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Part I
Part I
Introductory Note
James Russell Lowell, poet, essayist, diplomatist, and scholar, was born
at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 22, 1819, the son of a Unitarian
minister. Educated at Harvard College, he tried the law, but soon gave it up
for literature. His poem on "The Present Crisis," written in 1844, was his
first really notable production, and one that made a deep impression on the
public mind. In the twenty years of troubled politics that followed, one finds
it constantly quoted. The year 1848 saw four volumes from Lowell`s pen - a
book of "Poems," the "Fable for Critics," "The Biglow Papers," and the "Vision
of Sir Launfal." The second of these exhibited the author as wit and critic,
the third as political reformer, the fourth as poet and mystic; and these
various sides of his personality continue to appear with varying prominence
throughout his career.
On the retirement of Longfellow from the chair of belles-lettres at
Harvard in 1854, Lowell was elected to succeed him, and by way of preparation
spent the next two years in Europe studying modern languages and literatures.
In 1857 he became the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and after 1864 he
collaborated with Charles Eliot Norton in the editorship of the North American
Review. Throughout the period of the war Lowell wrote much both in prose and
verse on behalf of the Union; his work on the North American was largely
literary criticism.
In 1877 Lowell went to Spain as American Minister, and in 1880 to London,
where for five years he represented the United States with great distinction,
and did much to improve the relations of the two countries. Six years after
his return, on August 12, 1891, he died in Elmwood, the house in Cambridge
where he was born.
Lowell`s literary gifts were so various that it is difficult to say on
which of them his final reputation will rest. But it is certain that he will
long be esteemed for the grace, vivacity, and eloquence of the prose in which
he placed before the world his views on such great American principles and
personalities as are dealt with in the following essay on "Abraham Lincoln".
Abraham Lincoln 1864-1865
There have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of South
Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured
retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the nation they had
wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but could not control, when no
thoughtful American opened his morning paper without dreading to find that he
had no longer a country to love and honor. Whatever the result of the
convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still be
enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment
made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every
man`s heart and shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his
consciousness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing
more. Men might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless
associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up
messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have evaporated
beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced
to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new conditions chance
might leave dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of our
people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions of national
peril. We felt an only too natural distrust of immense public meetings and
enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which the war
was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that the slackening of public
spirit should be proportionate to the previous over-tension, might well be
foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history. Men acting
gregariously are always in extremes. As they are one moment capable of higher
courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser depression, and it is often a
matter of chance whether numbers shall multiply confidence or discouragement.
Nor does deception lead more surely to distrust of men than self-deception
to suspicion of principles. The only faith that wears well and holds its color
in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp
mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the
statesman needs something more durable to work in, - must be able to rely on
the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people, without which
that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral than of material
peril, will be wanting at the critical moment. Would this fervor of the Free
States hold out? Was it kindled by a just feeling of the value of
constitutional liberty? Had it body enough to withstand the inevitable
dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our population intelligence enough
to comprehend that the choice was between order and anarchy, between the
equilibrium of a government by law and the tussle of misrule by
pronunciamiento? Could a war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of
hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were
serious questions, and with no precedent to aid in answering them.
[Footnote: By arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company.]
At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for the most
anxious apprehension. A President known to be infected with the political
heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the Southern
conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not say of power, but of
chaos, to a successor known only as the representative of a party whose
leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs;
an empty treasury was called on to supply resources beyond precedent in the
history of finance; the trees were yet growing and the iron unmined with which
a navy was to be built and armored; officers without discipline were to make a
mob into an army; and, above all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and
reinforced with every vague hint and every specious argument of despondency by
a powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or actively
hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter element
of disintegration and discouragement among a people where every citizen at
home, and every soldier in the field, is a reader of newspapers. The peddlers
of rumor in the North were the most effective allies of the rebellion. A
nation can be liable to no more insidious treachery than that of the
telegraph, sending hourly its electric thrill of panic along the remotest
nerves of the community, till the excited imagination makes every real danger
loom heightened with its unreal double.
And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem to be
solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate relations and its
future consequences; the conditions of its solution were so intricate and so
greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable contingencies; so many of
the data, whether for hope or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of
arrangement under any of the categories of historical precedent, that there
were moments of crisis when the firmest believer in the strength and
sufficiency of the democratic theory of government might well hold his breath
in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of political philosophy,
solemnly arguing from the precedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish
city, whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward
parentheses of mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable of
the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far -
reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient of
regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural nucleus of
gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always on the verge of civil
war, and slunk at last into the natural alms-house of bankrupt popular
government, a military despotism. Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons
who knew democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely from
books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton, who, having
eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the "Times"
demanding redress, and drawing a mournful inference of democratic instability.
Nor were men wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in London
literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European culture, and contempt of
their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view, and who, owing all they had
and all they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high-breeding to
join in the shallow epicedium that our bubble had burst.
But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid or
the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity against any over-
confidence of hope. A war - which, whether we consider the expanse of the
territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or the reach of the
principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the most momentous of modern times
- was to be waged by a people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of
peace, under a chief magistrate without experience and without reputation,
whose every measure was sure to be cunningly hampered by a jealous and
unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with unheard-of complications
at home, must soothe a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to
become war. All this was to be done without warning and without preparation,
while at the same time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the
political condition of tour millions of people, by softening the prejudices,
allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their
unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion when the
heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny visibly intervening
in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears. Never, perhaps, was
any system of government tried by so continuous and searching a strain as ours
during the last three years; never has any shown itself stronger; and never
could that strength be so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of
the people, - to that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public
opinion possible only under the influence of a political framework like our
own. We find it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be blind to the
grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on here, - to the heroic
energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving that it knows how
much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we own that it is impossible for
us to conceive the mental and moral condition of the American who does not
feel his spirit braced and heightened by being even a spectator of such
qualities and achievements. That a steady purpose and a definite aim have been
given to the jarring forces which, at the beginning of the war, spent
themselves in the discussion of schemes which could only become operative, if
at all, after the war was over; that a popular excitement has been slowly
intensified into an earnest national will; that a somewhat impracticable moral
sentiment has been made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end;
that the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of
friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even useful for
good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil
conflict has been prevented from complicating a domestic with a foreign war;
all these results, any one of which might suffice to prove greatness in a
ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense, the good humor, the sagacity,
the large-mindedness, and the unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a
blind fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most dangerous
and difficult eminence of modern times. It is by presence of mind in untried
emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested; it is by the sagacity to
see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth there may be in an
adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks
behind it, that a reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a fact
the force of argument; it is by a wise forecast which allows hostile
combinations to go so far as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of
his own power, that a politician proves his genius for statecraft; and
especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment that he seems to follow
it, by so yielding doubtful points that he can be firm without seeming
obstinate in essential ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise
without the weakness of concession; by so instinctively comprehending the
temper and prejudices of a people as to make them gradually conscious of the
superior wisdom of his freedom from temper and prejudice, - it is by qualities
such as these that a magistrate shows himself worthy to be chief in a
commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such as these that we firmly
believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent of statesmen and
the most successful of rulers. If we wish to appreciate him, we have only to
conceive the inevitable chaos in which we should now be weltering, had a weak
man or an unwise one been chosen in his stead.
"Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it"; and
this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in
any critical emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of prestige,
of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent interest, while the new man must
slowly and painfully create all these out of the unwilling material around
him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by
sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive sympathy with the
national character. Mr. Lincoln`s task was one of peculiar and exceptional
difficulty. Long habit had accustomed the American people to the notion of a
party in power, and of a President as its creature and organ, while the more
vital fact, that the executive for the time being represents the abstract idea
of government as a permanent principle superior to all party and all private
interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They had so long seen the public
policy more or less directed by views of party, and often even of personal
advantage, as to be ready to suspect the motives of a chief magistrate
compelled, for the first time in our history, to feel himself the head and
hand of a great nation, and to act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by
all publicists, that the first duty of a government is to defend and maintain
its own existence. Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into the
hands of the opposition by the necessity under which the administration found
itself of applying this old truth to new relations. Nor were the opposition
his only nor his most dangerous opponents.
The Republicans had carried the country upon an issue in which ethics
were more directly and visibly mingled with politics than usual. Their leaders
were trained to a method of oratory which relied for its effect rather on the
moral sense than the understanding. Their arguments were drawn, not so much
from experience as from general principles of right and wrong. When the war
came, their system continued to be applicable and effective, for here again
the reason of the people was to be reached and kindled through their
sentiments. It was one of those periods of excitement, gathering, contagious,
universal, which, while they last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving
to the mere words country, human rights, democracy, a meaning and a force
beyond that of sober and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained
and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in and
roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of
the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that
indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest
reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be
warmed over into anything better than cant, - and phrases, when once the
inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only
that semblance of meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty
minds. Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder
or more striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the
passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is
nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into
dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain of sentiment over
questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction; and perhaps the severest
strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a tendency of his own supporters
which chimed with his own private desires, while wholly opposed to his
convictions of what would be wise policy.
The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable to be
passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be laid to
heart. Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his command,
outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of understanding, for
inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning it for himself, than Mr.
Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he was a good stump-speaker,
nominated for his availability, - that is, because he had no history, - and
chosen by a party with whose more extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It
might well be feared that a man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of
hostile partisans could rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of
character, in decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who was
at best only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly
represent even that, would fail of political, much more of popular, support.
And certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few resources of power
in the past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln.
Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as President, there was
a large and at that time dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to
the office, and even in the party that elected him there was also a large
minority that suspected him of being secretly a communicant with the church of
Laodicea. All that he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one
side; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness and
backsliding by the other. Meanwhile, he was to carry on a truly colossal war
by means of both; he was to disengage the country from diplomatic
entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbed by the help or the hindrance
of either, and to win from the crowning dangers of his administration, in the
confidence of the people, the means of his safety and their own. He has
contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has
stood so firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration.
Mr. Lincoln`s policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down no
programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast -
iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be
useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin`s motto, Le temps et
moi. The moi, to be sure, was not very prominent at first; but it has grown
more and more so, till the world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands
for a character of marked individuality and capacity of affairs. Time was his
prime-minister, and, we began to think, at one period, his general-in-chief
also. At first he was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence
of progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took
the breath away from those who think there is no getting on safely while there
is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only being who has time
enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make
a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in
reviewing his career, though we have sometimes in our impatience thought
otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment
brought up all his reserves. Semper nocuit differre paratis is a sound axiom,
but the really efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is not ready,
and be firm against all persuasion and reproach till he is.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln`s course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that the
chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his adhesion to
certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly accomplishing his
ends. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a
conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing more sure to end in disaster than a
theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies.
True, there is a popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding
necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but
in real life we commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as it is
called, are those who have learned to allow for the influence of their eddies,
and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln`s
perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making
fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country is to
be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to run straight at all
hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where the
main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we
have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out right at
last.
A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel might be drawn between
Mr. Lincoln and one of the most striking figures in modern history, - Henry
IV. of France. The career of the latter may be more picturesque, as that of a
daring captain always is; but in all its vicissitudes there is nothing more
romantic than that sudden change, as by a rub of Aladdin`s lamp, from the
attorney`s office in a country town of Illinois to the helm of a great nation
in times like these. The analogy between the characters and circumstances of
the two men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to a rebellion
rather than a crown, Henry`s chief material dependence was the Huguenot party,
whose doctrines sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if not
suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King only in name over the
greater part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet
gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party that
he was the only centre of order and legitimate authority round which France
could reorganize itself. While preachers who held the divine right of kings
made the churches of Paris ring with declamations in favor of democracy rather
than submit to the heretic dog of a Bearnois, - much as our soi-disant
Democrats have lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and
denouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Independence, - Henry bore both
parties in hand till he was convinced that only one course of action could
possibly combine his own interests and those of France. Meanwhile the
Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that he was theirs, the Catholics
hoped somewhat doubtfully that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned
aside remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest or a proverb (if a
little high, he liked them none the worse), joking continually as his manner
was. We have seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho Panza by
persons incapable of appreciating one of the deepest pieces of wisdom in the
pro-foundest romance ever written; namely, that, while Don Quixote was
incomparable in theoretic and ideal statesmanship, Sancho, with his stock of
proverbs, the ready money of human experience, made the best possible
practical governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws and modern instances as
Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and
thoroughly earnest man, around whom the fragments of France were to gather
themselves till she took her place again as a planet of the first magnitude in
the European system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate than Henry.
However some may think him wanting in zeal, the most fanatical can find no
taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor can the most bitter charge him
with being influenced by motives of personal interest. The leading distinction
between the policies of the two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to
the nation; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation over to him. One left a
united France; the other, we hope and believe, will leave a reunited America.
We leave our readers to trace the further points of difference and resemblance
for themselves, merely suggesting a general similarity which has often
occurred to us. One only point of melancholy interest we will allow ourselves
to touch upon. That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from
certain English tourists who would consider similar revelations in regard to
Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in their want of bienseance. It is no
concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitness for the high place he so
worthily occupies; but he is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the matter of
good looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been
reproached with Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with
all deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or see in
it any reason why he should govern Americans the less wisely.
People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are glad
that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us forever from
the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom America made,
as God made Adam, out of the very earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown,
to show us how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await
the call of opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justice of
God and the worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well in their proper
place, but they shrivel at the touch of nature like stubble in the fire. The
genius that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us than
that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the instincts and convictions
of an entire people. Autocracy may have something in it more melodramatic than
this, but falls far short of it in human value and interest.
Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improvised
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science, which, if
it cannot always command men of special aptitude and great powers, at least
demands the long and steady application of the best powers of such men as it
can command to master even its first principles. It is curious, that, in a
country which boasts of its intelligence, the theory should be so generally
held that the most complicated of human contrivances, and one which every day
becomes more complicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to talk for
an hour or two without stopping to think.
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