Lincoln

N >> Nathaniel Wright Stephenson >> Lincoln


Lincoln's was one of those natures in which ideas have to become latent
before they can be precipitated by outward circumstance into definite
form. Always with him the idea that was to become powerful at a crisis
was one that he had long held in solution, that had permeated
him without his formulating it, that had entwined itself with his
heartstrings; never was it merely a conscious act of the logical
faculty. His characteristics as a lawyer--preoccupation with basal
ideas, with ethical significance, with those emotions which form the
ultimates of life--these always determined his thought. His idea of
nationalism was a typical case. He had always believed in the reality of
the national government as a sovereign fact. But he had thought little
about it; rather he had taken it for granted. It was so close to his
desire that he could not without an effort acknowledge the sincerity
of disbelief in it. That was why he was so slow in forming a true
comprehension of the real force opposing him. Disunion had appeared
to him a mere device of party strategy. That it was grounded upon a
genuine, a passionate conception of government, one irreconcilable with
his own, struck him, when at last he grasped it, as a deep offense. The
literary statesman sprang again to life. He threw all the strength of
his mind, the peculiar strength that had made him president, into a
statement of the case for nationalism.

His vehicle for publishing his case was the first message to
Congress.(1) It forms an amazing contrast with the first inaugural.
The argument over slavery that underlies the whole of the inaugural has
vanished. The message does not mention slavery. From the first word to
the last, it is an argument for the right of the central government to
exercise sovereign power, and for the duty of the American people--to
give their lives for the Union. No hint of compromise; nought of the
cautious and conciliatory tone of the inaugural. It is the blast of a
trumpet--a war trumpet. It is the voice of a stern mind confronting an
adversary that arouses in him no sympathy, no tolerance even, much less
any thought of concession. Needless to insist that this adversary is
an idea. Toward every human adversary, Lincoln was always unbelievably
tender. Though little of a theologian, he appreciated intuitively
some metaphysical ideas; he projected into politics the philosopher's
distinction between sin and the sinner. For all his hatred of the ideas
which he held to be treason, he never had a vindictive impulse directed
toward the men who accepted those ideas. Destruction for the idea,
infinite clemency for the person--such was his attitude.

It was the idea of disunion, involving as he believed, a misconception
of the American government, and by implication, a misconception of the
true function of all governments everywhere, against which he declared a
war without recourse.

The basis of his argument reaches back to his oration on Clay, to
his assertion that Clay loved his country, partly because it was his
country, even more because it was a free country. This idea ran
through Lincoln's thinking to the end. There was in him a suggestion
of internationalism. At the full height of his power, in his complete
maturity as a political thinker, he said that the most sacred bond in
life should be the brotherhood of the workers of all nations. No words
of his are more significant than his remarks to passing soldiers in
1863, such as, "There is more involved in this contest than is realized
by every one. There is involved in this struggle the question whether
your children and my children shall enjoy the privileges we have
enjoyed." And again, "I happen temporarily to occupy this White House. I
am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here
as my father's child has."(2)

This idea, the idea that the "plain people" are the chief concern of
government was the bed rock of all his political thinking. The mature,
historic Lincoln is first of all a leader of the plain people--of the
mass--as truly as was Cleon, or Robespierre, or Andrew Jackson. His
gentleness does not remove him from that stern category. The latent
fanaticism that is in every man, or almost every man, was grounded in
Lincoln, on his faith--so whimsically expressed--that God must have
loved the plain people because he had made so many of them.(3) The basal
appeal of the first message was in the words:

"This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it
is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of
government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men;
to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of
laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair
chance in the race of life."(4) Not a war over slavery, not a war to
preserve a constitutional system, but a war to assert and maintain the
sovereignty of--"We, the People."

But how was it to be proved that this was, in fact, the true issue of
the moment? Here, between the lines of the first message, Lincoln's
deepest feelings are to be glimpsed. Out of the discovery that Virginia
honestly believed herself a sovereign power, he had developed in himself
a deep, slow-burning fervor that probably did much toward fusing him
into the great Lincoln of history. But why? What was there in that
idea which should strike so deep? Why was it not merely one view in a
permissible disagreement over the interpretation of the Constitution?
Why did the cause of the people inspire its champion to regard the
doctrine of State sovereignty as anti-christ? Lincoln has not revealed
himself on these points in so many words. But he has revealed himself
plainly enough by implication.

The clue is in that element of internationalism which lay at the back of
his mind. There must be no misunderstanding of this element. It was not
pointing along the way of the modern "international." Lincoln would have
fought Bolshevism to the death. Side by side with his assertion of the
sanctity of the international bond of labor, stands his assertion of
a sacred right in property and that capital is a necessity.(5) His
internationalism was ethical, not opportunistic. It grew, as all
his ideas grew, not out of a theorem, not from a constitutional
interpretation, but from his overpowering commiseration for the mass
of mankind. It was a practical matter. Here were poor people to be
assisted, to be enriched in their estate, to be enlarged in spirit. The
mode of reaching the result was not the thing. Any mode, all sorts of
modes, might be used. What counted was the purpose to work relief, and
the willingness to throw overboard whatever it might be that tended to
defeat the purpose. His internationalism was but a denial of "my country
right or wrong." There can be little doubt that, in last resort, he
would have repudiated his country rather than go along with it in
opposition to what he regarded as the true purpose of government. And
that was, to advance the welfare of the mass of mankind.

He thought upon this subject in the same manner in which he thought as
a lawyer, sweeping aside everything but what seemed to him the ethical
reality at the heart of the case. For him the "right" of a State to do
this or that was a constitutional question only so long as it did not
cross that other more universal "right," the paramount "charter of
liberty," by which, in his view, all other rights were conditioned. He
would impose on all mankind, as their basic moral obligation, the duty
to sacrifice all personal likes, personal ambitions, when these in their
permanent tendencies ran contrary to the tendency which he rated as
paramount. Such had always been, and was always to continue, his own
attitude toward slavery. No one ever loathed it more. But he never
permitted it to take the first place in his thoughts. If it could
be eradicated without in the process creating dangers for popular
government he would rejoice. But all the schemes of the Abolitionists,
hitherto, he had condemned as dangerous devices because they would
strain too severely the fabric of the popular state, would violate
agreements which alone made it possible. Therefore, being always
relentless toward himself, he required of himself the renunciation of
this personal hope whenever, in whatever way, it threatened to make less
effective the great democratic state which appeared to him the central
fact of the world.

The enlargement of his reasoning led him inevitably to an unsparing
condemnation of the Virginian theory. One of his rare flashes of
irritation was an exclamation that Virginia loyalty always had an
"if."(6) At this point, to make him entirely plain, there is needed
another basic assumption which he has never quite formulated. However,
it is so obviously latent in his thinking that the main lines are to be
made out clearly enough. Building ever on that paramount obligation
of all mankind to consider first the welfare of God's plain people, he
assumed that whenever by any course of action any congregation of men
were thrown together and led to form any political unit, they were never
thereafter free to disregard in their attitude toward that unit its
value in supporting and advancing the general cause of the welfare of
the plain people. A sweeping, and in some contingencies, a terrible
doctrine! Certainly, as to individuals, classes, communities even, a
doctrine that might easily become destructive. But it formed the basis
of all Lincoln's thought about the "majority" in America. Upon it
would have rested his reply, had he ever made a reply, to the Virginia
contention that while his theory might apply to each individual State,
it could not apply to the group of States. He would have treated such
a reply, whether fairly or unfairly, as a legal technicality. He would
have said in substance: here is a congregation to be benefited, this
great mass of all the inhabitants of all the States of the Union;
accident, or destiny, or what you will, has brought them together, but
here they are; they are moving forward, haltingly, irregularly, but
steadily, toward fuller and fuller democracy; they are part of
the universal democratic movement; their vast experiment has an
international significance; it is the hope of the "Liberal party
throughout the world"; to check that experiment, to break it into
Separate minor experiments; to reduce the imposing promise of its
example by making it seem unsuccessful, would be treason to mankind.
Therefore, both on South and North, both on the Seceders he meant to
fight and on those Northerners of whom he was not entirely sure, he
aimed to impose the supreme immediate duty of proving to the world that
democracy on a great scale could have sufficient vitality to maintain
itself against any sort of attack. Anticipating faintly the Gettysburg
oration, the first message contained these words: "And this issue
embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the
whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or
democracy--a government of the people by the same people--can or can
not maintain its integrity against its own domestic foes. . . . Must a
government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people
or too weak to maintain its own existence?"(7) He told Hay that "the
crucial idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us
to prove that popular government is not an absurdity"; "that the basal
issue was whether or no the people could govern themselves."(8)

But all this elaborate reasoning, if it went no further, lacked
authority. It was political speculation. To clothe itself with authority
it had to discover a foundation in historic fact. The real difficulty
was not what ought to have been established in America in the past,
but what actually had been. Where was the warrant for those bold
proposition--who "we, the people," really were; in what their sovereign
power really consisted; what was history's voice in the matter? To state
an historic foundation was the final aim of the message. To hit its mark
it had to silence those Northerners who denied the obligation to fight
for the Union; it had to oppose their "free love" ideas of political
unity with the conception of an established historic government, one
which could not be overthrown except through the nihilistic process
of revolution. So much has been written upon the exact location of
sovereignty in the American federal State that it is difficult to escape
the legalistic attitude, and to treat the matter purely as history. So
various, so conflicting, and at times so tenuous, are the theories,
that a flippant person might be forgiven did he turn from the whole
discussion saying impatiently it was blind man's buff. But on one thing,
at least, we must all agree. Once there was a king over this country,
and now there is no king. Once the British Crown was the sovereign, and
now the Crown has receded into the distance beyond the deep blue sea.
When the Crown renounced its sovereignty in America, what became of it?
Did it break into fragments and pass peacemeal to the various revolted
colonies? Was it transferred somehow to the group collectively? These
are the obvious theories; but there are others. And the others give
rise to subtler speculations. Who was it that did the actual revolting
against the Crown--colonies, parties, individuals, the whole American
people, who?

Troublesome questions these, with which Lincoln and the men of his time
did not deal in the spirit of historical science. Their wishes fathered
their thoughts. Southerners, practically without exception, held
the theory of the disintegration of the Crown's prerogative, its
distribution among the States. The great leaders of Northern thought
repudiated the idea. Webster and Clay would have none of it. But
their own theories were not always consistent; and they differed
among themselves. Lincoln did the natural thing. He fastened upon the
tendencies in Northern thought that supported his own faith. Chief among
these was the idea that sovereignty passed to the general congregation
of the inhabitants of the colonies--"we, the people"--because we, the
people, were the real power that supported the revolt. He had accepted
the idea that the American Revolution was an uprising of the people,
that its victory was in a transfer of sovereign rights from an English
Crown to an American nation; that a new collective state, the Union, was
created by this nation as the first act of the struggle, and that it was
to the Union that the Crown succumbed, to the Union that its prerogative
passed. To put this idea in its boldest and its simplest terms was the
crowning effort of the message.

"The States have their status in the Union and they have no other legal
status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and
by revolution. The Union, and not themselves separately, procured their
independence and their liberty. By conquest or purchase, the Union gave
each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The Union is
older than any of the States, and in fact, it created them as States.
Originally some dependent colonies made the Union, and in turn, the
Union threw off this old dependence for them and made them States, such
as they are."(9)

This first message completes the evolution of Lincoln as a political
thinker. It is his third, his last great landmark. The Peoria speech,
which drew to a focus all the implications of his early life, laid the
basis of his political significance; the Cooper Union speech, summing
up his conflict with Douglas, applied his thinking to the new issue
precipitated by John Brown; but in both these he was still predominantly
a negative thinker, still the voice of an opposition. With the first
message, he became creative; he drew together what was latent in his
earlier thought; he discarded the negative; he laid the foundation of
all his subsequent policy. The breadth and depth of his thinking is
revealed by the fulness with which the message develops the implications
of his theory. In so doing, he anticipated the main issues that were to
follow: his determination to keep nationalism from being narrowed into
mere "Northernism"; his effort to create an all-parties government; his
stubborn insistence that he was suppressing an insurrection, not waging
external war; his doctrine that the Executive, having been chosen by the
entire people, was the one expression of the sovereignty of the people,
and therefore, the repository of all these exceptional "war powers" that
are dormant in time of peace. Upon each of those issues he was destined
to wage fierce battles with the politicians who controlled Congress, who
sought to make Congress his master, who thwarted, tormented and almost
defeated him. In the light of subsequent history the first message has
another aspect besides its significance as political science. In its
clear understanding of the implications of his attitude, it attains
political second sight. As Lincoln, immovable, gazes far into the
future, his power of vision makes him, yet again though in a widely
different sense, the "seer in a trance, Seeing all his own mischance."

His troubles with Congress began at once. The message was received on
July fourth, politely, but with scant response to its ideas. During
two weeks, while Congress in its fatuousness thought that the battle
impending in Virginia would settle things, the majority in Congress
would not give assent to Lincoln's view of what the war was about. And
then came Bull Run. In a flash the situation changed. Fatuousness was
puffed out like a candle in a wind. The rankest extremist saw that
Congress must cease from its debates and show its hand; must say what
the war was about; must inform the nation whether it did or did not
agree with the President.

On the day following Bull Run, Crittenden introduced this resolution:
"That the present, deplorable civil war has been forced upon the country
by the Disunionists of the Southern States, now in arms against the
constitutional government, and in arms around the capital; that in this
national emergency, Congress, banishing all feelings of mere passion and
resentment, will recollect only its duty to the whole country; that this
war is not waged on their part in any spirit of oppression or for
any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or
interfering with the rights or established institutions of these States,
but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to
preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of
the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are
accomplished, the war ought to cease." This Crittenden Resolution was
passed instantly by both Houses, without debate and almost without
opposition. (10)

Paradoxically, Bull Run had saved the day for Lincoln, had enabled him
to win his first victory as a statesman.




XVIII. THE JACOBIN CLUB

The keen Englishman who had observed the beauty of the Virginian woods
on "Bull Run Sunday," said, after the battle was lost, "I hope Senator
Wilson is satisfied." He was sneering at the whole group of intemperate
Senators none of whom had ever smelled powder, but who knew it all when
it came to war; who had done their great share in driving the President
and the generals into a premature advance. Senator Wilson was one of
those who went out to Manassas to see the Confederacy overthrown, that
fateful Sunday. He was one of the most precipitate among those who fled
back to Washington. On the way, driving furiously, amid a press of men
and vehicles, he passed a carriage containing four Congressmen who were
taking their time. Perhaps irritated by their coolness, he shouted to
them to make haste. "If we were in as big a hurry as you are," replied
Congressman Riddle, scornfully, "we would."

These four Congressmen played a curiously dramatic part before they got
back to Washington. So did a party of Senators with whom they joined
forces. This other party, at the start, also numbered four. They had
planned a jolly picnic--this day that was to prove them right in
hurrying the government into battle!--and being wise men who knew how
to take time by the forelock, they had taken their luncheon with them.
From what is known of Washington and Senators, then as now, one may risk
a good deal that the luncheon was worth while. Part of the tragedy of
that day was the accidental break-up of this party with the result amid
the confusion of a road crowded by pleasure-seekers, that two Senators
went one way carrying off the luncheon, while the other two, making the
best of the disaster, continued southward through those beautiful early
hours when Russell was admiring the scenery, their luncheon all to seek.
The lucky men with the luncheon were the Senators Benjamin Wade
and Zachary Chandler. Senator Trumbull and Senator Grimes, both on
horseback, were left to their own devices. However, fortune was with
them. Several hours later they had succeeded in getting food by the
wayside and were resting in a grove of trees some distance beyond the
village of Centerville. Suddenly, they suffered an appalling surprise;
happening to look up, they beheld emerging out of the distance, a
stampede of men and horses which came thundering down the country road,
not a hundred yards from where they sat. "We immediately mounted our
horses," as Trumbull wrote to his wife the next day, "and galloped to
the road, by which time it was crowded, hundreds being in advance on
the way to Centerville and two guns of Sherman's battery having already
passed in full retreat. We kept on with the crowd, not knowing what else
to do. We fed our horses at Centerville and left there at six o'clock....
Came on to Fairfax Court House where we got supper and, leaving there at
ten o'clock reached home at half past two this morning. . . . I am
dreadfully disappointed and mortified."(1)

Meanwhile, what of those other gay picnickers, Senator Wade and Senator
Chandler? They drove in a carriage. Viewing the obligations of the hour
much as did C. C. Clay at the President's reception, they were armed.
Wade had "his famous rifle" which he had brought with him to Congress,
which at times in the fury of debate he had threatened to use, which
had become a byword. These Senators seem to have ventured nearer to
the front than did Trumbull and Grimes, and were a little later in the
retreat At a "choke-up," still on the far side of Centerville, their
carriage passed the carriage of the four Congressmen--who, by the way,
were also armed, having among them "four of the largest navy revolvers."

All these men, whatever their faults or absurdities, were intrepid.
The Congressmen, at least, were in no good humor, for they had driven
through a regiment of three months men whose time expired that day and
who despite the cannon in the distance were hurrying home.

The race of the fugitives continued. At Centerville, the Congressmen
passed Wade. Soon afterward Wade passed them for the second time. About
a mile out of Fairfax Court House, "at the foot of a long down grade,
the pike on the northerly side was fenced and ran along a farm. On the
other side for a considerable distance was a wood, utterly impenetrable
for men or animals, larger than cats or squirrels." Here the Wade
carriage stopped. The congressional carriage drove up beside it. The two
blocked a narrow way where as in the case of Horatius at the bridge,
"a thousand might well be stopped by three." And then "bluff Ben Wade"
showed the mettle that was in him. The "old Senator, his hat well back
on his head," sprang out of his carriage, his rifle in his hand, and
called to the others, "Boys, we'll stop this damned runaway." And they
did it. Only six of them, but they lined up across that narrow road;
presented their weapons and threatened to shoot; seized the bridles
of horses and flung the horses back on their haunches; checked a
panic-stricken army; held it at bay, until just when it seemed they were
about to be overwhelmed, military reserves hurrying out from Fairfax
Court House, took command of the road. Cool, unpretentious Riddle calls
the episode "Wade's exploit," and adds "it was much talked of." The
newspapers dealt with it extravagantly.(2)

Gallant as the incident was, it was all the military service that "Ben"
Wade and "Zach" Chandler--for thus they are known in history-over saw.
But one may believe that it had a lasting effect upon their point of
view and on that of their friend Lyman Trumbull. Certain it is that none
of the three thereafter had any doubts about putting the military men
in their place. All the error of their own view previous to Bull Run was
forgotten. Wade and Chandler, especially, when military questions were
in dispute, felt that no one possibly could know more of the subject
than did the men who stopped the rout in the narrow road beyond Fairfax.

Three of those picnickers who missed their guess on Bull Run Sunday,
Wade, Chandler and Trumbull, were destined to important parts in the
stern years that were to come. Before the close of the year 1861 the
three made a second visit to the army; and this time they kept together.
To that second visit momentous happenings may be traced. How it came
about must be fully understood.