable resolvent, lost themselves, found themselves, and issued from its shadows, or their children did, changed both for good and ill, Americans. Meanwhile the great forest, during two hundred years, was slowly vanishing. This parent of a new people gave its life to its offspring and passed away. In the early nineteenth century it had withered backward far from the coast; had lost its identity all along the north end of the eastern mountains; had frayed out toward the sunset into lingering tentacles, into broken minor forests, into shreds and patches.
Curiously, by a queer sort of natural selection, its people had congregated into life communities not all of one pattern. There were places as early as the beginning of the century where distinction had appeared. At other places life was as rude and rough as could be imagined. There were innumerable farms that were still mere "clearings," walled by the forest. But there were other regions where for many a mile the timber had been hewn away, had given place to a ragged continuity of farmland. In such regions especially if the poorer elements of the forest, spiritually speaking, had drifted thither—the straggling villages which had appeared were but groups of log cabins huddled along a few neglected lanes. In central Kentucky, a poor new village was Elizabethtown, unkempt, chokingly dusty in the dry weather, with muddy streams instead of streets during the rains, a stench of pig-sties at the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking outward glimpses of a lovely meadow land.
At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, a carpenter, also his niece Nancy Hanks. Poor people they were, of the sort that had been sucked into the forest in their weakness, or had been pushed into it by a social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was Virginia. They were of a thriftless, unstable class; that vagrant peasantry which had drifted westward to avoid competition with slave labor. The niece, Nancy, has been reputed illegitimate. And though tradition derives her from the predatory amour of an aristocrat, there is nothing to sustain the tale except her own appearance. She had a bearing, a cast of feature, a tone, that seemed to hint at higher social origins than those of her Hanks relatives. She had a little schooling; was of a pious and emotional turn of mind; enjoyed those amazing "revivals" which now and then gave an outlet to the pent-up religiosity of the village; and she was almost handsome.(1)
History has preserved no clue why this girl who was rather the best of her sort chose to marry an illiterate apprentice of her uncle's, Thomas Lincoln, whose name in the forest was spelled "Linkhorn." He was a shiftless fellow, never succeeding at anything, who could neither read nor write. At the time of his birth, twenty-eight years before, his parents—drifting, roaming people, struggling with poverty—were dwellers in the Virginia mountains. As a mere lad, he had shot an Indian—one of the few positive acts attributed to him—and his father had been killed by Indians. There was a "vague tradition" that his grandfather had been a Pennsylvania Quaker who had wandered southward through the forest mountains. The tradition angered him. Though he appears to have had little enough—at least in later years—of the fierce independence of the forest, he resented a Quaker ancestry as an insult. He had no suspicion that in after years the zeal of genealogists would track his descent until they had linked him with a lost member of a distinguished Puritan family, a certain Mordecai Lincoln who removed to New Jersey, whose descendants became wanderers of the forest and sank speedily to the bottom of the social scale, retaining not the slightest memory of their New England origin.(2) Even in the worst of the forest villages, few couples started married life in less auspicious circumstances than did Nancy and Thomas. Their home in one of the alleys of Elizabethtown was a shanty fourteen feet square.(3) Very soon after marriage, shiftless Thomas gave up carpentering and took to farming. Land could be had almost anywhere for almost nothing those days, and Thomas got a farm on credit near where now stands Hodgenville. Today, it is a famous place, for there, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln, second child, but first son of Nancy and Thomas, was born.(4)
During most of eight years, Abraham lived in Kentucky. His father, always adrift in heart, tried two farms before abandoning Kentucky altogether. A shadowy figure, this Thomas; the few memories of him suggest a superstitious nature in a superstitious community. He used to see visions in the forest. Once, it is said, he came home, all excitement, to tell his wife he had seen a giant riding on a lion, tearing up trees by the roots; and thereupon, he took to his bed and kept it for several days.
His son Abraham told this story of the giant on the lion to a playmate of his, and the two boys gravely discussed the existence of ghosts. Abraham thought his father "didn't exactly believe in them," and seems to have been in about the same state of mind himself. He was quite sure he was "not much" afraid of the dark. This was due chiefly to the simple wisdom of a good woman, a neighbor, who had taught him to think of the night as a great room that God had darkened even as his friend darkened a room in her house by hanging something over the window.(5)
The eight years of his childhood in Kentucky had few incidents. A hard, patient, uncomplaining life both for old and young. The men found their one deep joy in the hunt. In lesser degree, they enjoyed the revivals which gave to the women their one escape out of themselves. A strange, almost terrible recovery of the primitive, were those religious furies of the days before the great forest had disappeared. What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—the very brood of the forest's innermost heart—had found a voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in the severity of the forest routine, gave no sign of its existence.
A visitor remembered long afterward a handsome young woman who he thought was Nancy Hanks, singing wildly, whirling about as may once have done the ecstatic women of the woods of Thrace, making her way among equally passionate worshipers, to the foot of the rude altar, and there casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marry.(6) So did thousands of forest women in those seasons when their communion with a mystic loneliness was confessed, when they gave tongue as simply as wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and promptings of that secret woodland where Pan was still the lord. And the day following the revival, they were again the silent, expressionless, much enduring, long-suffering forest wives, mothers of many children, toilers of the cabins, who cooked and swept and carried fuel by sunlight, and by firelight sewed and spun.
It can easily be understood how these women, as a rule, exerted little influence on their sons. Their imaginative side was too deeply hidden, the nature of their pleasures too secret, too mysterious. Male youth, following its obvious pleasure, went with the men to the hunt. The women remained outsiders. The boy who chose to do likewise, was the incredible exception. In him had come to a head the deepest things in the forest life: the darkly feminine things, its silence, its mysticism, its secretiveness, its tragic patience. Abraham was such a boy. It is said that he astounded his father by refusing to own a gun. He earned terrible whippings by releasing animals caught in traps. Though he had in fullest measure the forest passion for listening to stories, the ever-popular tales of Indian warfare disgusted him. But let the tale take on any glint of the mystery of the human soul—as of Robinson Crusoe alone on his island, or of the lordliness of action, as in Columbus or Washington—and he was quick with interest. The stories of talking animals out of Aesop fascinated him.
In this thrilled curiosity about the animals was the side of him least intelligible to men like his father. It lives in many anecdotes: of his friendship with a poor dog he had which he called "Honey"; of pursuing a snake through difficult thickets to prevent its swallowing a frog; of loitering on errands at the risk of whippings to watch the squirrels in the tree-tops; of the crowning offense of his childhood, which earned him a mighty beating, the saving of a fawn's life by scaring it off just as a hunter's gun was leveled. And by way of comment on all this, there is the remark preserved in the memory of another boy to whom at the time it appeared most singular, "God might think as much of that little fawn as of some people." Of him as of another gentle soul it might have been said that all the animals were his brothers and sisters.(7)
One might easily imagine this peculiar boy who chose to remain at home while the men went out to slay, as the mere translation into masculinity of his mother, and of her mothers, of all the converging processions of forest women, who had passed from one to another the secret of their mysticism, coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of their suppressed lives, till it reached at last their concluding child. But this would only in part explain him. Their mysticism, as after-time was to show, he had undoubtedly inherited. So, too, from them, it may be, came another characteristic—that instinct to endure, to wait, to abide the issue of circumstance, which in the days of his power made him to the politicians as unintelligible as once he had been to the forest huntsmen. Nevertheless, the most distinctive part of those primitive women, the sealed passionateness of their spirits, he never from childhood to the end revealed. In the grown man appeared a quietude, a sort of tranced calm, that was appalling. From what part of his heredity did this derive? Was it the male gift of the forest? Did progenitors worthier than Thomas somehow cast through him to his alien son that peace they had found in the utter heart of danger, that apparent selflessness which is born of being ever unfailingly on guard?
It is plain that from the first he was a natural stoic, taking his whippings, of which there appear to have been plenty, in silence, without anger. It was all in the day's round. Whippings, like other things, came and went. What did it matter? And the daily round, though monotonous, had even for the child a complement of labor. Especially there was much patient journeying back and forth with meal bags between his father's cabin and the local mill. There was a little schooling, very little, partly from Nancy Lincoln, partly from another good woman, the miller's kind old mother, partly at the crudest of wayside schools maintained very briefly by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on; but out of this schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B C.(8) And even at this age, a pathetic eagerness to learn, to invade the wonder of the printed book! Also a marked keenness of observation. He observed things which his elders overlooked. He had a better sense of direction, as when he corrected his father and others who were taking the wrong short-cut to a burning house. Cool, unexcitable, he was capable of presence of mind. Once at night when the door of the cabin was suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold, a spectral thing in the darkness, furry, with the head of an ox, Thomas Lincoln shrank back aghast; little Abraham, quicker-sighted and quicker-witted, slipped behind the creature, pulled at its furry mantle, and revealed a forest Diana, a bold girl who amused herself playing demon among the shadows of the moon.
Seven years passed and his eighth birthday approached. All this while Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food, but never had he money in his pocket. His successive farms, bought on credit, were never paid for. An incurable vagrant, he came at last to the psychological moment when he could no longer impose himself on his community. He must take to the road in a hazard of new fortune. Indiana appeared to him the land of promise. Most of his property—such as it was—except his carpenter's tools, he traded for whisky, four hundred gallons. Somehow he obtained a rattletrap wagon and two horses.
The family appear to have been loath to go. Nancy Lincoln had long been ailing and in low spirits, thinking much of what might happen to her children after her death. Abraham loved the country-side, and he had good friends in the miller and his kind old mother. But the vagrant Thomas would have his way. In the brilliancy of the Western autumn, with the ruined woods flaming scarlet and gold, these poor people took their last look at the cabin that had been their wretched shelter, and set forth into the world.(9)
II THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH
Vagrants, or little better than vagrants, were Thomas Lincoln and his family making their way to Indiana. For a year after they arrived they were squatters, their home an "open-faced camp," that is, a shanty with one wall missing, and instead of chimney, a fire built on the open side. In that mere pretense of a house, Nancy Lincoln and her children spent the winter of 1816-1817. Then Thomas resorted to his familiar practice of taking land on credit. The Lincolns were now part of a "settlement" of seven or eight families strung along a little stream known as Pigeon Creek. Here Thomas entered a quarter-section of fair land, and in the course of the next eleven years succeeded—wonderful to relate—in paying down sufficient money to give him title to about half.
Meanwhile, poor fading Nancy went to her place. Pigeon Creek was an out-of-the-way nook in the still unsettled West, and Nancy during the two years she lived there could not have enjoyed much of the consolation of her religion. Perhaps now and then she had ghostly council of some stray circuit-rider. But for her the days of the ecstasies had gone by; no great revival broke the seals of the spirit, stirred its deep waters, along Pigeon Creek. There was no religious service when she was laid to rest in a coffin made of green lumber and fashioned by her husband. Months passed, the snow lay deep, before a passing circuit-rider held a burial service over her grave. Tradition has it that the boy Abraham brought this about very likely, at ten years old, he felt that her troubled spirit could not have peace till this was done. Shadowy as she is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that she was a reality to her son. He not only loved her but revered her. He believed that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius. Many years after her death he said, "God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her."
Nancy was not long without a successor. Thomas Lincoln, the next year, journeyed back to Kentucky and returned in triumph to Indiana, bringing as his wife, an old flame of his who had married, had been widowed, and was of a mind for further adventures. This Sarah Bush Lincoln, of less distinction than Nancy, appears to have been steadier-minded and stronger-willed. Even before this, Thomas had left the half-faced camp and moved into a cabin. But such a cabin! It had neither door, nor window, nor floor. Sally Lincoln required her husband to make of it a proper house—by the standards of Pigeon Creek. She had brought with her as her dowry a wagonload of furniture. These comforts together with her strong will began a new era of relative comfort in the Lincoln cabin.(1)
Sally Lincoln was a kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly attached to her. In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek, a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log farm-houses, the family life that was at least tolerable. The sordid misery described during her regime emerged from wretchedness to a state of by all the recorders of Lincoln's early days seems to have ended about his twelfth year. At least, the vagrant suggestion disappeared. Though the life that succeeded was void of luxury, though it was rough, even brutal, dominated by a coarse, peasant-like view of things, it was scarcely by peasant standards a life of hardship. There was food sufficient, if not very good; protection from wind and weather; fire in the winter time; steady labor; and social acceptance by the community of the creekside. That the labor was hard and long, went without saying. But as to that—as of the whippings in Kentucky—what else, from the peasant point of view, would you expect? Abraham took it all with the same stoicism with which he had once taken the whippings. By the unwritten law of the creekside he was his father's property, and so was his labor, until he came of age. Thomas used him as a servant or hired him out to other farmers. Stray recollections show us young Abraham working as a farm-hand for twenty-five cents the day, probably with "keep" in addition; we glimpse him slaughtering hogs skilfully at thirty-one cents a day, for this was "rough work." He became noted as an axman.
In the crevices, so to speak, of his career as a farm-hand, Abraham got a few months of schooling, less than a year in all. A story that has been repeated a thousand times shows the raw youth by the cabin fire at night doing sums on the back of a wooden shovel, and shaving off its surface repeatedly to get a fresh page. He devoured every book that came his way, only a few to be sure, but generally great ones—the Bible, of course, and Aesop, Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, and a few histories, these last unfortunately of the poorer sort. He early displayed a bent for composition, scribbling verses that were very poor, and writing burlesque tales about his acquaintances in what passed for a Biblical style.(2)
One great experience broke the monotony of the life on Pigeon Creek. He made a trip to New Orleans as a "hand" on a flatboat. Of this trip little is known though much may be surmised. To his deeply poetic nature what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast river; the pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the fleets of barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water; the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French city with its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the foreign speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other worlds besides Pigeon Creek!
What seed of new thinking was sown in his imagination by this Odyssey we shall never know. The obvious effect in the ten years of his life in Indiana was produced at Pigeon Creek. The "settlement" was within fifteen miles of the Ohio. It lay in that southerly fringe of Indiana which received early in the century many families of much the same estate, character and origin as the Lincolns,—poor whites of the edges of the great forest working outward toward the prairies. Located on good land not far from a great highway, the Ohio, it illustrated in its rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such settlements, the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower class into a peasant farmer. Its life was of the earth, earthy; though it retained the religious traditions of the forest, their significance was evaporating; mysticism was fading into emotionalism; the camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic. The supreme social event, the wedding, was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four hours: a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for a prize; an Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games and outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy dispersal next day."(3) The intensities of the forest survived in hard drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.
In this atmosphere, about eighteen and nineteen, Abraham shot up suddenly from a slender boy to a huge, raw-honed, ungainly man, six feet four inches tall, of unusual muscular strength. His strength was one of the fixed conditions of his development. It delivered him from all fear of his fellows. He had plenty of peculiarities. He was ugly, awkward; he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man. And these peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might have brought him into ridicule. As it was, whatever his peculiarities, in a society like that of Pigeon Creek, the man who could beat all competitors, wrestling or boxing, was free from molestation. But Lincoln instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be himself. Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood continued with growing vitality in his young manhood: his placidity and his intense sense of comradeship. The latter, however, had undergone a change. It was no longer the comradeship of the wild creatures. That spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank growth to his tremendous stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line, out of the world of birds and beasts and into the world of men. He took the new world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity with which he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers, fawns.
Here as there, the difference from his mother, deep though their similarities may have been, was sharply evident. Had he been wholly at one with her religiously, the gift of telling speech which he now began to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced her heart, might have made him a boy preacher, and later, a great revivalist. His father and elder sister while on Pigeon Creek joined the local Baptist Church. But Abraham did not follow them. Nor is there a single anecdote linking him in any way with the fervors of camp meeting. On the contrary, what little is remembered, is of a cool aloofness.(4) The inscrutability of the forest was his—what it gave to the stealthy, cautious men who were too intent on observing, too suspiciously watchful, to give vent to their feelings. Therefore, in Lincoln there was always a double life, outer and inner, the outer quietly companionable, the inner, solitary, mysterious.
It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years on Pigeon Creek. During those years, Lincoln discovered his gift of story-telling. He also discovered humor. In the employment of both talents, he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young ruffians among whom he dwelt. Very soon this powerful fellow, who could throw any of them in a wrestle, won the central position among them by a surer title, by the power to delight. And any one who knows how peasant schools of art arise—for that matter, all schools of art that are vital—knows how he did it. In this connection, his famous biographers, Nicolay and Hay, reveal a certain externality by objecting that a story attributed to him is ancient. All stories are ancient. Not the tale, but the telling, as the proverb says, is the thing. In later years, Lincoln wrote down every good story that he heard, and filed it.(5) When it reappeared it had become his own. Who can doubt that this deliberate assimilation, the typical artistic process, began on Pigeon Creek? Lincoln never would have captured as he did his plowboy audience, set them roaring with laughter in the intervals of labor, had he not given them back their own tales done over into new forms brilliantly beyond their powers of conception. That these tales were gross, even ribald, might have been taken for granted, even had we not positive evidence of the fact. Otherwise none of that uproarious laughter which we may be sure sounded often across shimmering harvest fields while stalwart young pagans, ever ready to pause, leaned, bellowing, on the handles of their scythes, Abe Lincoln having just then finished a story.
Though the humor of these stories was Falstaffian, to say the least, though Lincoln was cock of the walk among the plowboys of Pigeon Creek, a significant fact with regard to him here comes into view. Not an anecdote survives that in any way suggests personal licentiousness. Scrupulous men who in after-time were offended by his coarseness of speech—for more or less of the artist of Pigeon Creek stuck to him almost to the end; he talked in fables, often in gross fables—these men, despite their annoyance, felt no impulse to attribute to him personal habits in harmony with his tales. On the other hand, they were puzzled by their own impression, never wavering, that he was "pureminded." The clue which they did not have lay in the nature of his double life. That part of him which, in our modern jargon, we call his "reactions" obeyed a curious law. They dwelt in his outer life without penetrating to the inner; but all his impulses of personal action were securely seated deep within. Even at nineteen, for any one attuned to spiritual meaning, he would have struck the note of mystery, faintly, perhaps, but certainly. To be sure, no hint of this reached the minds of his rollicking comrades of the harvest field. It was not for such as they to perceive the problem of his character, to suspect that he was a genius, or to guess that a time would come when sincere men would form impressions of him as dissimilar as black and white. And so far as it went the observation of the plowboys was correct. The man they saw was indeed a reflection of themselves. But it was a reflection only. Their influence entered into the real man no more than the image in a mirror has entered into the glass.
III. A VILLAGE LEADER
Though placid, this early Lincoln was not resigned. He differed from the boors of Pigeon Creek in wanting some other sort of life. What it was he wanted, he did not know. His reading had not as yet given him definite ambitions. It may well be that New Orleans was the clue to such stirring in him as there was of that discontent which fanciful people have called divine. Remembering New Orleans, could any imaginative youth be content with Pigeon Creek?
In the spring of 1830, shortly after he came of age, he agreed for once with his father whose chronic vagrancy had reasserted itself. The whole family set out again on their wanderings and made their way in an oxcart to a new halting place on the Sangamon River in Illinois. There Abraham helped his father clear another piece of land for another illusive "start" in life. The following spring he parted with his family and struck out for himself.(1) His next adventure was a second trip as a boatman to New Orleans. Can one help suspecting there was vague hope in his heart that he might be adventuring to the land of hearts' desire? If there was, the yokels who were his fellow boatmen never suspected it. One of them long afterward asserted that Lincoln returned from New Orleans fiercely rebellious against its central institution, slavery, and determined to "hit that thing" whenever he could.
The legend centers in his witnessing a slave auction and giving voice to his horror in a style quite unlike any of his authentic utterances. The authority for all this is doubtful.(2) Furthermore, the Lincoln of 1831 was not yet awakened. That inner life in which such a reaction might take place was still largely dormant. The outer life, the life of the harvest clown, was still a thick insulation. Apparently, the waking of the inner life, the termination of its dormant stage, was reserved for an incident far more personal that fell upon him in desolating force a few years later.
Following the New Orleans venture, came a period as storekeeper for a man named Denton Offut, in perhaps the least desirable town in Illinois—a dreary little huddle of houses gathered around Rutledge's Mill on the Sangamon River and called New Salem.(3) Though a few of its people were of a better sort than any Lincoln had yet known except, perhaps, the miller's family in the old days in Kentucky—and still a smaller few were of fine quality, the community for the most part was hopeless. A fatality for unpromising neighborhoods overhangs like a doom the early part of this strange life. All accounts of New Salem represent it as predominantly a congregation of the worthless, flung together by unaccountable accident at a spot where there was no genuine reason for a town's existence. A casual town, created by drifters, and void of settled purpose. Small wonder that ere long it vanished from the map; that after a few years its drifting congregation dispersed to every corner of the horizon, and was no more. But during its brief existence it staged an episode in the development of Lincoln's character. However, this did not take place at once. And before it happened, came another turn of his soul's highway scarcely less important. He discovered, or thought he discovered, what he wanted. His vague ambition took shape. He decided to try to be a politician. At twenty-three, after living in New Salem less than a year, this audacious, not to say impertinent, young man offered himself to the voters of Sangamon County as a candidate for the Legislature. At this time that humility which was eventually his characteristic had not appeared. It may be dated as subsequent to New Salem—a further evidence that the deep spiritual experience which closed this chapter formed a crisis. Before then, at New Salem as at Pigeon Creek, he was but a variant, singularly decent, of the boisterous, frolicking, impertinent type that instinctively sought the laxer neighborhoods of the frontier. An echo of Pigeon Creek informed the young storekeeper's first state paper, the announcement of his candidacy, in the year 1832. His first political speech was in a curious vein, glib, intimate and fantastic: "Fellow citizens, I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected, I shall be thankful; if not it will be all the same."(4)
However, this bold throw of the dice of fortune was not quite so impertinent as it seems. During the months when he was in charge of Offut's grocery store he had made a conquest of New Salem. The village grocery in those days was the village club. It had its constant gathering of loafers all of whom were endowed with votes. It was the one place through which passed the whole population, in and out, one time or another. To a clever storekeeper it gave a chance to establish a following. Had he, as Lincoln had, the gift of story-telling, the gift of humor, he was a made man. Pigeon Creek over again! Lincoln's wealth of funny stories gave Offut's grocery somewhat the role of a vaudeville theater and made the storekeeper as popular a man as there was in New Salem.
In another way he repeated his conquest of Pigeon Creek. New Salem had its local Alsatia known as Clary's Grove whose insolent young toughs led by their chief, Jack Armstrong, were the terror of the neighborhood. The groceries paid them tribute in free drinks. Any luckless storekeeper who incurred their displeasure found his store some fine morning a total wreck. Lincoln challenged Jack Armstrong to a duel with fists. It was formally arranged. A ring was formed; the whole village was audience; and Lincoln thrashed him to a finish. But this was only a small part of his triumph. His physical prowess, joined with his humor and his companionableness; entirely captivated Clary's Grove. Thereafter, it was storekeeper Lincoln's pocket borough; its ruffians were his body-guard. Woe to any one who made trouble for their hero.
There were still other causes for his quick rise to the position of village leader. His unfailing kindness was one; his honesty was another. Tales were related of his scrupulous dealings, such as walking a distance of miles in order to correct a trifling error he had made, in selling a poor woman less than the proper weight of tea. Then, too, by New Salem standards, he was educated. Long practice on the shovel at Pigeon Creek had given him a good handwriting, and one of the first things he did at New Salem was to volunteer to be clerk of elections. And there was a distinct moral superiority. Little as this would have signified unbacked by his giant strength since it had that authority behind it his morality set him apart from his followers, different, imposing. He seldom, if ever, drank whisky. Sobriety was already the rule of his life, both outward and inward. At the same time he was not censorious. He accepted the devotion of Clary's Grove without the slightest attempt to make over its bravoes in his own image. He sympathized with its ideas of sport. For all his kindliness to humans of every sort much of his sensitiveness for animals had passed away. He was not averse to cock fighting; he enjoyed a horse race.(5) Altogether, in his outer life, before the catastrophe that revealed him to himself, he was quite as much in the tone of New Salem as ever in that of Pigeon Creek. When the election came he got every vote in New Salem except three.(6)
But the village was a small part of Sangamon County. Though Lincoln received a respectable number of votes elsewhere, his total was well down in the running. He remained an inconspicuous minority candidate.
Meanwhile Offut's grocery had failed. In the midst of the legislative campaign, Offut's farmer storekeeper volunteered for the Indian War with Black Hawk, but returned to New Salem shortly before the election without having once smelled powder. Since his peers were not of a mind to give him immediate occupation in governing, he turned again to business. He formed a partnership with a man named Berry. They bought on credit the wreck of a grocery that had been sacked by Lincoln's friends of Clary's Grove, and started business as "General Merchants," under the style of Berry & Lincoln. There followed a year of complete unsuccess. Lincoln demonstrated that he was far more inclined to read any chance book that came his way than to attend to business, and that he had "no money sense." The new firm went the way of Offut's grocery, leaving nothing behind it but debt. The debts did not trouble Berry; Lincoln assumed them all. They formed a dreadful load which he bore with his usual patience and little by little discharged. Fifteen years passed before again he was a free man financially.
A new and powerful influence came into his life during the half idleness of his unsuccessful storekeeping. It is worth repeating in his own words, or what seems to be the fairly accurate recollection of his words: "One day a man who was migrating to the West, drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel for which he had no room in his wagon, and which he said contained nothing of special value. I did not want it but to oblige him I bought it and paid him, I think, a half a dollar for it. Without further examination I put it away in the store and forgot all about it Sometime after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel and emptying it upon the floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone's Commentaries. I began to read those famous works, and I had plenty of time; for during the long summer days when the farmers were busy with their crops, my customers were few and far between. The more I read, the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed. I read until I devoured them."(7)
The majesty of the law at the bottom of a barrel of trash discovered at a venture and taking instant possession of the discoverer's mind! Like the genius issuing grandly in the smoke cloud from the vase drawn up out of the sea by the fisher in the Arabian tale! But this great book was not the only magic casket discovered by the idle store-keeper, the broken seals of which released mighty presences. Both Shakespeare and Burns were revealed to him in this period. Never after did either for a moment cease to be his companion. These literary treasures were found at Springfield twenty miles from New Salem, whither Lincoln went on foot many a time to borrow books.
His subsistence, after the failure of Berry & Lincoln, was derived from the friendliness of the County Surveyor Calhoun, who was a Democrat, while Lincoln called himself a Whig. Calhoun offered him the post of assistant. In accepting, Lincoln again displayed the honesty that was beginning to be known as his characteristic. He stipulated that he should be perfectly free to express his opinions, that the office should not be in any respect, a bribe. This being conceded, he went to work furiously on a treatise upon surveying, and astonishingly soon, with the generous help of the schoolmaster of New Salem, was able to take up his duties. His first fee was "two buckskins which Hannah Armstrong 'fixed' on his pants so the briers would not wear them out."(8)
Thus time passed until 1834 when he staked his only wealth, his popularity, in the gamble of an election. This time he was successful. During the following winter he sat in the Legislature of Illinois; a huge, uncouth, mainly silent member, making apparently no impression whatever, very probably striking the educated members as a nonentity in homespun.(9)
In the spring of 1835, he was back in New Salem, busy again with his surveying. Kind friends had secured him the office of local postmaster. The delivery of letters was now combined with going to and fro as a surveyor. As the mail came but once a week, and as whatever he had to deliver could generally be carried in his hat, and as payment was in proportion to business done, his revenues continued small. Nevertheless, in the view of New Salem, he was getting on.
And then suddenly misfortune overtook him. His great adventure, the first of those spiritual agonies of which he was destined to endure so many, approached. Hitherto, since childhood, women had played no part in his story. All the recollections of his youth are vague in their references to the feminine. As a boy at Pigeon Creek when old Thomas was hiring him out, the women of the settlement liked to have him around, apparently because he was kindly and ever ready to do odd jobs in addition to his regular work. However, until 1835, his story is that of a man's man, possibly because there was so much of the feminine in his own make-up. In 1835 came a change. A girl of New Salem, a pretty village maiden, the best the poor place could produce, revealed him to himself. Sweet Ann Rutledge, the daughter of the tavern-keeper, was his first love. But destiny was against them. A brief engagement was terminated by her sudden death late in the summer of 1835. Of this shadowy love-affair very little is known,—though much romantic fancy has been woven about it. Its significance for after-time is in Lincoln's "reaction." There had been much sickness in New Salem the summer in which Ann died. Lincoln had given himself freely as nurse—the depth of his companionableness thus being proved—and was in an overwrought condition when his sorrow struck him. A last interview with the dying girl, at which no one was present, left him quite unmanned. A period of violent agitation followed. For a time he seemed completely transformed. The sunny Lincoln, the delight of Clary's Grove, had vanished. In his place was a desolated soul—a brother to dragons, in the terrible imagery of Job—a dweller in the dark places of affliction. It was his mother reborn in him. It was all the shadowiness of his mother's world; all that frantic reveling in the mysteries of woe to which, hitherto, her son had been an alien. To the simple minds of the villagers with their hard-headed, practical way of keeping all things, especially love and grief, in the outer layer of consciousness, this revelation of an emotional terror was past understanding. Some of them, true to their type, pronounced him insane. He was watched with especial vigilance during storms, fogs, damp gloomy weather, "for fear of an accident." Surely, it was only a crazy man, in New Salem psychology, who was heard to say, "I can never be reconciled to have the snow, rains and storms beat upon her grave."(10)
In this crucial moment when the real base of his character had been suddenly revealed—all the passionateness of the forest shadow, the unfathomable gloom laid so deep at the bottom of his soul—he was carried through his spiritual eclipse by the loving comprehension of two fine friends. New Salem was not all of the sort of Clary's Grove. Near by on a farm, in a lovely, restful landscape, lived two people who deserve to be remembered, Bowlin Green and his wife. They drew Lincoln into the seclusion of their home, and there in the gleaming days of autumn, when everywhere in the near woods flickered downward, slowly, idly, the falling leaves golden and scarlet, Lincoln recovered his equanimity.(11) But the hero of Pigeon Creek, of Clary's Grove, did not quite come hack. In the outward life, to be sure, a day came when the sunny story-teller, the victor of Jack Armstrong, was once more what Jack would have called his real self. In the inner life where alone was his reality, the temper which affliction had revealed to him was established. Ever after, at heart, he was to dwell alone, facing, silent, those inscrutable things which to the primitive mind are things of every day. Always, he was to have for his portion in his real self, the dimness of twilight, or at best, the night with its stars, "never glad, confident morning again."
IV. REVELATIONS
From this time during many years almost all the men who saw beyond the surface in Lincoln have indicated, in one way or another, their vision of a constant quality. The observers of the surface did not see it. That is to say, Lincoln did not at once cast off any of his previous characteristics. It is doubtful if he ever did. His experience was tenaciously cumulative. Everything he once acquired, he retained, both in the outer life and the inner; and therefore, to those who did not have the clue to him, he appeared increasingly contradictory, one thing on the surface, another within. Clary's Grove and the evolutions from Clary's Grove, continued to think of him as their leader. On the other hand, men who had parted with the mere humanism of Clary's Grove, who were a bit analytical, who thought themselves still more analytical, seeing somewhat beneath the surface, reached conclusions similar to those of a shrewd Congressman who long afterward said that Lincoln was not a leader of men but a manager of men.(1) This astute distinction was not true of the Lincoln the Congressman confronted; nevertheless, it betrays much both of the observer and of the man he tried to observe. In the Congressman's day, what he thought he saw was in reality the shadow of a Lincoln that had passed away, passed so slowly, so imperceptibly that few people knew it had passed. During many years following 1835, the distinction in the main applied. So thought the men who, like Lincoln's latest law partner, William H. Herndon, were not derivatives of Clary's Grove. The Lincoln of these days was the only one Herndon knew. How deeply he understood Lincoln is justly a matter of debate; but this, at least, he understood—that Clary's Grove, in attributing to Lincoln its own idea of leadership, was definitely wrong. He saw in Lincoln, in all the larger matters, a tendency to wait on events, to take the lead indicated by events, to do what shallow people would have called mere drifting. To explain this, he labeled him a fatalist.(2) The label was only approximate, as most labels are. But Herndon's effort to find one is significant. In these years, Lincoln took the initiative—when he took it at all—in a way that most people did not recognize. His spirit was ever aloof. It was only the every-day, the external Lincoln that came into practical contact with his fellows.
This is especially true of the growing politician. He served four consecutive terms in the Legislature without doing anything that had the stamp of true leadership. He was not like either of the two types of politicians that generally made up the legislatures of those days—the men who dealt in ideas as political counters, and the men who were grafters without in their naive way knowing that they were grafters. As a member of the Legislature, Lincoln did not deal in ideas. He was instinctively incapable of graft A curiously routine politician, one who had none of the earmarks familiar in such a person. Aloof, and yet, more than ever companionable, the power he had in the Legislature—for he had acquired a measure of power—was wholly personal. Though called a Whig, it was not as a party man but as a personal friend that he was able to carry through his legislative triumphs. His most signal achievement was wholly a matter of personal politics. There was a general demand for the removal of the capital from its early seat at Vandalia, and rivalry among other towns was keen. Sangamon County was bent on winning the prize for its own Springfield. Lincoln was put in charge of the Springfield strategy. How he played his cards may be judged from the recollections of another member who seems to have anticipated that noble political maxim, "What's the Constitution between friends?" "Lincoln," he says, "made Webb and me vote for the removal, though we belonged to the southern end of the state. We defended our vote before our constituents by saying that necessity would ultimately force the seat of government to a central position; but in reality, we gave the vote to Lincoln because we liked him, because we wanted to oblige our friend, and because we recognized him as our leader."(3)
And yet on the great issues of the day he could not lead them. In 1837, the movement of the militant abolitionists, still but a few years old, was beginning to set the Union by the ears. The illegitimate child of Calvinism and the rights of man, it damned with one anathema every holder of slaves and also every opponent of slavery except its own uncompromising adherents. Its animosity was trained particularly on every suggestion that designed to uproot slavery without creating an economic crisis, that would follow England's example, and terminate the "peculiar institution" by purchase. The religious side of abolition came out in its fury against such ideas. Slave-holders were Canaanites. The new cult were God's own people who were appointed to feel anew the joy of Israel hewing Agag asunder. Fanatics, terrible, heroic, unashamed, they made two sorts of enemies—not only the partisans of slavery, but all those sane reformers who, while hating slavery, hated also the blood-lust that would make the hewing of Agag a respectable device of political science. Among the partisans of slavery were the majority of the Illinois Legislature. Early in 1837, they passed resolutions condemning abolitionism. Whereupon it was revealed—not that anybody at the time cared to know the fact, or took it to heart—that among the other sort of the enemies of abolition was our good young friend, everybody's good friend, Abe Lincoln. He drew up a protest against the Legislature's action; but for all his personal influence in other affairs, he could persuade only one member to sign with him. Not his to command at will those who "recognized him as their leader" in the orthodox political game—so discreet, in that it left principles for some one else to be troubled about! Lincoln's protest was quite too far out of the ordinary for personal politics to endure it. The signers were asked to proclaim their belief "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to promote than to abate its evils."(4)
The singular originality of this position, sweeping aside as vain both participants in the new political duel, was quite lost on the little world in which Lincoln lived. For after-time it has the interest of a bombshell that failed to explode. It is the dawn of Lincoln's intellect. In his lonely inner life, this crude youth, this lover of books in a village where books were curiosities, had begun to think. The stages of his transition from mere story-telling yokel—intellectual only as the artist is intellectual, in his methods of handling—to the man of ideas, are wholly lost. And in this fact we have a prophecy of all the years to come. Always we shall seek in vain for the early stages of Lincoln's ideas. His mind will never reveal itself until the moment at which it engages the world. No wonder, in later times, his close associates pronounced him the most secretive of men; that one of the keenest of his observers said that the more you knew of Lincoln, the less you knew of him.(5)
Except for the handicap of his surroundings, his intellectual start would seem belated; even allowing for his handicap, it was certainly slow. He was now twenty-eight. Pretty well on to reveal for the first time intellectual power! Another characteristic here. His mind worked slowly. But it is worth observing that the ideas of the protest were never abandoned. Still a third characteristic, mental tenacity. To the end of his days, he looked askance at the temper of abolitionism, regarded it ever as one of the chief evils of political science. And quite as significant was another idea of the protest which also had developed from within, which also he never abandoned.
On the question of the power of the national government with regard to slavery, he took a position not in accord with either of the political creeds of his day. The Democrats had already formulated their doctrine that the national government was a thing of extremely limited powers, the "glorified policeman" of a certain school of publicists reduced almost to a minus quantity. The Whigs, though amiably vague on most things except money-making by state aid, were supposed to stand for a "strong central government". Abolitionism had forced on both parties a troublesome question, "What about slavery in the District of Columbia, where the national government was supreme?" The Democrats were prompt in their reply: Let the glorified policeman keep the peace and leave private interests, such as slave-holding, alone. The Whigs evaded, tried not to apply their theory of "strong" government; they were fearful lest they offend one part of their membership if they asserted that the nation had no right to abolish slavery in the District, fearful of offending others if they did not. Lincoln's protest asserted that "the Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia but the power ought not to be exercised, unless at the request of the District." In other words, Lincoln, when suddenly out of the storm and stress that followed Ann's death his mentality flashes forth, has an attitude toward political power that was not a consequence of his environment, that sets him apart as a type of man rare in the history of statesmanship. What other American politician of his day—indeed, very few politicians of any day—would have dared to assert at once the existence of a power and the moral obligation not to use it? The instinctive American mode of limiting power is to deny its existence. Our politicians so deeply distrust our temperament that whatever they may say for rhetorical effect, they will not, whenever there is any danger of their being taken at their word, trust anything to moral law. Their minds are normally mechanical. The specific, statutory limitation is the only one that for them has reality. The truth that temper in politics is as great a factor as law was no more comprehensible to the politicians of 1837 than, say Hamlet or The Last Judgment. But just this is what the crude young Lincoln understood. Somehow he had found it in the depths of his own nature. The explanation, if any, is to be found in his heredity. Out of the shadowy parts of him, beyond the limits of his or any man's conscious vision, dim, unexplored, but real and insistent as those forest recesses from which his people came, arise the two ideas: the faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness, that it should be slow to compel results, even the result of righteousness, that it should be tolerant of human errors, that it should transform them slowly, gradually, as do the gradual forces of nature, as do the sun and the rain.
And such was to be the real Lincoln whenever he spoke out, to the end. His tonic was struck by his first significant utterance at the age of twenty-eight. How inevitable that it should have no significance to the congregation of good fellows who thought of him merely as one of their own sort, who put up with their friend's vagary, and speedily forgot it.
The moment was a dreary one in Lincoln's fortunes. By dint of much reading of borrowed books, he had succeeded in obtaining from the easy-going powers that were in those days, a license to practise law. In the spring of 1837 he removed to Springfield. He had scarcely a dollar in his pocket. Riding into Springfield on a borrowed horse, with all the property he owned, including his law books, in two saddlebags, he went to the only cabinet-maker in the town and ordered a single bedstead. He then went to the store of Joshua F. Speed. The meeting, an immensely eventful one for Lincoln, as well as a classic in the history of genius in poverty, is best told in Speed's words: "He came into my store, set his saddle-bags on the counter and inquired what the furnishings for a single bedstead would cost. I took slate and pencil, made a calculation and found the sum for furnishings complete, would amount to seventeen dollars in all. Said he: 'It is probably cheap enough, but I want to say that, cheap as it is, I have not the money to pay; but if you will credit me until Christmas, and my experiment here as a lawyer is a success, I will pay you then. If I fail in that I will probably never pay you at all.' The tone of his voice was so melancholy that I felt for him. I looked up at him and I thought then as I think now that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life. I said to him: 'So small a debt seems to affect you so deeply, I think I can suggest a plan by which you will be able to attain your end without incurring any debt. I have a very large room and a very large double bed in it, which you are perfectly welcome to share with me if you choose.' 'Where is your room?' he asked. 'Up-stairs,' said I, pointing to the stairs leading from the store to my room. Without saying a word, he took his saddle-bags on his arm, went upstairs, set them down on the floor, came down again, and with a face beaming with pleasure and smiles exclaimed, 'Well, Speed, I'm moved.'"(6)
This was the beginning of a friendship which appears to have been the only one of its kind Lincoln ever had. Late in life, with his gifted private secretaries, with one or two brilliant men whom he did not meet until middle age, he had something like intimate comradeship. But even they did not break the prevailing solitude of his inner life. His aloofness of soul became a fixed condition. The one intruder in that lonely inner world was Speed. In the great collection of Lincoln's letters none have the intimate note except the letters to Speed. And even these are not truly intimate with the exception of a single group inspired all by the same train of events. The deep, instinctive reserve of Lincoln's nature was incurable. The exceptional group of letters involve his final love-affair. Four years after his removal to Springfield, Lincoln became engaged to Miss Mary Todd. By that time he had got a start at the law and was no longer in grinding poverty. If not yet prosperous, he had acquired "prospects"—the strong likelihood of better things to come so dear to the buoyant heart of the early West.
Hospitable Springfield, some of whose best men had known him in the Legislature, opened its doors to him. His humble origin, his poor condition, were forgiven. In true Western fashion, he was frankly put on trial to show what was in him. If he could "make good" no further questions would be asked. And in every-day matters, his companionableness rose to the occasion. Male Springfield was captivated almost as easily as New Salem.
But all this was of the outer life. If the ferment within was constant between 1835 and 1840, the fact is lost in his taciturnity. But there is some evidence of a restless emotional life.
In the rebound after the woe following Ann's death, he had gone questing after happiness—such a real thing to him, now that he had discovered the terror of unhappiness—in a foolish half-hearted courtship of a bouncing, sensible girl named Mary Owens, who saw that he was not really in earnest, decided that he was deficient in those "little links that make up a woman's happiness," and sent him about his business—rather, on the whole, to his relief.(7) The affair with Miss Todd had a different tone from the other. The lady was of another world socially. The West in those days swarmed with younger sons, or the equivalents of younger sons, seeking their fortunes, whom sisters and cousins were frequently visiting. Mary Todd was sister-in-law to a leading citizen of Springfield. Her origin was of Kentucky and Virginia, with definite claims to distinction. Though a family genealogy mounts as high as the sixth century, sober history is content with a grandfather and great grandfather who were military men of some repute, two great uncles who were governors, and another who was a cabinet minister. Rather imposing contrasted with the family tree of the child of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks! Even more significant was the lady's education. She had been to a school where young ladies of similar social pretensions were allowed to speak only the French language. She was keenly aware of the role marked out for her by destiny, and quite convinced that she would always in every way live up to it.
The course of her affair with Lincoln did not run smooth. There were wide differences of temperament; quarrels of some sort—just what, gossip to this day has busied itself trying to discover—and on January 1, 1841, the engagement was broken. Before the end of the month he wrote to his law partner apologizing for his inability to be coherent on business matters. "For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me; it is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I can not tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it appears to me . . . a change of scene might help me."
His friend Speed became his salvation. Speed closed out his business and carried Lincoln off to visit his own relations in Kentucky. It was the devotion of Bowlin Green and his wife over again. But the psychology of the event was much more singular. Lincoln, in the inner life, had progressed a long way since the death of Ann, and the progress was mainly in the way of introspection, of self-analysis. He had begun to brood. As always, the change did not reveal itself until an event in the outward life called it forth like a rising ghost from the abyss of his silences. His friends had no suspicion that in his real self, beneath the thick disguise of his external sunniness, he was forever brooding, questioning, analyzing, searching after the hearts of things both within and without..
"In the winter of 1840 and 1841," writes Speed, "he was unhappy about the engagement to his wife—not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going with his hand. How much he suffered then on that account, none knew so well as myself; he disclosed his whole heart to me. In the summer of 1841 I became engaged to my wife. He was here on a visit when I courted her; and strange to say, something of the same feeling which I regarded as so foolish in him took possession of me, and kept me very unhappy from the time of my engagement until I was married. This will explain the deep interest he manifested in his letters on my account.... One thing is plainly discernible; if I had not been married and happy, far more happy than I ever expected to be, he would not have married."
Whether or not Speed was entirely right in his final conclusion, it is plain that he and Lincoln were remarkably alike in temperament; that whatever had caused the break in Lincoln's engagement was repeated in his friend's experience when the latter reached a certain degree of emotional tension; that this paralleling of Lincoln's own experience in the experience of the friend so like himself, broke tip for once the solitude of his inner life and delivered him from some dire inward terror. Both men were deeply introspective. Each had that overpowering sense of the emotional responsibilities of marriage, which is bred in the bone of certain hyper-sensitive types—at least in the Anglo-Saxon race. But neither realized this trait in himself until, having blithely pursued his impulse to the point of committal, his spiritual conscience suddenly awakened and he asked of his heart, "Do I truly love her? Am I perfectly sure the emotion is permanent?"
It is on this speculation that the unique group of the intimate letters to Speed are developed. They were written after Lincoln's return to Springfield, while Speed was wrestling with the demon of self-analysis. In the period which they cover, Lincoln delivered himself from that same demon and recovered Serenity. Before long he was writing: "I know what the painful point with you is at all times when you are unhappy; it is an apprehension that you do not love her as you should. What nonsense! How came you to court her? Was it because you thought she deserved it and that you had given her reason to expect it? If it was for that, why did not the same reason make you court Ann Todd, and at least twenty others of whom you can think, to whom it would apply with greater force than to her? Did you court her for her wealth? Why, you said she had none. But you say you reasoned yourself into it. What do you mean by that? Was it not that you found yourself unable to reason yourself out of it?" And much more of the same shrewd sensible sort,—a picture unintentionally of his own state of mind no less than of his friend's.
This strange episode reveals also that amid Lincoln's silences, while the outward man appeared engrossed in everyday matters, the inward man had been seeking religion. His failure to accept the forms of his mother's creed did not rest on any lack of the spiritual need. Though undefined, his religion glimmers at intervals through the Speed letters. When Speed's fiancee fell ill and her tortured lover was in a paroxysm of remorse and grief, Lincoln wrote: "I hope and believe that your present anxiety and distress about her health and her life must and will forever banish those horrid doubts which I know you sometimes felt as to the truth of your affection for her. If they can once and forever be removed (and I feel a presentment that the Almighty has sent your present affliction expressly for that object) surely nothing can come in their stead to fill their immeasurable measure of misery. . . Should she, as you fear, be destined to an early grave, it is indeed a great consolation to know she is so well prepared to meet it."
Again he wrote: "I was always superstitious. I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing you and your Fanny together, which union I have no doubt lie had foreordained. Whatever He designs He will do for me yet. 'Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord' is my text now."
The duality in self-torture of these spiritual brethren endured in all about a year and a half, and closed with Speed's marriage. Lincoln was now entirely delivered from his demon. He wrote Speed a charming letter, serene, affectionate, touched with gentle banter, valiant though with a hint of disillusion as to their common type. "I tell you, Speed, our forebodings (for which you and I are peculiar) are all the worst sort of nonsense. . You say you much fear that that elysium of which you have dreamed so much is never to be realized. Well, if it shall not, I dare swear it will not be the fault of her who is now your wife. I have no doubt that it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize."(8)
V. PROSPERITY
How Lincoln's engagement was patched up is as delicious an uncertainty, from gossip's point of view, as how it had been broken off. Possibly, as many people have asserted, it was brought about by an event of which, in the irony of fate, Lincoln ever after felt ashamed.(1) An impulsive, not overwise politician, James Shields, a man of many peculiarities, was saucily lampooned in a Springfield paper by some jaunty girls, one of whom was Miss Todd.
Somehow,—the whole affair is very dim,—Lincoln acted as their literary adviser. Shields demanded the name of his detractor; Lincoln assumed the responsibility; a challenge followed. Lincoln was in a ridiculous position. He extricated himself by a device which he used more than once thereafter; he gravely proposed the impossible. He demanded conditions which would have made the duel a burlesque—a butcher's match with cavalry broadswords. But Shields, who was flawlessly literal, insisted. The two met and only on the dueling ground was the quarrel at last talked into oblivion by the seconds. Whether this was the cause of the reconciliation with Miss Todd, or a consequence, or had nothing to do with it, remains for the lovers of the unimportant to decide. The only sure fact in this connection is the marriage which took place November 4, 1842.(2)
Mrs. Lincoln's character has been much discussed. Gossip, though with very little to go on, has built up a tradition that the marriage was unhappy. If one were to believe the half of what has been put in print, one would have to conclude that the whole business was a wretched mistake; that Lincoln found married life intolerable because of the fussily dictatorial self-importance of his wife. But the authority for all these tales is meager. Not one is traceable to the parties themselves. Probably it will never be known till the end of time what is false in them, what true. About all that can be disengaged from this cloud of illusive witnesses is that Springfield wondered why Mary Todd married Lincoln. He was still poor; so poor that after marriage they lived at the Globe Tavern on four dollars a week. And the lady had been sought by prosperous men! The lowliness of Lincoln's origin went ill with her high notions of her family's importance. She was downright, high-tempered, dogmatic, but social; he was devious, slow to wrath, tentative, solitary; his very appearance, then as afterward, was against him. Though not the hideous man he was later made out to be—the "gorilla" of enemy caricaturists—he was rugged of feature, with a lower lip that tended to protrude. His immense frame was thin and angular; his arms were inordinately long; hands, feet and eyebrows were large; skin swarthy; hair coarse, black and generally unkempt. Only the amazing, dreamful eyes, and a fineness in the texture of the skin, redeemed the face and gave it distinction.(3) Why did precise, complacent Miss Todd pick out so strange a man for her mate? The story that she married him for ambition, divining what he was to be—like Jane Welsh in the conventional story of Carlyle—argues too much of the gift of prophecy. Whatever her motive, it is more than likely that she was what the commercialism of to-day would call an "asset." She had certain qualities that her husband lacked. For one, she had that intuition for the main chance which shallow people confound with practical judgment. Her soul inhabited the obvious; but within the horizon of the obvious she was shrewd, courageous and stubborn. Not any danger that Mary Lincoln would go wandering after dreams, visions, presences, such as were drifting ever in a ghostly procession at the back of her husband's mind. There was a danger in him that was to grow with the years, a danger that the outer life might be swamped by the inner, that the ghosts within might carry him away with them, away from fact—seeking-seeking. That this never occurred may be fairly credited, or at least very plausibly credited, to the firm-willed, the utterly matter-of-fact little person he had married. How far he enjoyed the mode of his safe-guarding is a fruitless speculation.
Another result that may, perhaps, be due to Mary Lincoln was the improvement in his fortunes. However, this may have had no other source than a distinguished lawyer whose keen eyes had been observing him since his first appearance in politics. Stephen T. Logan "had that old-fashioned, lawyer-like morality which was keenly intolerant of any laxity or slovenliness of mind or character." He had, "as he deserved, the reputation of being the best nisi prius lawyer in the state."(4) After watching the gifted but ill-prepared young attorney during several years, observing the power he had of simplification and convincingness in statement, taking the measure of his scrupulous honesty—these were ever Lincoln's strong cards as a lawyer—Logan made him the surprising offer of a junior partnership, which was instantly accepted. That was when his inner horizon was brightening, shortly before his marriage. A period of great mental energy followed, about the years 1842 and 1843. Lincoln threw himself into the task of becoming a real lawyer under Logan's direction. However, his zeal flagged after a time, and when the partnership ended four years later he had to some extent fallen back into earlier, less strenuous habits. "He permitted his partner to do all the studying in the preparation of cases, while he himself trusted to his general knowledge of the law and the inspiration of the surroundings to overcome the judge or the jury."(5) Though Lincoln was to undergo still another stimulation of the scholarly conscience before finding himself as a lawyer, the four years with Logan were his true student period. If the enthusiasm of the first year did not hold out, none the less he issued from that severe course of study a changed man, one who knew the difference between the learned lawyer and the unlearned. His own methods, to be sure, remained what they always continued to be, unsystematic, not to say slipshod. Even after he became president his lack of system was at times the despair of his secretaries.(6) Herndon, who succeeded Logan as his partner, and who admired both men, has a broad hint that Logan and Lincoln were not always an harmonious firm. A clash of political ambitions is part explanation; business methods another. "Logan was scrupulously exact and used extraordinary care in the preparation of papers. His words were well chosen, and his style of composition was stately and formal."(7) He was industrious and very thrifty, while Lincoln had "no money sense." It must have annoyed, if it did not exasperate his learned and formal partner, when Lincoln signed the firm name to such letters as this: "As to real estate, we can not attend to it. We are not real estate agents, we are lawyers. We recommend that you give the charge of it to Mr. Isaac S. Britton, a trust-worthy man and one whom the Lord made on purpose for such business."(8)
Superficial observers, then and afterward, drew the conclusion that Lincoln was an idler. Long before, as a farm-hand, he had been called "bone idle."(9) And of the outer Lincoln, except under stress of need, or in spurts of enthusiasm, as in the earlier years with Logan, this reckless comment had its base of fact. The mighty energy that was in Lincoln, a tireless, inexhaustible energy, was inward, of the spirit; it did not always ramify into the sensibilities and inform his outer life. The connecting link of the two, his mere intelligence, though constantly obedient to demands of the outer life, was not susceptible of great strain except on demand of the spiritual vision. Hence his attitude toward the study of the law. It thrilled and entranced him, called into play all his powers—observation, reflection, intelligence—just so long as it appeared in his imagination a vast creative effort of the spiritual powers, of humanity struggling perilously to see justice done upon earth, to let reason and the will of God prevail. It lost its hold upon him the instant it became a thing of technicalities, of mere learning, of statutory dialectics.
The restless, inward Lincoln, dwelling deep among spiritual shadows, found other outlets for his energy during these years when he was establishing himself at the bar. He continued to be a voracious reader. And his reading had taken a skeptical turn. Volney and Paine were now his intimates. The wave of ultra-rationalism that went over America in the 'forties did not spare many corners of the land. In Springfield, as in so many small towns, it had two effects: those who were not touched by it hardened into jealous watchfulness, and their religion naturally enough became fiercely combative; those who responded to the new influence became a little affected philosophically, a bit effervescent. The young men, when of serious mind, and all those who were reformers by temperament, tended to exalt the new, to patronize, if not to ridicule the old. At Springfield, as at many another frontier town wracked by its growing pains, a Young Men's Lyceum confessed the world to be out of joint, and went to work glibly to set it right. Lincoln had contributed to its achievements. An oration of his on "Perpetuation of Our Free Institutions,"(10) a mere rhetorical "stunt" in his worst vein now deservedly forgotten, so delighted the young men that they asked to have it printed—quite as the same sort of young men to-day print essays on cubism, or examples of free verse read to poetry societies. Just what views he expressed on things in general among the young men and others; how far he aired his acquaintance with the skeptics, is imperfectly known.(11) However, a rumor got abroad that he was an "unbeliever," which was the easy label for any one who disagreed in religion with the person who applied it. The rumor was based in part on a passage in an address on temperance. In 1842, Lincoln, who had always been abstemious, joined that Washington Society which aimed at a reformation in the use of alcohol. His address was delivered at the request of the society. It contained this passage, very illuminating in its light upon the generosity, the real humility of the speaker, but scarcely tactful, considering the religious susceptibility of the hour: "If they (the Christians) believe as they profess, that Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form of sinful man, and as such die an ignominious death, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension for the temporal and perhaps eternal salvation of a large, erring and unfortunate class of their fellow creatures! Nor is the condescension very great. In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have. Indeed, I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class."(12) How like that remark attributed to another great genius, one whom Lincoln in some respects resembled, the founder of Methodism, when he said of a passing drunkard: "There goes John Wesley, except for the Grace of God." But the frontier zealots of the 'forties were not of the Wesley type. The stories of Lincoln's skeptical interests, the insinuations which were promptly read into this temperance address, the fact that he was not a church-member, all these were seized upon by a good but very narrow man, a devoted, illiterate evangelist, Peter Cartwright.
In 1846, this religious issue became a political issue. The Whigs nominated Lincoln for Congress. It was another instance of personal politics. The local Whig leaders had made some sort of private agreement, the details of which appear to be lost, but according to which Lincoln now became the inevitable candidate.(13) He was nominated without opposition. The Democrats nominated Cartwright.
Two charges were brought against Lincoln: that he was an infidel, and that he was—of all things in the world!—an aristocrat. On these charges the campaign was fought. The small matter of what he would do at Washington, or would not do, was brushed aside. Personal politics with a vengeance! The second charge Lincoln humorously and abundantly disproved; the first, he met with silence.
Remembering Lincoln's unfailing truthfulness, remembering also his restless ambition, only one conclusion can be drawn from this silence. He could not categorically deny Cartwright's accusation and at the same time satisfy his own unsparing conception of honesty. That there was no real truth in the charge of irreligion, the allusions in the Speed letters abundantly prove. The tone is too sincere to be doubted; nevertheless, they give no clue to his theology. And for men like Cartwright, religion was tied up hand and foot in theology. Here was where Lincoln had parted company from his mother's world, and from its derivatives. Though he held tenaciously to all that was mystical in her bequest to him, he rejected early its formulations. The evidence of later years reaffirms this double fact. The sense of a spiritual world behind, beyond the world of phenomena, grew on him with the years; the power to explain, to formulate that world was denied him. He had no bent for dogma. Ethically, mystically, he was always a Christian; dogmatically he knew not what he was. Therefore, to the challenge to prove himself a Christian on purely dogmatic grounds, he had no reply. To attempt to explain what separated him from his accusers, to show how from his point of view they were all Christian—although, remembering their point of view, he hesitated to say so—to draw the line between mysticism and emotionalism, would have resulted only in a worse confusion. Lincoln, the tentative mystic, the child of the starlit forest, was as inexplicable to Cartwright with his perfectly downright religion, his creed of heaven or hell—take your choice and be quick about it!—as was Lincoln the spiritual sufferer to New Salem, or Lincoln the political scientist to his friends in the Legislature.
But he was not injured by his silence. The faith in him held by too many people was too well established. Then, as always thereafter, whatever he said or left unsaid, most thoughtful persons who came close to him sensed him as a religious man. That was enough for healthy, generous young Springfield. He and Cartwright might fight out their religious issues when they pleased, Abe should have his term in Congress. He was elected by a good majority.(14)
VI. UNSATISFYING RECOGNITION
Lincoln's career as a Congressman, 1847-1849, was just what might have been expected—his career in the Illinois Legislature on a larger scale. It was a pleasant, companionable, unfruitful episode, with no political significance. The leaders of the party did not take him seriously as a possible initiate to their ranks. His course was that of a loyal member of the Whig mass. In the party strategy, during the debates over the Mexican War and the Wilmot Proviso, he did his full party duty, voting just as the others did. Only once did he attempt anything original—a bill to emancipate the slaves of the District, which was little more than a restatement of his protest of ten years before—and on this point Congress was as indifferent as the Legislature had been. The bill was denied a hearing and never came to a vote before the House.(1)
And yet Lincoln did not fail entirely to make an impression at Washington. And again it was the Springfield experience repeated. His companionableness was recognized, his modesty, his good nature; above all, his story-telling. Men liked him. Plainly it was his humor, his droll ways, that won them; together with instant recognition of his sterling integrity.
"During the Christmas holidays," says Ben Perley Poore, "Mr. Lincoln found his way into the small room used as the Post Office of the House, where a few genial reconteurs used to meet almost every morning after the mail had been distributed into the members' boxes, to exchange such new stories as any of them might have acquired since they had last met. After modestly standing at the door for several days, Mr. Lincoln was reminded of a story, and by New Year's he was recognized as the champion story-teller of the Capital. His favorite seat was at the left of the open fireplace, tilted back in his chair with his long legs reaching over to the chimney jamb."(2)
In the words of another contemporary, "Congressman Lincoln was very fond of howling and would frequently. . . meet other members in a match game at the alley of James Casparus. . . . He was an awkward bowler, but played the game with great zest and spirit solely for exercise and amusement, and greatly to the enjoyment and entertainment of the other players, and by reason of his criticisms and funny illustrations. . . . When it was known that he was in the alley, there would assemble numbers of people to witness the fun which was anticipated by those who knew of his fund of anecdotes and jokes. When in the alley, surrounded by a crowd of eager listeners, he indulged with great freedom in the sport of narrative, some of which were very broad."(3)
Once, at least, he entertained Congress with an exhibition of his humor, and this, oddly enough, is almost the only display of it that has come down to us, first hand. Lincoln's humor has become a tradition. Like everything else in his outward life, it changed gradually with his slow devious evolution from the story-teller of Pigeon Creek to the author of the Gettysburg Oration. It is known chiefly through translation. The "Lincoln Stories" are stories someone else has told who may or may not have heard them told by Lincoln. They are like all translations, they express the translator not the original—final evidence that Lincoln's appeal as a humorist was in his manner, his method, not in his substance. "His laugh was striking. Such awkward gestures belonged to no other man. They attracted universal attention from the old sedate down to the schoolboy."(4) He was a famous mimic.
Lincoln is himself the authority that he did not invent his stories. He picked them up wherever he found them, and clothed them with the peculiar drollery of his telling. He was a wag rather than a wit. All that lives in the second-hand repetitions of his stories is the mere core, the original appropriated thing from which the inimitable decoration has fallen off. That is why the collections of his stories are such dreary reading,—like Carey's Dante, or Bryant's Homer. And strange to say, there is no humor in his letters. This man who was famous as a wag writes to his friends almost always in perfect seriousness, often sadly. The bit of humor that has been preserved in his one comic speech in Congress,—a burlesque of the Democratic candidate of 1848, Lewis Cass,—shorn as it is of his manner, his tricks of speech and gesture, is hardly worth repeating.(5)
Lincoln was deeply humiliated by his failure to make a serious impression at Washington.(6) His eyes opened in a startled realization that there were worlds he could not conquer. The Washington of the 'forties was far indeed from a great capital; it was as friendly to conventional types of politician as was Springfield or Vandalia. The man who could deal in ideas as political counters, the other man who knew the subtleties of the art of graft, both these were national as well as local figures. Personal politics were also as vicious at Washington as anywhere; nevertheless, there was a difference, and in that difference lay the secret of Lincoln's failure. He was keen enough to grasp the difference, to perceive the clue to his failure. In a thousand ways, large and small, the difference came home to him. It may all be symbolized by a closing detail of his stay. An odd bit of incongruity was the inclusion of his name in the list of managers of the Inaugural Ball of 1849. Nothing of the sort had hitherto entered into his experience. As Mrs. Lincoln was not with him he joined "a small party of mutual friends" who attended the ball together. As one of them relates, "he was greatly interested in all that was to be seen and we did not take our departure until three or four o'clock in the morning."(7) What an ironic picture—this worthy provincial, the last word for awkwardness, socially as strange to such a scene as a little child, spending the whole night gazing intently at everything he could see, at the barbaric display of wealth, the sumptuous gowns, the brilliant uniforms, the distinguished foreigners, and the leaders of America, men like Webster and Clay, with their air of assured power, the men he had failed to impress. This was his valedictory at Washington. He went home and told Herndon that he had committed political suicide.(8) He had met the world and the world was too strong for him.
And yet, what was wrong? He had been popular at Washington, in the same way in which he had been popular at Springfield. Why had the same sort of success inspired him at Springfield and humiliated him at Washington? The answer was in the difference between the two worlds. Companionableness, story-telling, at Springfield, led to influence; at Washington it led only to applause. At Springfield it was a means; at Washington it was an end. The narrow circle gave the good fellow an opportunity to reveal at his leisure everything else that was in him; the larger circle ruthlessly put him in his place as a good fellow and nothing more. The truth was that in the Washington of the 'forties, neither the inner nor the outer Lincoln could by itself find lodgment. Neither the lonely mystical thinker nor the captivating buffoon could do more than ripple its surface. As superficial as Springfield, it lacked Springfield's impulsive generosity. To the long record of its obtuseness it had added another item. The gods had sent it a great man and it had no eyes to see. It was destined to repeat the performance.
And so Lincoln came home, disappointed, disillusioned. He had not succeeded in establishing the slightest claim, either upon the country or his party. Without such claim he had no ground for attempting reelection. The frivolity of the Whig machine in the Sangamon region was evinced by their rotation agreement. Out of such grossly personal politics Lincoln had gone to Washington; into this essentially corrupt system he relapsed. He faced, politically, a blank wall. And he had within him as yet, no consciousness of any power that might cleave the wall asunder. What was he to do next?
At this dangerous moment—so plainly the end of a chapter—he was offered the governorship of the new Territory of Oregon. For the first time he found himself at a definite parting of the ways, where a sheer act of will was to decide things; where the pressure of circumstance was of secondary importance.
In response to this crisis, an overlooked part of him appeared. The inheritance from his mother, from the forest, had always been obvious. But, after all, he was the son not only of Nancy and of the lonely stars, but also of shifty, drifty Thomas the unstable. If it was not his paternal inheritance that revived in him at this moment of confessed failure, it was something of the same sort. Just as Thomas had always by way of extricating himself from a failure taken to the road, now Abraham, at a psychological crisis, felt the same wanderlust, and he threatened to go adrift. Some of his friends urged him to accept. "You will capture the new community," said they, "and when Oregon becomes a State, you will go to Washington as its first Senator." What a glorified application of the true Thomasian line of thought. Lincoln hesitated—hesitated—
And then the forcible little lady who had married him put her foot down. Go out to that far-away backwoods, just when they were beginning to get on in the world; when real prosperity at Springfield was surely within their grasp; when they were at last becoming people of importance, who should be able to keep their own carriage? Not much!
Her husband declined the appointment and resumed the practice of law in Springfield.(9)
VII. THE SECOND START
Stung by his failure at Washington, Lincoln for a time put his whole soul into the study of the law. He explained his failure to himself as a lack of mental training.(1) There followed a repetition of his early years with Logan, but with very much more determination, and with more abiding result.
In those days in Illinois, as once in England, the judges held court in a succession of towns which formed a circuit. Judge and lawyers moved from town to town, "rode the circuit" in company,—sometimes on horseback, sometimes in their own vehicles, sometimes by stage. Among the reminiscences of Lincoln on the circuit, are his "poky" old horse and his "ramshackle" old buggy. Many and many a mile, round and round the Eighth Judicial Circuit, he traveled in that humble style. What thoughts he brooded on in his lonely drives, he seldom told. During this period the cloud over his inner life is especially dense. The outer life, in a multitude of reminiscences, is well known. One of its salient details was the large proportion of time he devoted to study.
"Frequently, I would go out on the circuit with him," writes Herndon. "We, usually, at the little country inn, occupied the same bed. In most cases, the beds were too short for him and his feet would hang over the footboard, thus exposing a limited expanse of shin bone. Placing his candle at the head of his bed he would read and study for hours. I have known him to stay in this position until two o'clock in the morning. Meanwhile, I and others who chanced to occupy the same room would be safely and soundly asleep. On the circuit, in this way, he studied Euclid until he could with ease demonstrate all the propositions in the six books. How he could maintain his equilibrium or concentrate his thoughts on an abstract mathematical problem, while Davis, Logan, Swett, Edwards and I, so industriously and volubly filled the air with our interminable snoring, was a problem none of, us—could ever solve."(2)
A well-worn copy of Shakespeare was also his constant companion.
He rose rapidly in the profession; and this in spite of his incorrigible lack of system. The mechanical side of the lawyer's task, now, as in the days with Logan, annoyed him; he left the preparation of papers to his junior partner, as formerly he left it to his senior partner. But the situation had changed in a very important way. In Herndon, Lincoln had for a partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not disturbed by his grotesque or absurd sides.
"He was proverbially careless as to his habits," Herndon writes. "In a letter to a fellow lawyer in another town, apologizing for his failure to answer sooner, he explains: 'First, I have been very busy in the United States Court; second, when I received the letter, I put it in my old hat, and buying a new one the next day, the old one was set aside, so the letter was lost sight of for the time.' This hat of Lincoln's—a silk plug—was an extraordinary receptacle. It was his desk and his memorandum book. In it he carried his bank-book and the bulk of his letters. Whenever in his reading or researches, he wished to preserve an idea, he jotted it down on an envelope or stray piece of paper and placed it inside the lining; afterwards, when the memorandum was needed, there was only one place to look for it." Herndon makes no bones about confessing that their office was very dirty. So neglected was it that a young man of neat habits who entered the office as a law student under Lincoln could not refrain from cleaning it up, and the next visitor exclaimed in astonishment, "What's happened here!"(3)
"The office," says that same law student, "was on the second floor of a brick building on the public square opposite the courthouse. You went up a flight of stairs and then passed along a hallway to the rear office which was a medium sized room. There was one long table in the center of the room, and a shorter one running in the opposite direction forming a T and both were covered with green baize. There were two windows which looked into the back yard. In one corner was an old-fashioned secretary with pigeonholes and a drawer; and here Mr. Lincoln and his partner kept their law papers. There was also a bookcase containing about two hundred volumes of law and miscellaneous books." The same authority adds, "There was no order in the office at all." Lincoln left all the money matters to Herndon. "He never entered an item on the account book. If a fee was paid to him and Herndon was not there, he would divide the money, wrap up one part in paper and place it in his partner's desk with the inscription, 'Case of Roe versus Doe, Herndon's half.' He had an odd habit of reading aloud much to his partner's annoyance. He talked incessantly; a whole forenoon would sometimes go by while Lincoln occupied the whole time telling stories."(4)
On the circuit, his story-telling was an institution. Two other men, long since forgotten, vied with him as rival artists in humorous narrative. These three used to hold veritable tournaments. Herndon has seen "the little country tavern where these three were wont to meet after an adjournment of court, crowded almost to suffocation, with an audience of men who had gathered to witness the contest among the members of the strange triumvirate. The physicians of the town, all the lawyers, and not infrequently a preacher, could be found in the crowd that filled the doors and windows. The yarns they spun and the stories they told would not bear repetition here, but many of them had morals which, while exposing the weakness of mankind, stung like a whiplash. Some were, no doubt, a thousand years old, with just enough of verbal varnish and alterations of names and date to make them new and crisp. By virtue of the last named application, Lincoln was enabled to draw from Balzac a 'droll story' and locating it 'in Egypt' (Southern Illinois) or in Indiana, pass it off for a purely original conception. . . I have seen Judge Treat, who was the very impersonation of gravity itself, sit up till the last and laugh until, as he often expressed it, 'he almost shook his ribs loose.' The next day he would ascend the bench and listen to Lincoln in a murder trial with all the seeming severity of an English judge in wig and gown."(5)
Lincoln enjoyed the life on the circuit. It was not that he was always in a gale of spirits; a great deal of the time he brooded. His Homeric nonsense alternated with fits of gloom. In spite of his late hours, whether of study or of story-telling, he was an early riser. "He would sit by the fire having uncovered the coals, and muse and ponder and soliloquize."(6) Besides his favorite Shakespeare, he had a fondness for poetry of a very different sort—Byron, for example. And he never tired of a set of stanzas in the minor key beginning: "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"(7)
The hilarity of the circuit was not by any means the whole of its charm for him. Part of that charm must have been the contrast with his recent failure at Washington. This world he could master. Here his humor increased his influence; and his influence grew rapidly. He was a favorite of judges, jury and the bar. Then, too, it was a man's world. Though Lincoln had a profound respect for women, he seems generally to have been ill at ease in their company. In what his friends would have called "general society" he did not shine. He was too awkward, too downright, too lacking in the niceties. At home, though he now owned a house and was making what seemed to him plenty of money, he was undoubtedly a trial to Mrs. Lincoln's sense of propriety. He could not rise with his wife, socially. He was still what he had become so long before, the favorite of all the men—good old Abe Lincoln that you could tie to though it rained cats and dogs. But as to the ladies! Fashionable people calling on Mrs. Lincoln, had been received by her husband in his shirt-sleeves, and he totally unabashed, as oblivious of discrepancy as if he were a nobleman and not a nobody.(8) The dreadful tradition persists that he had been known at table to put his own knife into the butter.
How safe to assume that many things were said commiserating poor Mrs. Lincoln who had a bear for a husband. And some people noticed that Lincoln did not come home at week-ends during term-time as often as he might. Perhaps it meant something; perhaps it did not. But there could be no doubt that the jovial itinerant life of the circuit was the life for him—at least in the early 'fifties. That it was, and also that he was becoming known as a lawyer, is evinced by his refusal of a flattering invitation to enter a prosperous firm in Chicago.
Out of all this came a deepening of his power to reach and impress men through words. The tournament of the story-tellers was a lawyers' tournament. The central figure was reading, studying, thinking, as never in his life before. Though his fables remained as broad as ever, the merely boisterous character ceased to predominate. The ethical bent of his mind came to the surface. His friends were agreed that what they remembered chiefly of his stories was not the broad part of them, but the moral that was in them.(9) And they had no squeamishness as critics of the art of fable-making.
His ethical sense of things, his companionableness, the utterly non-censorious cast of his mind, his power to evolve yarns into parables—all these made him irresistible with a jury. It was a saying of his: "If I can divest this case of technicalities and swing it to the jury, I'll win it."(10)
But there was not a trace in him of that unscrupulousness usually attributed to the "jury lawyer." Few things show more plainly the central unmovableness of his character than his immunity to the lures of jury speaking. To use his power over an audience for his own enjoyment, for an interested purpose, for any purpose except to afford pleasure, or to see justice done, was for him constitutionally impossible. Such a performance was beyond the reach of his will. In a way, his nature, mysterious as it was, was also the last word for simplicity, a terrible simplicity. The exercise of his singular powers was irrevocably conditioned on his own faith in the moral justification of what he was doing. He had no patience with any conception of the lawyer's function that did not make him the devoted instrument of justice. For the law as a game, for legal strategy, he felt contempt. Never under any conditions would he attempt to get for a client more than he was convinced the client in justice ought to have. The first step in securing his services was always to persuade him that one's cause was just He sometimes threw up a case in open court because the course of it had revealed deception on the part of the client. At times he expressed his disdain of the law's mere commercialism in a stinging irony.
"In a closely contested civil suit," writes his associate, Ward Hill Lamon, "Lincoln proved an account for his client, who was, though he did not know it at the time, a very slippery fellow. The opposing attorney then proved a receipt clearly covering the entire cause of action. By the time he was through Lincoln was missing. The court sent for him to the hotel. 'Tell the Judge,' said he, 'that I can't come; my hands are dirty and I came over to clean them.'"(11)
"Discourage litigation," he wrote. "Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser, in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a Superior Opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough."(12)
He held his moral and professional views with the same inflexibility with which he held his political views. Once he had settled upon a conviction or an opinion, nothing could move him. He was singularly stubborn, and yet, in all the minor matters of life, in all his merely personal concerns, in everything except his basal ideas, he was pliable to a degree. He could be talked into almost any concession of interest. He once told Herndon he thanked God that he had not been born a woman because he found it so hard to refuse any request made of him. His outer easiness, his lack of self-assertion,—as most people understand self-assertion,—persist in an amusing group of anecdotes of the circuit. Though he was a favorite with the company at every tavern, those little demagogues, the tavern-keepers, quickly found out that he could be safely put upon. In the minute but important favoritism of tavern life, in the choice of rooms, in the assignment of seats at table, in the distribution of delicacies, easy-going Lincoln was ever the first one to be ignored. "He never complained of the food, bed, or lodgings," says a judge of the circuit, David Davis. "If every other fellow grumbled at the bill of fare which greeted us at many of the dingy taverns, Lincoln said nothing."(13)
But his complacency was of the surface only. His ideas were his own. He held to them with dogged tenacity. Herndon was merely the first of several who discerned on close familiarity Lincoln's inward inflexibility. "I was never conscious," he writes, "of having made much of an 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."(14)
In these years of the early 'fifties, Herndon had much occasion to test his partner's indifference to other men's views, his tenacious adherence to his own. Herndon had become an Abolitionist. He labored to convert Lincoln; but it was a lost labor. The Sphinx in a glimmer of sunshine was as unassailable as the cheery, fable-loving, inflexible Lincoln. The younger man would work himself up, and, flushed with ardor, warn Lincoln against his apparent conservatism when the needs of the hour were so great; but his only answer would be, "Billy, you are too rampant and spontaneous."(15)
Nothing could move him from his fixed conviction that the temper of Abolitionism made it pernicious. He persisted in classifying it with slavery,—both of equal danger to free institutions. He took occasion to reassert this belief in the one important utterance of a political nature that commemorates this period. An oration on the death of Henry Clay, contains the sentence: "Cast into life when slavery was already widely spread and deeply sealed, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated without producing a greater evil even to the cause of human liberty itself."(16)
It will be remembered that the Abolitionists were never strongly national in sentiment. In certain respects they remind one of the extreme "internationals" of to-day. Their allegiance was not first of all to Society, nor to governments, but to abstract ideas. For all such attitudes in political science, Lincoln had an instinctive aversion. He was permeated always, by his sense of the community, of the obligation to work in terms of the community. Even the prejudices, the shortsightedness of the community were things to be considered, to be dealt with tenderly. Hence his unwillingness to force reforms upon a community not ripe to receive them. In one of his greatest speeches occurs the dictum: "A universal feeling whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded."(17) Anticipating such ideas, he made in his Clay oration, a startling denunciation of both the extreme factions of
"Those (Abolitionists) who would shiver into fragments the union of these States, tear to tatters its now 'venerated Constitution, and even burn the last copy of the Bible rather than slavery should continue a single hour; together with all their more halting sympathizers, have received and are receiving their just execration; and the name and opinion and influence of Mr. Clay are fully and, as I trust, effectually and enduringly arrayed against them. But I would also if I could, array his name, opinion and influence against the opposite extreme, against a few, but increasing number of men who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.'"(18)
In another passage he stated what he conceived to be the central inspiration of Clay. Had he been thinking of himself, he could not have foreshadowed more exactly the basal drift of all his future as a statesman:
"He loved his country partly because it was his own country, and mostly because it was a free country; and he burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity, and glory, because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human right and human nature."(19)
VIII. A RETURN TO POLITICS
Meanwhile, great things were coming forward at Washington. They centered about a remarkable man with whom Lincoln had hitherto formed a curious parallel, by whom hitherto he had been completely overshadowed. Stephen Arnold Douglas was prosecuting attorney at Springfield when Lincoln began the practice of law. They were in the Legislature together. Both courted Mary Todd. Soon afterward, Douglas had distanced his rival. When Lincoln went to the House of Representatives as a Whig, Douglas went to the Senate as a Democrat. While Lincoln was failing at Washington, Douglas was building a national reputation. In the hubbub that followed the Compromise of 1850, while Lincoln, abandoning politics, immersed himself in the law, Douglas rendered a service to the country by defeating a movement in Illinois to reject the Compromise. When the Democratic National Convention assembled in 1852, he was sufficiently prominent to obtain a considerable vote for the presidential nomination.
The dramatic contrast of these two began with their physical appearance. Douglas was so small that he had been known to sit on a friend's knee while arguing politics. But his energy of mind, his indomitable force of character, made up for his tiny proportions. "The Little Giant" was a term of endearment applied to him by his followers. The mental contrast was equally marked. Scarcely a quality in Lincoln that was not reversed in Douglas—deliberation, gradualness, introspection, tenacity, were the characteristics of Lincoln's mind. The mind of Douglas was first of all facile. He was extraordinarily quick. In political Strategy he could sense a new situation, wheel to meet it, throw overboard well-established plans, devise new ones, all in the twinkle of an eye. People who could not understand such rapidity of judgment pronounced him insincere, or at least, an opportunist. That he did not have the deep inflexibility of Lincoln may be assumed; that his convictions, such as they were, did not have an ethical cast may be safely asserted. Nevertheless, he was a great force, an immense human power, that did not change its course without good reason of its own sort. Far more than a mere opportunist. Politically, he summed up a change that was coming over the Democratic party. Janus-like, he had two faces, one for his constituents, one for his colleagues. To the voter he was still a Jeffersonian, with whom the old phraseology of the party, liberty, equality, and fraternity, were still the catch-words. To his associates in the Senate he was essentially an aristocrat, laboring to advance interests that were careless of the rights of man. A later age has accused the Senate of the United States of being the citadel of Big Business. Waiving the latter view, the historian may assert that something suggestive of Big Business appeared in our politics in the 'fifties, and was promptly made at home in the Senate. Perhaps its first definite manifestation was a new activity on the part of the great slave-holders. To invoke again the classifications of later points of view, certain of our historians to-day think they can see in the 'fifties a virtual slavery trust, a combine of slave interests controlled by the magnates of the institution, and having as real, though informal, an existence as has the Steel Trust or the Beef Trust in our own time. This powerful interest allied itself with the capitalists of the Northeast. In modern phraseology, they aimed to "finance" the slave interest from New York. And for a time the alliance succeeded in doing this. The South went entirely upon credit. It bought and borrowed heavily in the East New York furnished the money.
Had there been nothing further to consider, the invasion of the Senate by Big Business in the 'fifties might not have taken place. But there was something else. Slavery's system of agriculture was excessively wasteful. To be highly profitable it required virgin soil, and the financial alliance demanded high profits. Early in the 'fifties, the problem of Big Business was the acquisition of fresh soil for slavery. The problem entered politics with the question how could this be brought about without appearing to contradict democracy? The West also had its incipient Big Business. It hinged upon railways. Now that California had been acquired, with a steady stream of migration westward, with all America dazzled more or less by gold-mines and Pacific trade, a transcontinental railway was a Western dream. But what course should it take, what favored regions were to become its immediate beneficiaries? Here was a chance for great jockeying among business interests in Congress, for slave-holders, money-lenders, railway promoters to manipulate deals to their hearts' content. They had been doing so amid a high complication of squabbling, while Douglas was traveling in Europe during 1853. When he returned late in the year, the unity of the Democratic machine in Congress was endangered by these disputes. Douglas at once attacked the problem of party harmony. He threw himself into the task with all his characteristic quickness, all his energy and resourcefulness.
By this time the problem contained five distinct factors: The upper Northeast wanted a railroad starting at Chicago. The Central West wanted a road from St. Louis. The Southwest wanted a road from New Orleans, or at least, the frustration of the two Northern schemes. Big Business wanted new soil for slavery. The Compromise of 1850 stood in the way of the extension of slave territory.
If Douglas had had any serious convictions opposed to slavery the last of the five factors would have brought him to a standstill. Fortunately for him as a party strategist, he was indifferent. Then, too, he firmly believed that slavery could never thrive in the West because of climatic conditions. "Man might propose, but physical geography would dispose."(1) On both counts it seemed to him immaterial what concessions be made to slavery extension northwestward. Therefore, he dismissed this consideration and applied himself to the harmonization of the four business factors involved. The result was a famous compromise inside a party. His Kansas-Nebraska Bill created two new territories, one lying westward from Chicago; one lying westward from St. Louis. It also repealed the Missouri Compromise and gave the inhabitants of each territory the right to decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be permitted in their midst. That is to say, both to the railway promoter and the slavery financier, it extended equal governmental protection, but it promised favors to none, and left each faction to rise or fall in the free competition of private enterprise. Why—was not this, remembering Douglas's assumptions, a master-stroke?
He had expected, of course, denunciation by the Abolitionists. He considered it immaterial. But he was not in the least prepared for what happened. A storm burst. It was fiercest in his own State. "Traitor," "Arnold," "Judas," were the pleasant epithets fired at him in a bewildering fusillade. He could not understand it. Something other than mere Abolitionism had been aroused by his great stroke. But what was it? Why did men who were not Abolitionists raise a hue and cry? Especially, why did many Democrats do so? Amazed, puzzled, but as always furiously valiant, Douglas hurried home to join battle with his assailants. He entered on a campaign of speech-making. On October 3, 1854, he spoke at Springfield. His enemies, looking about for the strongest popular speaker they could find, chose Lincoln. The next day he replied to Douglas.
The Kansas-Nebraska Bill had not affected any change in Lincoln's thinking. His steady, consistent development as a political thinker had gone on chiefly in silence ever since his Protest seventeen years before. He was still intolerant of Abolitionism, still resolved to leave slavery to die a natural death in the States where it was established. He defended the measure which most offended the Abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Law. He had appeared as counsel for a man who claimed a runaway slave as his property.(2) None the less, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill had brought him to his feet, wheeled him back from law into politics, begun a new chapter. The springs of action in is case were the factor which Douglas had overlooked, which in all his calculations he had failed to take into account, which was destined to destroy him.
Lincoln, no less than Douglas, had sensed the fact that money was becoming a power in American politics. He saw that money and slavery tended to become allies with the inevitable result of a shift of gravity in the American social system. "Humanity" had once been the American shibboleth; it was giving place to a new shibboleth-"prosperity." And the people who were to control and administer prosperity were the rich. The rights of man were being superseded by the rights of wealth. Because of its place in this new coalition of non-democratic influences, slavery, to Lincoln's mind, was assuming a new role, "beginning," as he had said, in the Clay oration, "to assail and ridicule the white man's charter of freedom, the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.'"
That phrase, "the white man's charter of freedom," had become Lincoln's shibboleth. Various utterances and written fragments of the summer of 1854, reveal the intensity of his preoccupation.
"Equality in society beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort or of the domestic slavery sort"(3)
"If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right enslave B, why may not B snatch the same argument and prove equally that he may enslave A? You say A is white and B is black. It is color then; the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own. But, you say, it is a question of interest, and if you make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you."(4)
Speaking of slavery to a fellow lawyer, he said: "It is the most glittering, ostentatious, and displaying property in the world; and now, if a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady love owns. The love of slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth, but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labor."(5)
It was because of these views, because he saw slavery allying itself with the spread of plutocratic ideals, that Lincoln entered the battle to prevent its extension. He did so in his usual cool, determined way.
Though his first reply to Douglas was not recorded, his second, made at Peoria twelve days later, still exists.(6) It is a landmark in his career. It sums up all his long, slow development in political science, lays the abiding foundation of everything he thought thereafter. In this great speech, the end of his novitiate, he rings the changes on the white man's charter of freedom. He argues that the extension of slavery tends to discredit republican institutions, and to disappoint "the Liberal party throughout the world." The heart of his argument is:
"Whether slavery shall go into Nebraska or other new Territories is not a matter of exclusive concern to the people who may go there. The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these Territories. We want them for homes for free white people. This they can not be to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted within them. Slave States are places for poor white people to remove from, not remove to. New Free States are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition. For this use the nation needs these Territories."
The speech was a masterpiece of simplicity, of lucidity. It showed the great jury; lawyer at his best. Its temper was as admirable as its logic; not a touch of anger nor of vituperation.
"I have no prejudice against the Southern people," said he. "They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses North and South.
"When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution."
His instinctive aversion to fanaticism found expression in a plea for the golden mean in politics.
"Some men, mostly Whigs, who condemn the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nevertheless hesitate to go for its restoration lest they be thrown in company with the Abolitionists. Will they allow me as an old Whig, to tell them good-humoredly that I think this is very silly. Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong. Stand with the Abolitionist in restoring the Missouri Compromise, and stand against him when he attempts to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law. In the latter case you stand with the Southern dis-unionist. What of that? You are still right. In both cases you are right. In both cases you expose the dangerous extremes. In both you stand on middle ground and hold the ship level and steady. In both you are national, and nothing less than national. This is the good old Whig ground. To desert such ground because of any company is to be less than a Whig-less than a man-less than an American."
These two speeches against Douglas made an immense impression Byron-like, Lincoln waked up and found himself famous. Thereupon, his ambition revived. A Senator was to be chosen that autumn. Why might not this be the opportunity to retrieve his failure in Congress? Shortly after the Peoria speech, he was sending out notes like this to prominent politicians:
"Dear Sir: You used to express a good deal of partiality for me, and if you are still so, now is the time. Some friends here are really for me for the United States Senate, and I should be very grateful if you could make a mark for me among your members (of the Legislature)."(7)
When the Legislature assembled, it was found to comprise four groups: the out-and-out Democrats who would stand by Douglas through thick and thin, and vote only for his nominee; the bolting Democrats who would not vote for a Douglas man, but whose party rancor was so great that they would throw their votes away rather than give them to a Whig; such enemies of Douglas as were willing to vote for a Whig; the remainder.
The Democrats supported Governor Matteson; the candidate of the second group was Lyman Trumbull; the Whigs supported Lincoln. After nine exciting ballots, Matteson had forty-seven votes, Trumbull thirty-five, Lincoln fifteen. As the bolting Democrats were beyond compromise, Lincoln determined to sacrifice himself in order to defeat Matteson. Though the fifteen protested against deserting him, he required them to do so. On the tenth ballot, they transferred their votes to Trumbull and he was elected.(8)
Douglas had met his first important defeat. His policy had been repudiated in his own State. And it was Lincoln who had formulated the argument against him, who had held the balance of power, and had turned the scale.
IX. THE LITERARY STATESMAN
Lincoln had found at last a mode and an opportunity for concentrating all his powers in a way that could have results. He had discovered himself as a man of letters. The great speeches of 1854 were not different in a way from the previous speeches that were without results. And yet they were wholly different. Just as Lincoln's version of an old tale made of that tale a new thing, so Lincoln's version of an argument made of it a different thing from other men's versions. The oratory of 1854 was not state-craft in any ordinary sense. It was art Lincoln the artist, who had slowly developed a great literary faculty, had chanced after so many rebuffs on good fortune. His cause stood in urgent need of just what he could give. It was one of those moments when a new political force, having not as yet any opening for action, finds salvation in the phrase-maker, in the literary artist who can embody it in words.
During the next five years and more, Lincoln was the recognized offset to Douglas. His fame spread from Illinois in both directions. He was called to Iowa and to Ohio as the advocate of all advocates who could undo the effect of Douglas. His fame traveled eastward. The culmination of the period of literary leadership was his famous speech at Cooper Union in February, 1860.
It was inevitable that he should go along with the antislavery coalition which adopted the name of the Republican party. But his natural deliberation kept him from being one of its founders. An attempt of its founders to appropriate him after the triumph at Springfield, in October, 1854, met with a rebuff.(1) Nearly a year and a half went by before he affiliated himself with the new party. But once having made up his mind, he went forward wholeheartedly. At the State Convention of Illinois Republicans in 1856 he made a speech that has not been recorded but which is a tradition for moving oratory. That same year a considerable number of votes were cast for Lincoln for Vice-President in the Republican National Convention.
But all these were mere details. The great event of the years between 1854 and 1860 was his contest with Douglas. It was a battle of wits, a great literary duel. Fortunately for Lincoln, his part was played altogether on his own soil, under conditions in which he was entirely at his ease, where nothing conspired with his enemy to embarrass him.
Douglas had a far more difficult task. Unforeseen complications rapidly forced him to change his policy, to meet desertion and betrayal in his own ranks. These were terrible years when fierce events followed one another in quick succession—the rush of both slave-holders and abolitionists into Kansas; the cruel war along the Wakarusa River; the sack of Lawrence by the pro-slavery party; the massacre by John Brown at Pottawatomie; the diatribes of Sumner in the Senate; the assault on Sumner by Brooks. In the midst of this carnival of ferocity came the Dred Scott decision, cutting under the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, denying to the people of a Territory the right to legislate on slavery, and giving to all slave-holders the right to settle with their slaves anywhere they pleased outside a Free State. This famous decision repudiated Douglas's policy of leaving all such questions to local autonomy and to private enterprise. For a time Douglas made no move to save his policy. But when President Buchanan decided to throw the influence of the Administration on the side of the pro-slavery party in Kansas, Douglas was up in arms. When it was proposed to admit Kansas with a constitution favoring slavery, but which had not received the votes of a majority of the inhabitants, Douglas voted with the Republicans to defeat admission. Whereupon the Democratic party machine and the Administration turned upon him without mercy. He stood alone in a circle of enemies. At no other time did he show so many of the qualities of a great leader. Battling with Lincoln in the popular forum on the one hand, he was meeting daily on the other assaults by a crowd of brilliant opponents in Congress. At the same time he was playing a consummate game of political strategy, struggling against immense odds to recover his hold on Illinois. The crisis would come in 1858 when he would have to go before the Legislature for reelection. He knew well enough who his opponent would be. At every turn there fell across his path the shadow of a cool sinister figure, his relentless enemy. It was Lincoln. On the struggle with Lincoln his whole battle turned.
Abandoned by his former allies, his one hope was the retention of his constituency. To discredit Lincoln, to twist and discredit all his arguments, was for Douglas a matter of life and death. He struck frequently with great force, but sometimes with more fury than wisdom. Many a time the unruffled coolness of Lincoln brought to nothing what was meant for a deadly thrust. Douglas took counsel of despair and tried to show that Lincoln was preaching the amalgamation of the white and black races. "I protest," Lincoln replied, "against the counterfeit logic which says that because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal and the equal of all others."(2) Any false move made by Douglas, any rash assertion, was sure to be seized upon by that watchful enemy in Illinois. In attempting to defend himself on two fronts at once, defying both the Republicans and the Democratic machine, Douglas made his reckless declaration that all he wanted was a fair vote by the people of Kansas; that for himself he did not care how they settled the matter, whether slavery was voted up or voted down. With relentless skill, Lincoln developed the implications of this admission, drawing forth from its confessed indifference to the existence of slavery, a chain of conclusions that extended link by link to a belief in reopening the African slave trade. This was done in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for the Senate. In the same speech he restated his general position in half a dozen sentences that became at once a classic statement for the whole Republican party: "A house divided against itself can not stand. I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."(3)
The great duel was rapidly approaching its climax. What was in reality no more than the last round has appropriated a label that ought to have a wider meaning and is known as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The two candidates made a joint tour of the State, debating their policies in public at various places during the summer and autumn of 1858.
Properly considered, these famous speeches closed Lincoln's life as an orator. The Cooper Union speech was an isolated aftermath in alien conditions, a set performance not quite in his true vein. His brief addresses of the later years were incidental; they had no combative element. Never again was he to attempt to sway an audience for an immediate stake through the use of the spoken word. "A brief description of Mr. Lincoln's appearance on the stump and of his manner when speaking," as Herndon aptly remarks, "may not be without interest. When standing erect, he was six feet four inches high. He was lean in flesh and ungainly in figure. Aside from his sad, pained look, due to habitual melancholy, his face had no characteristic or fixed expression. He was thin through the chest and hence slightly stoop-shouldered. . . . At first he was very awkward and it seemed a real labor to adjust himself to his surroundings. He struggled for a time under a feeling of apparent diffidence and sensitiveness, and these only added to his awkwardness.... When he began speaking his voice was shrill, piping and unpleasant. His manner, his attitude, his dark yellow face, wrinkled and dry, his oddity of pose, his diffident movements; everything seemed to be against him, but only for a short time. . . . As he proceeded, he became somewhat more animated. . . . He did not gesticulate as much with his hands as with his head. He used the latter frequently, throwing it with him, this way and that. . . . He never sawed the air nor rent space into tatters and rags, as some orators do. He never acted for stage effect. He was cool, considerate, reflective—in time, self-possessed and self-reliant. . . . As he moved along in his speech he became freer and less uneasy in his movements; to that extent he was graceful. He had a perfect naturalness, a strong individuality, and to that extent he was dignified. . . . He spoke with effectiveness—and to move the judgment as well as the emotion of men. There was a world of meaning and emphasis in the long, bony finger of the right hand as he dotted the ideas on the minds of his hearers. . . . He always stood squarely on his feet. . . . He neither touched nor leaned on anything for support. He never ranted, never walked backward and forward on the platform. . . . As he proceeded with his speech, the exercise of his vocal organs altered somewhat the pitch of his voice. It lost in a measure its former acute and shrilling pitch and mellowed into a more harmonious and pleasant sound. His form expanded, and notwithstanding the sunken breast, he rose up a splendid and imposing figure. . . . His little gray eyes flashed in a face aglow with the fire of his profound thoughts; and his uneasy movements and diffident manner sunk themselves beneath the wave of righteous indignation that came sweeping over him."(4)
A wonderful dramatic contrast were these two men, each in his way so masterful, as they appeared in the famous debates. By good fortune we have a portrait of Douglas the orator, from the pen of Mrs. Stowe, who had observed him with reluctant admiration from the gallery of the Senate. "This Douglas is the very ideal of vitality. Short, broad, thick-set, every inch of him has its own alertness and motion. He has a good head, thick black hair, heavy black brows, and a keen face. His figure would be an unfortunate one were it not for the animation that constantly pervades it. As it is it rather gives poignancy to his peculiar appearance; he has a small handsome hand, moreover, and a graceful as well as forcible mode of using it. . . . He has two requisites of a debater, a melodious voice and clear, sharply defined enunciation. His forte in debating is his power of mystifying the point. With the most offhand assured airs in the world, and a certain appearance of honest superiority, like one who has a regard for you and wishes to set you right on one or two little matters, he proceeds to set up some point which is not that in question, but only a family connection of it, and this point he attacks with the very best of logic and language; he charges upon it, horse and foot, runs it down, tramples it in the dust, and then turns upon you with 'See, there is your argument. Did I not tell you so? You see it is all stuff.' And if you have allowed yourself to be so dazzled by his quickness as to forget that the routed point is not, after all, the one in question, you suppose all is over with it. Moreover, he contrives to mingle up so many stinging allusions, so many piquant personalities, that by the time he has done his mystification, a dozen others are ready and burning to spring on their feet to repel some direct or indirect attack all equally wide of the point."
The mode of travel of the two contestants heightened the contrast. George B. McClellan, a young engineer officer who had recently resigned from the army and was now general superintendent of the Illinois Central Railroad, gave Douglas his private car and a special train. Lincoln traveled any way he could-in ordinary passenger trains, or even in the caboose of a freight train. A curious symbolization of Lincoln's belief that the real conflict was between the plain people and organized money!
The debates did not develop new ideas. It was a literary duel, each leader aiming to restate himself in the most telling, popular way. For once that superficial definition of art applied: "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed." Nevertheless the debates contained an incident that helped to make history. Though Douglas was at war with the Administration, it was not certain that the quarrel might not be made up. There was no other leader who would be so formidable at the head of a reunited Democratic party. Lincoln pondered the question, how could the rift between Douglas and the Democratic machine be made irrevocable? And now a new phase of Lincoln appeared. It was the political strategist He saw that if he would disregard his own chance of election-as he had done from a simpler motive four years before—he could drive Douglas into a dilemma from which there was no real escape. He confided his purpose to his friends; they urged him not to do it. But he had made up his mind as he generally did, without consultation, in the silence of his own thoughts, and once having made it up, he was inflexible.
At Freeport, Lincoln made the move which probably lost him the Senatorship. He asked a question which if Douglas answered it one way would enable him to recover the favor of Illinois but would lose him forever the favor of the slave-holders; but which, if he answered it another way might enable him to make his peace at Washington but would certainly lose him Illinois. The question was: "Can the people of a United States Territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State Constitution?"(5) In other words, is the Dred Scott decision good law? Is it true that a slave-holder can take his slaves into Kansas if the people of Kansas want to keep him out?
Douglas saw the trap. With his instantaneous facility he tried to cloud the issue and extricate himself through evasion in the very manner Mrs. Stowe has described. While dodging a denial of the court's authority, he insisted that his doctrine of local autonomy was still secure because through police regulation the local legislature could foster or strangle slavery, just as they pleased, no matter "what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory under the Constitution."
As Lincoln's friends had foreseen, this matchless performance of carrying water on both shoulders caught the popular fancy; Douglas was reelected to the Senate. As Lincoln had foreseen, it killed him as a Democratic leader; it prevented the reunion of the Democratic party. The result appeared in 1860 when the Republicans, though still a minority party, carried the day because of the bitter divisions among the Democrats. That was what Lincoln foresaw when he said to his fearful friends while they argued in vain to prevent his asking the question at Free-port. "I am killing larger game; the great battle of 1860 is worth a thousand of this senatorial race."(6)
X. THE DARK HORSE
One of the most curious things in Lincoln is the way his confidence in himself came and went. He had none of Douglas's unwavering self-reliance. Before the end, to be sure, he attained a type of self-reliance, higher and more imperturbable. But this was not the fruit of a steadfast unfolding. Rather, he was like a tree with its alternating periods of growth and pause, now richly in leaf, now dormant. Equally applicable is the other familiar image of the successive waves.
The clue seems to have been, in part at least, a matter of vitality. Just as Douglas emanated vitality—so much so that his aura filled the whole Senate chamber and forced an unwilling response in the gifted but hostile woman who watched him from the gallery—Lincoln, conversely, made no such overpowering impression. His observers, however much they have to say about his humor, his seasons of Shakespearian mirth, never forget their impression that at heart he is sad. His fondness for poetry in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud."
It is impossible to discover any law governing the succession of his lapses in self-reliance. But they may be related very plausibly to his sense of failure or at least to his sense of futility. He was one of those intensely sensitive natures to whom the futilities of this world are its most discouraging feature. Whenever such ideas were brought home to him his energy flagged; his vitality, never high, sank. He was prone to turn away from the outward life to lose himself in the inner. All this is part of the phenomena which Herndon perceived more clearly than he comprehended it, which led him to call Lincoln a fatalist.
A humbler but perhaps more accurate explanation is the reminder that he was son to Thomas the unstable. What happened in Lincoln's mind when he returned defeated from Washington, that ghost-like rising of the impulses of old Thomas, recurred more than once thereafter. In fact there is a period well-defined, a span of thirteen years terminating suddenly on a day in 1862, during which the ghost of old Thomas is a thing to be reckoned with in his son's life. It came and went, most of the time fortunately far on the horizon. But now and then it drew near. Always it was lurking somewhere, waiting to seize upon him in those moments when his vitality sank, when his energies were in the ebb, when his thoughts were possessed by a sense of futility.
The year 1859 was one of his ebb tides. In the previous year the rising tide, which had mounted high during his success on the circuit, reached its crest The memory of his failure at Washington was effaced. At Freeport he was a more powerful genius, a more dominant personality, than he had ever been. Gradually, in the months following, the high wave subsided. During 1859 he gave most of his attention to his practice. Though political speech-making continued, and though he did not impair his reputation, he did nothing of a remarkable sort. The one literary fragment of any value is a letter to a Boston committee that had invited him to attend a "festival" in Boston on Jefferson's birthday. He avowed himself a thoroughgoing disciple of Jefferson and pronounced the principles of Jefferson "the definitions and axioms of free society." Without conditions he identified his own cause with the cause of Jefferson, "the man who in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."(1)
While the Boston committee were turning their eyes toward this great new phrase-maker of the West, several politicians in Illinois had formed a bold resolve. They would try to make him President. The movement had two sources—the personal loyalty of his devoted friends of the circuit, the shrewdness of the political managers who saw that his duel with Douglas had made him a national figure. As one of them said to him, "Douglas being so widely known, you are getting a national reputation through him." Lincoln replied that he did not lack the ambition but lacked altogether the confidence in the possibility of success.(2)
This was his attitude during most of 1859. The glow, the enthusiasm, of the previous year was gone. "I must in candor say that I do not think myself fit for the Presidency," he wrote to a newspaper editor in April. He used the same words to another correspondent in July. As late as November first, he wrote, "For my single self, I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause, and for this object I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position."(3)
Meanwhile, both groups of supporters had labored unceasingly, regardless of his approval. In his personal following, the companionableness of twenty years had deepened into an almost romantic loyalty. The leaders of this enthusiastic attachment, most of them lawyers, had no superiors for influence in Illinois. The man who had such a following was a power in politics whether he would or no. This the mere politicians saw. They also saw that the next Republican nomination would rest on a delicate calculation of probabilities. There were other Republicans more conspicuous than Lincoln—Seward in New York, Sumner in Massachusetts, Chase in Ohio—but all these had inveterate enemies. Despite their importance would it be safe to nominate them? Would not the party be compelled to take some relatively minor figure, some essentially new man? In a word, what we know as a "dark horse." Believing that this would happen, they built hopefully on their faith in Lincoln.
Toward the end of the year he was at last persuaded to take his candidacy seriously. The local campaign for his nomination had gone so far that a failure to go further would have the look of being discarded as the local Republican leader. This argument decided him. Before the year's end he had agreed to become a candidate before the convention. In his own words, "I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the Illinois delegates."(4)
It was shortly after this momentous decision that he went to New York by invitation and made his most celebrated, though not in any respect his greatest, oration.(5) A large audience filled Cooper Union, February 27, 1860. William Cullen Bryant presided. David Dudley Field escorted Lincoln to the platform. Horace Greeley was in the audience. Again, the performance was purely literary. No formulation of new policies, no appeal for any new departure. It was a masterly restatement of his position; of the essence of the debates with Douglas. It cleansed the Republican platform of all accidental accretions, as if a ship's hull were being scraped of barnacles preparatory to a voyage; it gave the underlying issues such inflexible definition that they could not be juggled with. Again he showed a power of lucid statement not possessed by any of his rivals. An incident of the speech was his unsparing condemnation of John Brown whose raid and death were on every tongue. "You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves," said he, apostrophizing the slave-holders. "We deny it, and what is your proof? 'Harper's Ferry; John Brown!' John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in this Harper's Ferry enterprise. . .
"John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves with all their ignorance saw plainly enough that it could not succeed. That affair in its philosophy corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of the people until he fancies himself commissioned by heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown's attempt at Harper's Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in the one case and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things."
The Cooper Union speech received extravagant praise from all the Republican newspapers. Lincoln's ardent partisans assert that it took New York "by storm." Rather too violent a way of putting it! But there can be no doubt that the speech made a deep impression. Thereafter, many of the Eastern managers were willing to consider Lincoln as a candidate, should factional jealousies prove uncompromising. Any port in a storm, you know. Obviously, there could be ports far more dangerous than this "favorite son" of Illinois.
Many national conventions in the United States have decided upon a compromise candidate, "a dark horse," through just such reasoning. The most noted instance is the Republican Convention of 1860. When it assembled at Chicago in June, the most imposing candidate was the brilliant leader of the New York Republicans, Seward. But no man in the country had more bitter enemies. Horace Greeley whose paper The Tribune was by far the most influential Republican organ, went to Chicago obsessed by one purpose: because of irreconcilable personal quarrels he would have revenge upon Seward. Others who did not hate Seward were afraid of what Greeley symbolized. And all of them knew that whatever else happened, the West must be secured.
The Lincoln managers played upon the Eastern jealousies and the Eastern fears with great skill. There was little sleep among the delegates the night previous to the balloting. At just the right moment, the Lincoln managers, though their chief had forbidden them to do so, offered promises with regard to Cabinet appointments.(6) And they succeeded in packing the galleries of the Convention Hall with a perfectly organized claque-"rooters," the modern American would say.
The result on the third ballot was a rush to Lincoln of all the enemies of Seward, and Lincoln's nomination amid a roaring frenzy of applause.
XI. SECESSION
After twenty-three years of successive defeats, Lincoln, almost fortuitously, was at the center of the political maelstrom. The clue to what follows is in the way he had developed during that long discouraging apprenticeship to greatness. Mentally, he had always been in isolation. Socially, he had lived in a near horizon. The real tragedy of his failure at Washington was in the closing against him of the opportunity to know his country as a whole. Had it been Lincoln instead of Douglas to whom destiny had given a residence at Washington during the 'fifties, it is conceivable that things might have been different in the 'sixties. On the other hand, America would have lost its greatest example of the artist in politics.
And without that artist, without his extraordinary literary gift, his party might not have consolidated in 1860. A very curious party it was. It had sprung to life as a denial, as a device for halting Douglas. Lincoln's doctrine of the golden mean, became for once a political power. Men of the most diverse views on other issues accepted in their need the axiom: "Stand with anybody so long as he stands right." And standing right, for that moment in the minds of them all, meant keeping slavery and the money power from devouring the territories.
The artist of the movement expressed them all in his declaration that the nation needed the Territories to give home and opportunity to free white people. Even the Abolitionists, who hitherto had refused to make common cause with any other faction, entered the negative coalition of the new party. So did Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats, as well as other factions then obscure which we should now label Socialists and Labormen.
However, this coalition, which in origin was purely negative, revealed, the moment it coalesced, two positive features. To the man of the near horizon in 1860 neither of these features seemed of first importance. To the man outside that horizon, seeing them in perspective as related to the sum total of American life, they had a significance he did not entirely appreciate.
The first of these was the temper of the Abolitionists. Lincoln ignored it. He was content with his ringing assertion of the golden mean. But there spoke the man of letters rather than the statesman. Of temper in politics as an abstract idea, he had been keenly conscious from the first; but his lack of familiarity with political organizations kept him from assigning full value to the temper of any one factor as affecting the joint temper of the whole group. It was appointed for him to learn this in a supremely hard way and to apply the lesson with wonderful audacity. But in 1860 that stern experience still slept in the future. He had no suspicion as yet that he might find it difficult to carry out his own promise to stand with the Abolitionists in excluding slavery from the Territories, and to stand against them in enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. He did not yet see why any one should doubt the validity of this promise; why any one should be afraid to go along with him, afraid that the temper of one element would infect the whole coalition.
But this fear that Lincoln did not allow for, possessed already a great many minds. Thousands of Southerners, of the sort whom Lincoln credited with good intentions about slavery, feared the Abolitionists Not because the Abolitionists wanted to destroy slavery, but because they wanted to do so fiercely, cruelly. Like Lincoln, these Southerners who were liberals in thought and moderates in action, did not know what to do about slavery. Like Lincoln, they had but one fixed idea with regard to it,—slavery must not be terminated violently. Lincoln, despite his near horizon, sensed them correctly as not being at one with the great plutocrats who wished to exploit slavery. But when the Abolitionist poured out the same fury of vituperation on every sort of slave-holder; when he promised his soul that it should yet have the joy of exulting in the ruin of all such, the moderate Southerners became as flint. When the Abolitionists proclaimed their affiliation with the new party, the first step was taken toward a general Southern coalition to stop the Republican advance.
There was another positive element blended into the negative coalition. In 1857, the Republicans overruling the traditions of those members who had once been Democrats, set their faces toward protection. To most of the Northerners the fatefulness of the step was not obvious. Twenty years had passed since a serious tariff controversy had shaken the North. Financial difficulties in the 'fifties were more prevalent in the North than in the South. Business was in a quandary. Labor was demanding better opportunities. Protection as a solution, or at least as a palliative, seemed to the mass of the Republican coalition, even to the former Democrats for all their free trade traditions, not outrageous. To the Southerners it was an alarm bell. The Southern world was agricultural; its staple was cotton; the bulk of its market was in England. Ever since 1828, the Southern mind had been constantly on guard with regard to tariff, unceasingly fearful that protection would be imposed on it by Northern and Western votes. To have to sell its cotton in England at free trade values, but at the same time to have to buy its commodities at protected values fixed by Northern manufacturers—what did that mean but the despotism of one section over another? When the Republicans took up protection as part of their creed, a general Southern coalition was rendered almost inevitable.
This, Lincoln {Missing text}. Again it is to be accounted for in part by his near horizon. Had he lived at Washington, had he met, frequently, Southern men; had he passed those crucial years of the 'fifties in debates with political leaders rather than in story-telling tournaments on the circuit; perhaps all this would have been otherwise. But one can not be quite sure. Finance never appealed to him. A wide application may be given to Herndon's remark that "he had no money sense." All the rest of the Republican doctrine finds its best statement in Lincoln. On the one subject of its economic policy he is silent. Apparently it is to be classified with the routine side of the law. To neither was he ever able to give more than a perfunctory attention. As an artist in politics he had the defect of his qualities.
What his qualities showed him were two things: the alliance of the plutocratic slave power with the plutocratic money power, and the essential rightness in impulse of the bulk of the Southern people. Hence his conclusion which became his party's conclusion: that, in the South, a political-financial ring was dominating a leaderless people, This was not the truth. Lincoln's defects in 1860 limited his vision. Nevertheless, to the solitary distant thinker, shut in by the near horizon of political Springfield, there was every excuse for the error. The palpable evidence all confirmed it. What might have contradicted it was a cloud of witnesses, floating, incidental, casual, tacit. Just what a nature like Lincoln's, if only he could have met them, would have perceived and comprehended; what a nature like Douglas's, no matter how plainly they were presented to him, could neither perceive nor comprehend. It was the irony of fate that an opportunity to fathom his time was squandered upon the unseeing Douglas, while to the seeing Lincoln it was denied. In a word, the Southern reaction against the Republicans, like the Republican movement itself, had both a positive and a negative side. It was the positive side that could be seen and judged at long range. And this was what Lincoln saw, which appeared to him to have created the dominant issue in 1860.
The negative side of the Southern movement he did not see. He was too far away to make out the details of the picture. Though he may have known from the census of 1850 that only one-third of the Southern whites were members of slave-holding families, he could scarcely have known that only a small minority of the Southern families owned as many as five slaves; that those who had fortunes in slaves were a mere handful—just as today those who have fortunes in steel or beef are mere handfuls. But still less did he know how entirely this vast majority which had so little, if any, interest in slavery, had grown to fear and distrust the North. They, like him, were suffering from a near horizon. They, too, were applying the principle "Stand with anybody so long as he stands right" But for them, standing right meant preventing a violent revolution in Southern life. Indifferent as they were to slavery, they were willing to go along with the "slave-barons" in the attempt to consolidate the South in a movement of denial—a denial of the right of the North, either through Abolitionism or through tariff, to dominate the South.
If only Lincoln with his subtle mind could have come into touch with the negative side of the Southern agitation! It was the other side, the positive side, that was vocal. With immense shrewdness the profiteers of slavery saw and developed their opportunity. They organized the South. They preached on all occasions, in all connections, the need of all Southerners to stand together, no matter how great their disagreements, in order to prevent the impoverishment of the South by hostile economic legislation. During the late 'fifties their propaganda for an all-Southern policy, made slow but constant headway. But even in 1859 these ideas were still far from controlling the South.
And then came John Brown. The dread of slave insurrection was laid deep in Southern recollection. Thirty years before, the Nat Turner Rebellion had filled a portion of Virginia with burned plantation houses amid whose ruins lay the dead bodies of white women. A little earlier, a negro conspiracy at Charleston planned the murder of white men and the parceling out of white women among the conspirators. And John Brown had come into Virginia at the head of a band of strangers calling upon the slaves to rise and arm.
Here was a supreme opportunity. The positive Southern force, the slave profiteers, seized at once the attitude of champions of the South. It was easy enough to enlist the negative force in a shocked and outraged denunciation of everything Northern. And the Northern extremists did all that was in their power to add fuel to the flame. Emerson called Brown "this new saint who had made the gallows glorious as the cross." The Southerners, hearing that, thought of the conspiracy to parcel out the white women of Charleston. Early in 1860 it seemed as if the whole South had but one idea-to part company with the North.
No wonder Lincoln threw all his influence into the scale to discredit the memory of Brown. No wonder the Republicans in their platform carefully repudiated him. They could not undo the impression made on the Southern mind by two facts: the men who lauded Brown as a new saint were voting the Republican ticket; the Republicans had committed themselves to the anti-Southern policy of protection.
And yet, in spite of all the labors of pro-slavery extremists, the movement for a breach with the North lost ground during 1860. When the election came, the vote for President revealed a singular and unforeseen situation. Four candidates were in the field. The Democrats, split into two by the issue of slavery expansion, formed two parties. The slave profiteers secured the nomination by one faction of John C. Breckinridge. The moderate Democrats who would neither fight nor favor slavery, nominated Douglas. The most peculiar group was the fourth. They included all those who would not join the Republicans for fear of the temper of the Abolition-members, but who were not promoters of slavery, and who distrusted Douglas. They had no program but to restore the condition of things that existed before the Nebraska Bill. About four million five hundred thousand votes were cast. Lincoln had less than two million, and all but about twenty-four thousand of these were in the Free States. However, the disposition of Lincoln's vote gave him the electoral college. He was chosen President by the votes of a minority of the nation. But there was another minority vote which as events turned out, proved equally significant. Breckinridge, the symbol of the slave profiteers, and of all those whom they had persuaded to follow them, had not been able to carry the popular vote of the South. They were definitely in the minority in their own section. The majority of the Southerners had so far reacted from the wild alarms of the beginning of the year that they refused to go along with the candidates of the extremists. They were for giving the Union another trial. The South itself had repudiated the slave profiteers.
This was the immensely significant fact of November, 1860. It made a great impression on the whole country. For the moment it made the fierce talk of the Southern extremists inconsequential. Buoyant Northerners, such as Seward, felt that the crisis was over; that the South had voted for a reconciliation; that only tact was needed to make everybody happy. When, a few weeks after the election, Seward said that all would be merry again inside of ninety days, his illusion had for its foundation the Southern rejection of the slave profiteers.
Unfortunately, Seward did not understand the precise significance of the thought of the moderate South. He did not understand that while the South had voted to send Breckinridge and his sort about their business, it was still deeply alarmed, deeply fearful that after all it might at any minute be forced to call them back, to make common cause with them against what it regarded as an alien and destructive political power, the Republicans. This was the Southern reservation, the unspoken condition of the vote which Seward—and for that matter, Lincoln, also,—failed to comprehend. Because of these cross-purposes, because the Southern alarm was based on another thing than the standing or falling of slavery, the situation called for much more than tact, for profound psychological statesmanship.
And now emerges out of the complexities of the Southern situation a powerful personality whose ideas and point of view Lincoln did not understand. Robert Barnwell Rhett had once been a man of might in politics. Twice he had very nearly rent the Union asunder. In 1844, again in 1851, he had come to the very edge of persuading South Carolina to secede. In each case he sought to organize the general discontent of the South,—its dread of a tariff, and of Northern domination. After his second failure, his haughty nature took offense at fortune. He resigned his seat in the Senate and withdrew to private life. But he was too large and too bold a character to attain obscurity. Nor would his restless genius permit him to rust in ease. During the troubled 'fifties, he watched from a distance, but with ever increasing interest, that negative Southern force which he, in the midst of it, comprehended, while it drifted under the wing of the extremists. As he did so, the old arguments, the old ambitions, the old hopes revived. In 1851 his cry to the South was to assert itself as a Separate nation—not for any one reason, but for many reasons—and to lead its own life apart from the North. It was an age of brilliant though ill-fated revolutionary movements in Europe. Kossuth and the gallant Hungarian attempt at independence had captivated the American imagination. Rhett dreamed of seeing the South do what Hungary had failed to do. He thought of the problem as a medieval knight would have thought, in terms of individual prowess, with the modern factors, economics and all their sort, left on one side. "Smaller nations (than South Carolina)," he said in 1851, "have striven for freedom against greater odds."
In 1860 he had concluded that his third chance had come. He would try once more to bring about secession. To split the Union, he would play into the hands of the slave-barons. He would aim to combine with their movement the negative Southern movement and use the resulting coalition to crown with success his third attempt. Issuing from his seclusion, he became at once the overshadowing figure in South Carolina. Around him all the elements of revolution crystallized. He was sixty years old; seasoned and uncompromising in the pursuit of his one ideal, the independence of the South. His arguments were the same which he had used in 1844, in 1851: the North would impoverish the South; it threatens to impose a crushing tribute in the shape of protection; it seeks to destroy slavery; it aims to bring about economic collapse; in the wreck thus produced, everything that is beautiful, charming, distinctive in Southern life will be lost; let us fight! With such a leader, the forces of discontent were quickly, effectively, organized. Even before the election of Lincoln, the revolutionary leaders in South Carolina were corresponding with men of like mind in other Southern States, especially Alabama, where was another leader, Yancey, only second in intensity to Rhett.
The word from these Alabama revolutionists to South Carolina was to dare all, to risk seceding alone, confident that the other States of the South would follow. Rhett and his new associates took this perilous advice. The election was followed by the call of a convention of delegates of the people of South Carolina. This convention, on the twentieth of December, 1860, repealed the laws which united South Carolina with the other States and proclaimed their own independent.
XII. THE CRISIS
Though Seward and other buoyant natures felt that the crisis had passed with the election, less volatile people held the opposite view. Men who had never before taken seriously the Southern threats of disunion had waked suddenly to a terrified consciousness that they were in for it. In their blindness to realities earlier in the year, they were like that brilliant host of camp followers which, as Thackeray puts it, led the army of Wellington dancing and feasting to the very brink of Waterloo. And now the day of reckoning had come. An emotional reaction carried them from one extreme to the other; from self-sufficient disregard of their adversaries to an almost self-abasing regard.
The very type of these people and of their reaction was Horace Greeley. He was destined many times to make plain that he lived mainly in his sensibilities; that, in his kaleidoscopic vision, the pattern of the world could be red and yellow and green today, and orange and purple and blue tomorrow. To descend from a pinnacle of self-complacency into a desolating abyss of panic, was as easy for Greeley as it is—in the vulgar but pointed American phrase—to roll off a log. A few days after the election, Greeley had rolled off his log. He was wallowing in panic. He began to scream editorially. The Southern extremists were terribly in earnest; if they wanted to go, go they would, and go they should. But foolish Northerners would be sure to talk war and the retaining of the South in the Union by force: it must not be; what was the Union compared with bloodshed? There must be no war—no war. Such was Greeley's terrified—appeal to the North. A few weeks after the election he printed his famous editorial denouncing the idea of a Union pinned together by bayonets. He followed up with another startling concession to his fears: the South had as good cause for leaving the Union as the colonies had for leaving the British Empire. A little later, he formulated his ultimate conclusion,—which like many of his ultimates proved to be transitory,—and declared that if any group of Southern States "choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so," and pledging himself and his followers to do "our best to forward their views."
Greeley wielded through The Tribune more influence, perhaps, than was possessed by any other Republican with the single exception of Lincoln. His newspaper constituency was enormous, and the relation between the leader and the led was unusually close. He was both oracle and barometer. As a symptom of the Republican panic, as a cause increasing that panic, he was of first importance.
Meanwhile Congress had met. And at once, the most characteristic peculiarity of the moment was again made emphatic. The popular majorities and the political machines did not coincide. Both in the North and in the South a minority held the situation in the hollow of its hand. The Breckinridge Democrats, despite their repudiation in the presidential vote, included so many of the Southern politicians, they were so well organized, they had scored such a menacing victory with the aid of Rhett in South Carolina, they had played so skilfully on the fears of the South at large, their leaders were such skilled managers, that they were able to continue for the moment the recognized spokesmen of the South at Washington. They lost no time defining their position. If the Union were not to be sundered, the Republicans must pledge themselves to a new and extensive compromise; it must be far different from those historic compromises that had preceded it. Three features must characterize any new agreement: The South must be dealt with as a unit; it must be given a "sphere of influence"—to use our modern term—which would fully satisfy all its impulses of expansion; and in that sphere, every question of slavery must be left entirely, forever, to local action. In a word, they demanded for the South what today would be described as a "dominion" status. Therefore, they insisted that the party which had captured the Northern political machine should formulate its reply to these demands. They gave notice that they would not discuss individual schemes, but only such as the victorious Republicans might officially present. Thus the national crisis became a party crisis. What could the Republicans among themselves agree to propose?
The central figure of the crisis seemed at first to be the brilliant Republican Senator from New York. Seward thought he understood the South, and what was still more important, human nature. Though he echoed Greeley's cry for peace—translating his passionate hysteria into the polished cynicism of a diplomat who had been known to deny that he was ever entirely serious—he scoffed at Greeley's fears. If the South had not voted lack of confidence in the Breckinridge crowd, what had it voted? If the Breckinridge leaders weren't maneuvering to save their faces, what could they be accused of doing? If Seward, the Republican man of genius, couldn't see through all that, couldn't devise a way to help them save their faces, what was the use in being a brilliant politician?
Jauntily self-complacent, as confident of himself as if Rome were burning and he the garlanded fiddler, Seward braced himself for the task of recreating the Union.
But there was an obstacle in his path. It was Lincoln. Of course, it was folly to propose a scheme which the incoming President would not sustain. Lincoln and Seward must come to an understanding. To bring that about Seward despatched a personal legate to Springfield. Thurlow Weed, editor, man of the world, political wire-puller beyond compare, Seward's devoted henchman, was the legate. One of the great events of American history was the conversation between Weed and Lincoln in December, 1860. By a rare propriety of dramatic effect, it occurred probably, on the very day South Carolina brought to an end its campaign of menace and adopted its Ordinance of Secession, December twentieth.(1)
Weed had brought to Springfield a definite proposal. The Crittenden compromise was being hotly discussed in Congress and throughout the country. All the Northern advocates of conciliation were eager to put it through. There was some ground to believe that the Southern machine at Washington would accept it. If Lincoln would agree, Seward would make it the basis of his policy.
This Compromise would have restored the old line of the Missouri Compromise and would have placed it under the protection of a constitutional amendment. This, together with a guarantee against congressional interference with slavery in the States where it existed, a guarantee the Republicans had already offered, seemed to Seward, to Weed, to Greeley, to the bulk of the party, a satisfactory means of preserving the Union. What was it but a falling back on the original policy of the party, the undoing of those measures of 1854 which had called the party into being? Was it conceivable that Lincoln would balk the wishes of the party by obstructing such a natural mode of extrication? But that was what Lincoln did. His views had advanced since 1854. Then, he was merely for restoring the old duality of the country, the two "dominions," Northern and Southern, each with its own social order. He had advanced to the belief that this duality could not permanently continue. Just how far Lincoln realized what he was doing in refusing to compromise will never be known. Three months afterward, he took a course which seems to imply that his vision during the interim had expanded, had opened before him a new revelation of the nature of his problem. At the earlier date Lincoln and the Southern people—not the Southern machine—were looking at the one problem from opposite points of view, and were locating the significance of the problem in different features. To Lincoln, the heart of the matter was slavery. To the Southerners, including the men who had voted lack of confidence in Breckinridge, the heart of the matter was the sphere of influence. What the Southern majority wanted was not the policy of the slave profiteers but a secure future for expansion, a guarantee that Southern life, social, economic, cultural, would not be merged with the life of the opposite section: in a word, preservation of "dominion" status. In Lincoln's mind, slavery being the main issue, this "dominion" issue was incidental—a mere outgrowth of slavery that should begin to pass away with slavery's restriction. In the Southern mind, a community consciousness, the determination to be a people by themselves, nation within the nation, was the issue, and slavery was the incident. To repeat, it is impossible to say what Lincoln would have done had he comprehended the Southern attitude. His near horizon which had kept him all along from grasping the negative side of the Southern movement prevented his perception of this tragic instance of cross-purposes.
Lacking this perception, his thoughts had centered themselves on a recent activity of the slave profiteers. They had clamored for the annexation of new territory to the south of us. Various attempts had been made to create an international crisis looking toward the seizure of Cuba. Then, too, bold adventurers had staked their heads, seeking to found slave-holding communities in Central America. Why might not such attempts succeed? Why might not new Slave States be created outside the Union, eventually to be drawn in? Why not? said the slave profiteer, and gave money and assistance to the filibusters in Nicaragua. Why not? said Lincoln, also. What protection against such an extension of boundaries? Was the limitation of slave area to be on one side only, the Northern side? And here at last, for Lincoln, was what appeared to be the true issue of the moment. To dualize the Union, assuming its boundaries to be fixed, was one thing. To dualize the Union in the face of a movement for extension of boundaries was another. Hence it was now vital, as Lincoln reasoned, to give slavery a fixed boundary on all sides. Silently, while others fulminated, or rhapsodized, or wailed, he had moved inexorably to a new position which was nothing but a logical development of the old. The old position was—no extension of slave territory; the new position was—no more Slave States.(2) Because Crittenden's Compromise left it possible to have a new Slave State in Cuba, a new Slave State in Nicaragua, perhaps a dozen such new States, Lincoln refused to compromise.(3)
It was a terrible decision, carrying within it the possibility of civil war. But Lincoln could not be moved. This was the first acquaintance of the established political leaders with his inflexible side. In the recesses of his own thoughts the decision had been reached. It was useless to argue with him. Weed carried back his ultimatum. Seward abandoned Crittenden's scheme. The only chance for compromise passed away. The Southern leaders set about their plans for organizing a Southern Confederacy.
XIII. ECLIPSE
Lincoln's ultimatum of December twentieth contained three proposals that might be made to the Southern leaders:
That the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law which hitherto had been left to State authorities should be taken over by Congress and supported by the Republicans.
That the Republicans to the extent of their power should work for the repeal of all those "Personal Liberty Laws" which had been established in certain Northern States to defeat the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law.
That the Federal Union must be preserved.(1)
In presenting these proposals along with a refusal to consider the Crittenden Compromise, Seward tampered with their clear-cut form. Fearful of the effect on the extremists of the Republican group, he withheld Lincoln's unconditional promise to maintain the Fugitive Slave Law and instead of pledging his party to the repeal of Personal Liberty Laws he promised only to have Congress request the States to repeal them. He suppressed altogether the assertion that the Union must be preserved.(2) About the same time, in a public speech, he said he was not going to be "humbugged" by the bogy of secession, and gave his fatuous promise that all the trouble would be ended inside ninety days. For all his brilliancy of a sort, he was spiritually obtuse. On him, as on Douglas, Fate had lavished opportunities to see life as it is, to understand the motives of men; but it could not make him use them. He was incorrigibly cynical. He could not divest himself of the idea that all this confusion was hubbub, was but an ordinary political game, that his only cue was to assist his adversaries in saving their faces. In spite of his rich experience,—in spite of being an accomplished man of the world,—at least in his own estimation—he was as blind to the real motives of that Southern majority which had rejected Breckinridge as was the inexperienced Lincoln. The coolness with which he modified Lincoln's proposals was evidence that he considered himself the great Republican and Lincoln an accident. He was to do the same again—to his own regret.
When Lincoln issued his ultimatum, he was approaching the summit, if not at the very summit, of another of his successive waves of vitality, of self-confidence. That depression which came upon him about the end of 1858, which kept him undecided, in a mood of excessive caution during most of 1859, had passed away. The presidential campaign with its thrilling tension, its excitement, had charged him anew with confidence. Although one more eclipse was in store for him—the darkest eclipse of all—he was very nearly the definitive Lincoln of history. At least, he had the courage which that Lincoln was to show.
He was now the target for a besieging army of politicians clamoring for "spoils" in the shape of promises of preferment. It was a miserable and disgraceful assault which profoundly offended him.(3) To his mind this was not the same thing as the simple-hearted personal politics of his younger days—friends standing together and helping one another along—but a gross and monstrous rapacity. It was the first chill shadow that followed the election day.
There were difficult intrigues over the Cabinet. Promises made by his managers at Chicago were presented for redemption. Rival candidates bidding for his favor, tried to cut each other's throats. For example, there was the intrigue of the War Department. The Lincoln managers had promised a Cabinet appointment to Pennsylvania; the followers of Simon Cameron were a power; it had been necessary to win them over in order to nominate Lincoln; they insisted that their leader was now entitled to the Pennsylvania seat in the Cabinet; but there was an anti-Cameron faction almost as potent in Pennsylvania as the Cameron faction. Both sent their agents to Springfield to lay siege to Lincoln. In this duel, the Cameron forces won the first round. Lincoln offered him the Secretaryship. Subsequently, his enemies made so good a case that Lincoln was convinced of the unwisdom of his decision and withdrew the offer. But Cameron had not kept the offer confidential. The withdrawal would discredit him politically and put a trump card into the hands of his enemies. A long dispute followed. Not until Lincoln had reached Washington, immediately before the inauguration, was the dispute ended, the withdrawal withdrawn, and Cameron appointed.(4)
It was a dreary winter for the President-elect. It was also a brand-new experience. For the first time he was a dispenser of favor on a grand scale. Innumerable men showed their meanest side, either to advance themselves or to injure others. As the weeks passed and the spectacle grew in shamelessness, his friends became more and more conscious of his peculiar melancholy. The elation of the campaign subsided into a deep unhappiness over the vanity of this world. Other phases of the shadowy side of his character also asserted themselves. Conspicuous was a certain trend in his thinking that was part of Herndon's warrant for calling him a fatalist. Lincoln's mysticism very early had taken a turn toward predestination, coupled with a belief in dreams.(5) He did not in any way believe in magic; he never had any faith in divinations, in the occult, in any secret mode of alluring the unseen powers to take one's side. Nevertheless, he made no bones about being superstitious. And he thought that coming events cast their shadows before, that something, at least, of the future was sometimes revealed through dreams. "Nature," he would say, "is the workshop of the Almighty, and we form but links in the chain of intellectual and material life."(6) Byron's Dream was one of his favorite poems. He pondered those ancient, historical tales which make free use of portents. There was a fascination for him in the story of Caracalla—how his murder of Geta was foretold, how he was upbraided by the ghosts of his father and brother. This dream-faith of his was as real as was a similar faith held by the authors of the Old Testament. He had his theory of the interpretation of dreams. Because they were a universal experience—as he believed, the universal mode of communication between the unseen and the seen—his beloved "plain people," the "children of Nature," the most universal types of humanity, were their best interpreters. He also believed in presentiment. As faithfully as the simplest of the brood of the forest—those recreated primitives who regulated their farming by the brightness or the darkness of the moon, who planted corn or slaughtered hogs as Artemis directed—he trusted a presentiment if once it really took possession of him. A presentiment which had been formed before this time, we know not when, was clothed with authority by a dream, or rather a vision, that came to him in the days of melancholy disillusion during the last winter at Springfield. Looking into a mirror, he saw two Lincolns,—one alive, the other dead. It was this vision which clenched his pre-sentiment that he was born to a great career and to a tragic end. He interpreted the vision that his administration would be successful, but that it would close with his death.(7)
The record of his inner life during the last winter at Springfield is very dim. But there can be no doubt that a desolating change attacked his spirit. As late as the day of his ultimatum he was still in comparative sunshine, or, at least his clouds were not close about him. His will was steel, that day. Nevertheless, a friend who visited him in January, to talk over their days together, found not only that "the old-time zest" was lacking, but that it was replaced by "gloom and despondency."(8) The ghosts that hovered so frequently at the back of his mind, the brooding tendencies which fed upon his melancholy and made him at times irresolute, were issuing from the shadows, trooping forward, to encompass him roundabout.
In the midst of this spiritual reaction, he was further depressed by the stern news from the South and from Washington. His refusal to compromise was beginning to bear fruit. The Gulf States seceded. A Southern Confederacy was formed. There is no evidence that he lost faith in his course, but abundant evidence that he was terribly unhappy. He was preyed upon by his sense of helplessness, while Buchanan through his weakness and vacillation was "giving away the case." "Secession is being fostered," said he, "rather than repressed, and if the doctrine meets with general acceptance in the Border States, it will be a great blow to the government."(9) He did not deceive himself upon the possible effect of his ultimatum, and sent word to General Scott to be prepared to hold or to "retake" the forts garrisoned by Federal troops in the Southern States.(10)
All the while his premonition of the approach of doom grew more darkly oppressive. The trail of the artist is discernible across his thoughts. In his troubled imagination he identified his own situation with that of the protagonist in tragedies on the theme of fate. He did not withhold his thoughts from the supreme instance. That same friend who found him possessed of gloom preserved these words of his: "I have read on my knees the story of Gethsemane, when the Son of God prayed in vain that the cup of bitterness might pass from him. I am in the Garden of Gethsemane now and my cup of bitterness is full and overflowing now."(11)
"Like some strong seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance,
With a glassy countenance,"
he faced toward Washington, toward the glorious terror promised him by his superstitions.
The last days before the departure were days of mingled gloom, desperation, and the attempt to recover hope. He visited his old stepmother and made a pilgrimage to his father's grave. His thoughts fondly renewed the details of his past life, lingered upon this and that, as if fearful that it was all slipping away from him forever. And then he roused himself as if in sudden revolt against the Fates. The day before he left Springfield forever Lincoln met his partner for the last time at their law office to wind up the last of their unsettled business. "After those things were all disposed of," says Herndon, "he crossed to the opposite side of the room and threw himself down on the old office sofa. . . . He lay there for some moments his face to the ceiling without either of us speaking. Presently, he inquired: 'Billy'—he always called me by that name—'how long have we been together?' 'Over sixteen years,' I answered. 'We've never had a cross word during all that time, have we?' . . . He gathered a bundle of papers and books he wished to take with him and started to go, but before leaving, he made the strange request that the sign board which swung on its rusty hinges at the foot of the stairway would remain. 'Let it hang there undisturbed,' he said, with a significant lowering of the voice. 'Give our clients to understand that the election of a President makes no change in the firm of Lincoln & Herndon. If I live, I am coming back some time, and then we'll go right on practising law as if nothing had happened.' He lingered for a moment as if to take a last look at the old quarters, and then passed through the door into the narrow hallway."(12)
On a dreary day with a cold rain falling, he set forth. The railway station was packed with friends. He made his way through the crowd slowly, shaking hands. "Having finally reached the train, he ascended the rear platform, and, facing about to the throng which had closed about him, drew himself up to his full height, removed his hat and stood for several seconds in profound silence. His eyes roved sadly over that sea of upturned faces. . . There was an unusual quiver on his lips and a still more unusual tear on his shriveled cheek. His solemn manner, his long silence, were as full of melancholy eloquence as any words he could have uttered."(13) At length, he spoke: "My friends, no one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I can not succeed. With that assistance, I can not fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."(14)
XIV. THE STRANGE NEW MAN
There is a period of sixteen months—from February, 1861, to a day in June, 1862,—when Lincoln is the most singular, the most problematic of statesmen. Out of this period he issues with apparent abruptness, the final Lincoln, with a place among the few consummate masters of state-craft. During the sixteen months, his genius comes and goes. His confidence, whether in himself or in others, is an uncertain quantity. At times he is bold, even rash; at others, irresolute. The constant factor in his mood all this while is his amazing humility. He seems to have forgotten his own existence. As a person with likes and dislikes, with personal hopes and fears, he has vanished. He is but an afflicted and perplexed mind, struggling desperately to save his country. A selfless man, he may be truly called through months of torment which made him over from a theoretical to a practical statesman. He entered this period a literary man who had been elevated almost by accident to the position of a leader in politics. After many blunders, after doubt, hesitation and pain, he came forth from this stern ordeal a powerful man of action.
The impression which he made on the country at the opening of this period was unfortunate. The very power that had hitherto been the making of him—the literary power, revealing to men in wonderfully convincing form the ideas which they felt within them but could not utter—this had deserted him. Explain the psychology of it any way you will, there is the fact! The speeches Lincoln made on the way to Washington during the latter part of February were appallingly unlike himself. His mind had suddenly fallen dumb. He had nothing to say. The gloom, the desolation that had penetrated his soul, somehow, for the moment, made him commonplace. When he talked—as convention required him to do at all his stopping places—his words were but faint echoes of the great political exponent he once had been. His utterances were fatuous; mere exhortations to the country not to worry. "There is no crisis but an artificial one," he said.(1) And the country stood aghast! Amazement, bewilderment, indignation, was the course of the reaction in many minds of his own party. Their verdict was expressed in the angry language of Samuel Bowles, "Lincoln is a Simple Susan."(2)
In private talk, Lincoln admitted that he was "more troubled about the outlook than he thought it discreet to show." This remark was made to a "Public Man," whose diary has been published but whose identity is still secret. Though keenly alert for any touch of weakness or absurdity in the new President, calling him "the most ill-favored son of Adam I ever saw," the Public Man found him "crafty and sensible." In conversation, the old Lincoln, the matchless phrase-maker, could still express himself. At New York he was told of a wild scheme that was on foot to separate the city from the North, form a city state such as Hamburg then was, and set up a commercial alliance with the Confederacy. "As to the free city business," said Lincoln, "well, I reckon it will be some time before the front door sets up bookkeeping on its own account."(3) The formal round of entertainment on his way to Washington wearied Lincoln intensely. Harassed and preoccupied, he was generally ill at ease. And he was totally unused to sumptuous living. Failures in social usage were inevitable. New York was convulsed with amusement because at the opera he wore a pair of huge black kid gloves which attracted the attention of the whole house, "hanging as they did over the red velvet box front." At an informal reception, between acts in the director's room, he looked terribly bored and sat on the sofa at the end of the room with his hat pushed back on his head. Caricatures filled the opposition papers. He was spoken of as the "Illinois ape" and the "gorilla." Every rash remark, every "break" in social form, every gaucherie was seized upon and ridiculed with-out mercy.
There is no denying that the oddities of Lincoln's manner though quickly dismissed from thought by men of genius, seriously troubled even generous men who lacked the intuitions of genius. And he never overcame these oddities. During the period of his novitiate as a ruler, the critical sixteen months, they were carried awkwardly, with embarrassment. Later when he had found himself as a ruler, when his self-confidence had reached its ultimate form and he knew what he really was, he forgot their existence. None the less, they were always a part of him, his indelible envelope. At the height of his power, he received visitors with his feet in leather slippers.(4) He discussed great affairs of state with one of those slippered feet flung up on to a corner of his desk. A favorite attitude, even when debating vital matters with the great ones of the nation, is described by his secretaries as "sitting on his shoulders"—he would slide far down into his chair and stick up both slippers so high above his head that they could rest with ease upon his mantelpiece.(5) No wonder that his enemies made unlimited fun. And they professed to believe that there was an issue here. When the elegant McClellan was moving heaven and earth, as he fancied, to get the army out of its shirt-sleeves, the President's manner was a cause of endless irritation. Still more serious was the effect of his manner on many men who agreed with him otherwise. Such a high-minded leader as Governor Andrew of Massachusetts never got over the feeling that Lincoln was a rowdy. How could a rowdy be the salvation of the country? In the dark days of 1864, when a rebellion against his leadership was attempted, this merely accidental side of him was an element of danger. The barrier it had created between himself and the more formal types, made it hard for the men who finally saved him to overcome their prejudice and nail his colors to the mast. Andrew's biographer shows himself a shrewd observer when he insists on the unexpressed but inexorable scale by which Andrew and his following measured Lincoln. They had grown up in the faith that you could tell a statesman by certain external signs, chiefly by a grandiose and commanding aspect such as made overpowering the presence of Webster. And this idea was not confined to any one locality. Everywhere, more or less, the conservative portion in every party held this view. It was the view of Washington in 1848 when Washington had failed to see the real Lincoln through his surface peculiarities. It was again the view of Washington when Lincoln returned to it.
Furthermore, his free way of talking, the broad stories he continued to tell, were made counts in his indictment. One of the bequests of Puritanism in America is the ideal, at least, of extreme scrupulousness in talk. To many sincere men Lincoln's choice of fables was often a deadly offense. Charles Francis Adams never got over the shock of their first interview. Lincoln clenched a point with a broad story. Many professional politicians who had no objection to such talk in itself, glared and sneered when the President used it—because forsooth, it might estrange a vote.
Then, too, Lincoln had none of the social finesse that might have adapted his manner to various classes. He was always incorrigibly the democrat pure and simple. He would have laughed uproariously over that undergraduate humor, the joy of a famous American University, supposedly strong on Democracy:
"Where God speaks to Jones, in the very same tones,
That he uses to Hadley and Dwight."
Though Lincoln's queer aplomb, his good-humored familiarity on first acquaintance, delighted most of his visitors, it offended many. It was lacking in tact. Often it was a clumsy attempt to be jovial too soon, as when he addressed Greeley by the name of "Horace" almost on first sight. His devices for putting men on the familiar footing lacked originality. The frequency with which he called upon a tall visitor to measure up against him reveals the poverty of his social invention. He applied this device with equal thoughtlessness to the stately Sumner, who protested, and to a nobody who grinned and was delighted.
It was this mere envelope of the genius that was deplorably evident on the journey from Springfield to Washington. There was one detail of the journey that gave his enemies a more definite ground for sneering. By the irony of fate, the first clear instance of Lincoln's humility, his reluctance to set up his own judgment against his advisers, was also his first serious mistake. There is a distinction here that is vital. Lincoln was entering on a new role, the role of the man of action. Hitherto all the great decisions of his life had been speculative; they had developed from within; they dealt with ideas. The inflexible side of him was intellectual. Now, without any adequate apprenticeship, he was called upon to make practical decisions, to decide on courses of action, at one step to pass from the dream of statecraft to its application. Inevitably, for a considerable time, he was two people; he passed back and forth from one to the other; only by degrees did he bring the two together. Meanwhile, he appeared contradictory. Inwardly, as a thinker, his development was unbroken; he was still cool, inflexible, drawing all his conclusions out of the depths of himself. Outwardly, in action, he was learning the new task, hesitatingly, with vacillation, with excessive regard to the advisers whom he treated as experts in action. It was no slight matter for an extraordinarily sensitive man to take up a new role at fifty-two.
This first official mistake of Lincoln's was in giving way to the fears of his retinue for his safety. The time had become hysterical. The wildest sort of stories filled the air. Even before he left Springfield there were rumors of plots to assassinate him.(6) On his arrival at Philadelphia information was submitted to his companions which convinced them that his life was in danger—an attempt would be made to kill him as he passed through Baltimore. Seward at Washington had heard the same story and had sent his son to Philadelphia to advise caution. Lincoln's friends insisted that he leave his special train and proceed to Washington with only one companion, on an ordinary night train. Railway officials were called in. Elaborate precautions were arranged. The telegraph lines were all to be disconnected for a number of hours so that even if the conspirators—assuming there were any—should discover his change of plan, they would be unable to communicate with Baltimore. The one soldier in the party, Colonel Sumner, vehemently protested that these changes were all "a damned piece of cowardice." But Lincoln acquiesced in the views of the majority of his advisers. He passed through Baltimore virtually in disguise; nothing happened; no certain evidence of a conspiracy was discovered. And all his enemies took up the cry of cowardice and rang the changes upon it.(7)
Meanwhile, despite all this semblance of indecision, of feebleness, there were signs that the real inner Lincoln, however clouded, was still alive. By way of offset to his fatuous utterances, there might have been set, had the Country been in a mood to weigh with care, several strong and clear pronouncements. And these were not merely telling phrases like that characteristic one about the bookkeeping of the front door. His mind was struggling out of its shadow. And the mode of its reappearance was significant. His reasoning upon the true meaning of the struggle he was about to enter, reached a significant stage in the speech he made at Harrisburg.(8)
"I have often inquired of myself," he said, "what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy (the United States) so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty not alone to the people of the country but hope to all the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it can not be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country can not be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it. Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there is no need of bloodshed and war. There is no necessity for it I am not in favor of such a course, and I may say in advance that there will be no bloodshed unless it is forced upon the government. The government will not use force unless force is used against it."
The two ideas underlying this utterance had grown in his thought steadily, consistently, ever since their first appearance in the Protest twenty-four years previous. The great issue to which all else—slavery, "dominion status," everything—was subservient, was the preservation of democratic institutions; the means to that end was the preservation of the Federal government. Now, as in 1852, his paramount object was not to "disappoint the Liberal party throughout the world," to prove that Democracy, when applied on a great scale, had yet sufficient coherence to remain intact, no matter how powerful, nor how plausible, were the forces of disintegration.
Dominated by this purpose he came to Washington. There he met Seward. It was the stroke of fate for both men. Seward, indeed, did not know that it was. He was still firmly based in the delusion that he, not Lincoln, was the genius of the hour. And he had this excuse, that it was also the country's delusion. There was pretty general belief both among friends and foes that Lincoln would be ruled by his Cabinet. In a council that was certain to include leaders of accepted influence—Seward, Chase, Cameron—what chance for this untried newcomer, whose prestige had been reared not on managing men, but on uttering words? In Seward's thoughts the answer was as inevitable as the table of addition. Equally mathematical was the conclusion that only one unit gave value to the combination. And, of course, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate was the unit. A severe experience had to be lived through before Seward made his peace with destiny. Lincoln was the quicker to perceive when they came together that something had happened. Almost from the minute of their meeting, he began to lean upon Seward; but only in a certain way. This was not the same thing as that yielding to the practical advisers which began at Philadelphia, which was subsequently to be the cause of so much confusion. His response to Seward was intellectual. It was of the inner man and revealed itself in his style of writing.
Hitherto, Lincoln's progress in literature had been marked by the development of two characteristics and by the lack of a third. The two that he possessed were taste and rhythm. At the start he was free from the prevalent vice of his time, rhetoricality. His "Address to the Voters of Sangamon County" which was his first state paper, was as direct, as free from bombast, as the greatest of his later achievements. Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was there exhibited, would have been led astray by the standards of the hour, would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in rhetorical clamor. But Lincoln was not precocious. In art, as in everything else, he progressed slowly; the literary part of him worked its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the daylight through a shadowy wood. It was not constant in its development. For many years it was little more than an irregular deepening of his two original characteristics, taste and rhythm. His taste, fed on Blackstone, Shakespeare, and the Bible, led him more and more exactingly to say just what he meant, to eschew the wiles of decoration, to be utterly non-rhetorical. His sense of rhythm, beginning simply, no more at first than a good ear for the sound of words, deepened into keen perception of the character of the word-march, of that extra significance which is added to an idea by the way it conducts itself, moving grandly or feebly as the case may be, from the unknown into the known, and thence across a perilous horizon, into memory. On the basis of these two characteristics he had acquired a style that was a rich blend of simplicity, directness, candor, joined with a clearness beyond praise, with a delightful cadence, having always a splendidly ordered march of ideas.
But there was the third thing in which the earlier style of Lincoln's was wanting. Marvelously apt for the purpose of the moment, his writings previous to 1861 are vanishing from the world's memory. The more notable writings of his later years have become classics. And the difference does not turn on subject-matter. All the ideas of his late writings had been formulated in the earlier. The difference is purely literary. The earlier writings were keen, powerful, full of character, melodious, impressive. The later writings have all these qualities, and in addition, that constant power to awaken the imagination, to carry an idea beyond its own horizon into a boundless world of imperishable literary significance, which power in argumentative prose is beauty. And how did Lincoln attain this? That he had been maturing from within the power to do this, one is compelled by the analogy of his other mental experiences to believe. At the same time, there can be no doubt who taught him the trick, who touched the secret spring and opened the new door to his mind. It was Seward. Long since it had been agreed between them that Seward was to be Secretary of State.(9) Lincoln asked him to criticize his inaugural. Seward did so, and Lincoln, in the main, accepted his criticism. But Seward went further. He proposed a new paragraph. He was not a great writer and yet he had something of that third thing which Lincoln hitherto had not exhibited. However, in pursuing beauty of statement, he often came dangerously near to mere rhetoric; his taste was never sure; his sense of rhythm was inferior; the defects of his qualities were evident. None the less, Lincoln saw at a glance that if he could infuse into Seward's words his own more robust qualities, the result—'would be a richer product than had ever issued from his own qualities as hitherto he had known them. He effected this transmutation and in doing so raised his style to a new range of effectiveness. The great Lincoln of literature appeared in the first inaugural and particularly in that noble passage which was the work of Lincoln and Seward together. In a way it said only what Lincoln had already said—especially in the speech at Harrisburg—but with what a difference!
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.
"I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."*
*Lincoln VI, 184; N. & H., III, 343. Seward advised the
omission of part of the original draft of the first of these
two paragraphs. After "defend it," Lincoln had written, "You
can forbear the assault upon it. I can not shrink from the
defense of it. With you and not with me is the solemn
question 'Shall it be peace or a sword?'" Having struck this
out, he accepted Seward's advice to add "some words of
affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence."
The original version of the concluding paragraph was prepared by Seward and read as follows: "I close. We are not, we must not he aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure, they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."
These words, now so famous, were spoken in the east portico of the Capitol on "one of our disagreeable, clear, windy, Washington spring days."(10) Most of the participants were agitated; many were alarmed. Chief Justice Taney who administered the oath could hardly speak, so near to uncontrollable was his emotion. General Scott anxiously kept his eye upon the crowd which was commanded by cannon. Cavalry were in readiness to clear the streets in case of riot. Lincoln's carriage on the way to the Capitol had been closely guarded. He made his way to the portico between files of soldiers. So intent—overintent—were his guardians upon his safety that they had been careless of the smaller matter of his comfort. There was insufficient room for the large company that had been invited to attend. The new President stood beside a rickety little table and saw no place on which to put his hat. Senator Douglas stepped forward and relieved him of the burden. Lincoln was "pale and very nervous," and toward the close of his speech, visibly affected. Observers differ point-blank as to the way the inaugural was received. The "Public Man" says that there was little enthusiasm. The opposite version makes the event an oratorical triumph, with the crowd, at the close, completely under his spell.(11)
On the whole, the inauguration and the festivities that followed appear to have formed a dismal event. While Lincoln spoke, the topmost peak of the Capitol, far above his head, was an idle derrick; the present dome was in process of construction; work on it had been arrested, and who could say when, if ever, the work would be resumed? The day closed with an inaugural ball that was anything but brilliant. "The great tawdry ballroom . . . not half full—and such an assemblage of strange costumes, male and female. Very few people of any consideration were there. The President looked exhausted and uncomfortable, and most ungainly in his dress; and Mrs. Lincoln all in blue, with a feather in her hair and a highly flushed face."(12)
XV. PRESIDENT AND PREMIER
The brilliant Secretary, who so promptly began to influence the President had very sure foundations for that influence. He was inured to the role of great man; he had a rich experience of public life; while Lincoln, painfully conscious of his inexperience, was perhaps the humblest-minded ruler that ever took the helm of a ship of state in perilous times. Furthermore, Seward had some priceless qualities which, for Lincoln, were still to seek. First of all, he had audacity—personally, artistically, politically. Seward's instantaneous gift to Lincoln was by way of throwing wide the door of his gathering literary audacity. There is every reason to think that Seward's personal audacity went to Lincoln's heart at once. To be sure, he was not yet capable of going along with it. The basal contrast of the first month of his administration lies between the President's caution and the boldness of the Secretary. Nevertheless, to a sensitive mind, seeking guidance, surrounded by less original types of politicians, the splendid fearlessness of Seward, whether wise or foolish, must have rung like a trumpet peal soaring over the heads of a crowd whose teeth were chattering. While the rest of the Cabinet pressed their ears to the ground, Seward thought out a policy, made a forecast of the future, and offered to stake his head on the correctness of his reasoning. This may have been rashness; it may have been folly; but, intellectually at least, it was valor. Among Lincoln's other advisers, valor at that moment was lacking. Contrast, however, was not the sole, nor the surest basis of Seward's appeal to Lincoln. Their characters had a common factor. For all their immeasurable difference in externals, both at bottom were void of malice. It was this characteristic above all others that gave them spiritually common ground. In Seward, this quality had been under fire for a long while. The political furies of "that iron time" had failed to rouse echoes in his serene and smiling soul. Therefore, many men who accepted him as leader because, indeed, they could not do without him—because none other in their camp had his genius for management, for the glorification of political intrigue—these same men followed him doubtfully, with bad grace, willing to shift to some other leader whenever he might arise. The clue to their distrust was Seward's amusement at the furious. Could a man who laughed when you preached on the beauty of the hewing of Agag, could such a man be sincere? And that Seward in some respects was not sincere, history generally admits. He loved to poke fun at his opponents by appearing to sneer at himself, by ridiculing the idea that he was ever serious. His scale of political values was different from that of most of his followers. Nineteen times out of twenty, he would treat what they termed "principles" as mere political counters, as legitimate subjects of bargain. If by any deal he could trade off any or all of these nineteen in order to secure the twentieth, which for him was the only vital one, he never scrupled to do so. Against a lurid background of political ferocity, this amused, ironic figure came to be rated by the extremists, both in his own and in the enemy camp as Mephistopheles.
No quality could have endeared him more certainly to Lincoln than the very one which the bigots misunderstood. From his earliest youth Lincoln had been governed by this same quality. With his non-censorious mind, which accepted so much of life as he found it, which was forever stripping principles of their accretions, what could be more inevitable than his warming to the one great man at Washington who like him held that such a point of view was the only rational one. Seward's ironic peacefulness in the midst of the storm gained in luster because all about him raged a tempest of ferocity, mitigated, at least so far as the distracted President could see, only by self-interest or pacifism.
As Lincoln came into office, he could see and hear many signs of a rising fierceness of sectional hatred. His secretary records with disgust a proposal to conquer the Gulf States, expel their white population, and reduce the region to a gigantic state preserve, where negroes should grow cotton under national supervision.(1) "We of the North," said Senator Baker of Oregon, "are a majority of the Union, and we will govern our Union in our own way."(2) At the other extreme was the hysterical pacifism of the Abolitionists. Part of Lincoln's abiding quarrel with the Abolitionists was their lack of national feeling. Their peculiar form of introspection had injected into politics the idea of personal sin. Their personal responsibility for slavery—they being part of a country that tolerated it—was their basal inspiration. Consequently, the most distinctive Abolitionists welcomed this opportunity to cast off their responsibility. If war had been proposed as a crusade to abolish slavery, their attitude might have been different But in March, 1860, no one but the few ultra-extremists, whom scarcely anybody heeded, dreamed of such a war. A war to restore the Union was the only sort that was considered seriously. Such a war, the Abolitionists bitterly condemned. They seized upon pacifism as their defense. Said Whittier of the Seceding States:
They break the links of Union: shall we light
The fires of hell to weld anew the chain,
On that red anvil where each blow is pain?
The fury and the fear offended Lincoln in equal measure. After long years opposing the political temper of the extremists, he was not the man now to change front. To one who believed himself marked out for a tragic end, the cowardice at the heart of the pacifism of his time was revolting. It was fortunate for his own peace of mind that he could here count on the Secretary of State. No argument based on fear of pain would meet in Seward with anything but derision. "They tell us," he had once said, and the words expressed his constant attitude, "that we are to encounter opposition. Why, bless my soul, did anybody ever expect to reach a fortune, or fame, or happiness on earth or a crown in heaven, without encountering resistance and opposition? What are we made men for but to encounter and overcome opposition arrayed against us in the line of our duty?"(3)
But if the ferocity and the cowardice were offensive and disheartening, there was something else that was beneath contempt. Never was self-interest more shockingly displayed. It was revealed in many ways, but impinged upon the new President in only one. A horde of office-seekers besieged him in the White House. The parallel to this amazing picture can hardly be found in history. It was taken for granted that the new party would make a clean sweep of the whole civil list, that every government employee down to the humblest messenger boy too young to have political ideas was to bear the label of the victorious party. Every Congressman who had made promises to his constituents, every politician of every grade who thought he had the party in his debt, every adventurer who on any pretext could make a showing of party service rendered, poured into Washington. It was a motley horde.
"Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town."
They converted the White House into a leaguer. They swarmed into the corridors and even the private passages. So dense was the swarm that it was difficult to make one's way either in or out. Lincoln described himself by the image of a man renting rooms at one end of his house while the other end was on fire.(4) And all this while the existence of the Republic was at stake! It did not occur to him that it was safe to defy the horde, to send it about its business. Here again, the figure of Seward stood out in brilliant light against the somber background. One of Seward's faculties was his power to form devoted lieutenants. He had that sure and nimble judgment which enables some men to inspire their lieutenants rather than categorically to instruct them. All the sordid side of his political games he managed in this way. He did not appear himself as the bargainer. In the shameful eagerness of most of the politicians to find offices for their retainers, Seward was conspicuous by contrast. Even the Cabinet was not free from this vice of catering to the thirsty horde.(5) Alone, at this juncture, Seward detached himself from the petty affairs of the hour and gave his whole attention to statecraft.
He had a definite policy. Another point of contact with Lincoln was the attitude of both toward the Union, supplemented as it was by their views of the place of slavery in the problem they confronted. Both were nationalists ready to make any sacrifices for the national idea. Both regarded slavery as an issue of second importance. Both were prepared for great concessions if convinced that, ultimately, their concessions would strengthen the trend of American life toward a general exaltation of nationality.
On the other hand, their differences—
Seward approached the problem in the same temper, with the same assumptions, that were his in the previous December. He still believed that his main purpose was to enable a group of politicians to save their faces by effecting a strategic retreat. Imputing to the Southern leaders an attitude of pure self-interest, he believed that if allowed to play the game as they desired, they would mark time until circumstances revealed to them whether there was more profit for them in the Union or out; he also believed that if sufficient time could be given, and if no armed clash took place, it would be demonstrated first, that they did not have so strong a hold on the South as they had thought they had; and second, that on the whole, it was to their interests to patch up the quarrel and come back into the Union. But he also saw that they had a serious problem of leadership, which, if rudely handled, might make it impossible for them to stand still. They had inflamed the sentiment of state-patriotism. In South Carolina, particularly, the popular demand was for independence. With this went the demand that Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, garrisoned by Federal troops, should be surrendered, or if not surrendered, taken forcibly from the United States. A few cannon shots at Sumter would mean war. An article in Seward's creed of statecraft asserted that the populace will always go wild over a war. To prevent a war fever in the North was the first condition of his policy at home. Therefore, in order to prevent it, the first step in saving his enemies' faces was to safeguard them against the same danger in their own calm. He must help them to prevent a war fever in the South. He saw but one way to do this. The conclusion which became the bed rock of his policy was inevitable. Sumter must be evacuated.
Even before the inauguration, he had broached this idea to Lincoln. He had tried to keep Lincoln from inserting in the inaugural the words, "The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government." He had proposed instead, "The power confided in me shall be used indeed with efficacy, but also with discretion, in every case and exigency, according to the circumstances actually existing, and with a view and a hope of a peaceful solution of the national troubles, and the restoration of fraternal sympathies and affections."(6) With the rejection of Seward's proffered revision, a difference between them in policy began to develop. Lincoln, says one of his secretaries, accepted Seward's main purpose but did not share his "optimism."(7) It would be truer to say that in this stage of his development, he was lacking in audacity. In his eager search for advice, he had to strike a balance between the daring Seward who at this moment built entirely on his own power of political devination, and the cautious remainder of the Cabinet who had their ears to the ground trying their best to catch the note of authority in the rumblings of vox populi. For his own part, Lincoln began with two resolves: to go very cautiously,—and not give something for nothing. Far from him, as yet, was that plunging mood which in Seward pushed audacity to the verge of a gamble. However, just previous to the inauguration, he took a cautious step in Seward's direction. Virginia, like all the other States of the upper South, was torn by the question which side to take. There was a "Union" party in Virginia, and a "Secession" party. A committee of leading Unionists conferred with Lincoln. They saw the immediate problem very much as Seward did. They believed that if time were allowed, the crisis could be tided over and the Union restored; but the first breath of war would wreck their hopes. The condition of bringing about an adjustment was the evacuation of Sumter. Lincoln told them that if Virginia could be kept in the Union by the evacuation of Sumter, he would not hesitate to recall the garrison.(8) A few days later, despite what he had said in the inaugural, he repeated this offer. A convention was then sitting at Richmond in debate upon the relations of Virginia to the Union. If it would drop the matter and dissolve—so Lincoln told another committee—he would evacuate Sumter and trust the recovery of the lower South to negotiation.(9) No results, so far as is known, came of either of those offers.
During the first half of March, the Washington government marked time. The office-seekers continued to besiege the President. South Carolina continued to clamor for possession of Sumter. The Confederacy sent commissioners to Washington whom Lincoln refused to recognize. The Virginia Convention swayed this way and that.
Seward went serenely about his business, confident that everything was certain to come his way soon or late. He went so far as to advise an intermediary to tell the Confederate Commissioners that all they had to do to get possession of Sumter was to wait. The rest of the Cabinet pressed their ears more tightly than ever to the ground. The rumblings of vox populi were hard to interpret. The North appeared to be in two minds. This was revealed the day following the inauguration, when a Republican Club in New York held a high debate upon the condition of the country. One faction wanted Lincoln to declare for a war-policy; another wished the Club to content itself with a vote of confidence in the Administration. Each faction put its views into a resolution and as a happy device for maintaining harmony, both resolutions were passed.(10) The fragmentary, miscellaneous evidence of newspapers, political meetings, the talk of leaders, local elections, formed a confused clamor which each listener interpreted according to his predisposition. The members of the Cabinet in their relative isolation at Washington found it exceedingly difficult to make up their minds what the people were really saying. Of but one thing they were certain, and that was that they represented a minority party. Before committing themselves any way, it was life and death to know what portion of the North would stand by them.(11)
At this point began a perplexity that was to torment the President almost to the verge of distraction. How far could he trust his military advisers? Old General Scott was at the head of the army. He had once been a striking, if not a great figure. Should his military advice be accepted as final? Scott informed Lincoln that Sumter was short of food and that any attempt to relieve it would call for a much larger force than the government could muster. Scott urged him to withdraw the garrison. Lincoln submitted the matter to the Cabinet. He asked for their opinions in writing.(12) Five advised taking Scott at his word and giving up all thought of relieving Sumter. There were two dissenters. The Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Portland Chase, struck the key-note of his later political career by an elaborate argument on expediency. If relieving Sumter would lead to civil war, Chase was not in favor of relief; but on the whole he did not think that civil war would result, and therefore, on the whole, he favored a relief expedition. One member of the Cabinet, Montgomery Blair, the Postmaster General, an impetuous, fierce man, was vehement for relief at all costs. Lincoln wanted to agree with Chase and Blair. He reasoned that if the fort was given up, the necessity under which it was done would not be fully understood; that by many it would be construed as part of a voluntary policy, that at home it would discourage the friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the matter a recognition abroad.
Nevertheless, with the Cabinet five to two against him, with his military adviser against him, Lincoln put aside his own views. The government went on marking time and considering the credentials of applicants for country post-offices.
By this time, Lincoln had thrown off the overpowering gloom which possessed him in the latter days at Springfield. It is possible he had reacted to a mood in which there was something of levity. His oscillation of mood from a gloom that nothing penetrated to a sort of desperate mirth, has been noted by various observers. And in 1861 he had not reached his final poise, that firm holding of the middle way,—-which afterward fused his moods and made of him, at least in action, a sustained personality.
About the middle of the month he had a famous interview with Colonel W. T. Sherman who had been President of the University of Louisiana and had recently resigned. Senator John Sherman called at the White House with regard to "some minor appointments in Ohio." The Colonel went with him. When Colonel Sherman spoke of the seriousness of the Secession movement, Lincoln replied, "Oh, we'll manage to keep house." The Colonel was so offended by what seemed to him the flippancy of the President that he abandoned his intention to resume the military life and withdrew from Washington in disgust.(13)
Not yet had Lincoln attained a true appreciation of the real difficulty before him. He had not got rid of the idea that a dispute over slavery had widened accidentally into a needless sectional quarrel, and that as soon as the South had time to think things over, it would see that it did not really want the quarrel. He had a queer idea that meanwhile he could hold a few points on the margin of the Seceded States, open custom houses on ships at the mouths of harbors, but leave vacant all Federal appointments within the Seceded States and ignore the absence of their representatives from Washington.(14) This marginal policy did not seem to him a policy of coercion; and though he was beginning to see that the situation from the Southern point of view turned on the right of a State to resist coercion, he was yet to learn that idealistic elements of emotion and of political dogma were the larger part of his difficulty.
Meanwhile, the upper South had been proclaiming its idealism. Its attitude was creating a problem for the lower South as well as for the North. The pro-slavery leaders had been startled out of a dream. The belief in a Southern economic solidarity so complete that the secession of any one Slave State would compel the secession of all the others, that belief had been proved fallacious. It had been made plain that on the economic issue, even as on the issue of sectional distrust, the upper South would not follow the lower South into secession. When delegates from the Georgia Secessionists visited the legislature of North Carolina, every courtesy was shown to them; the Speaker of the House assured them of North Carolina's sympathy and of her enduring friendliness; but he was careful not to suggest an intention to secede, unless (the condition that was destiny!) an attempt should be made to violate the sovereignty of the State by marching troops across her soil to attack the Confederates. Then, on the one issue of State sovereignty, North Carolina would leave the Union.(15) The Unionists in Virginia took similar ground. They wished to stay in the Union, and they were determined not to go out on the issue of slavery. Therefore they laid their heads together to get that issue out of the way. Their problem was to devise a compromise that would do three things: lay the Southern dread of an inundation of sectional Northern influence; silence the slave profiteers; meet the objections that had induced Lincoln to wreck the Crittenden Compromise. They felt that the first and second objectives would be reached easily enough by reviving the line of the Missouri Compromise. But something more was needed, or again, Lincoln would refuse to negotiate. They met their crucial difficulty by boldly appealing to the South to be satisfied with the conservation of its present life and renounce the dream of unlimited Southern expansion. Their Compromise proposed a death blow to the filibuster and all he stood for. It provided that no new territory other than naval stations should be acquired by the United States on either side the Missouri Line without consent of a majority of the Senators from the States on the opposite side of that line.(16)