Lincoln

N >> Nathaniel Wright Stephenson >> Lincoln


*Stanton's motive was probably economy. Congress was
terrified by the expense of the war. The Committee was
deeply alarmed over the political effect of war taxation.
They and Stanton were all convinced that McClellan was amply
strong enough to crush the Confederacy.

But even in this dire extremity, he would not give way without a last
attempt to save his earlier policy. On July twelfth, he called together
the Senators and Representatives of the Border States. He read to them
a written argument in favor of compensated emancipation, the Federal
government to assist the States in providing funds for the purpose.

"Let the States that are in rebellion," said he, "see definitely and
certainly that in no event will the States you represent ever join their
proposed Confederacy, and they can not much longer maintain the contest.
But you can not divest them of their hope to ultimately have you with
them so long as you show a determination to perpetuate the institution
within your own States. . . . If the war continues long, as it must if
the object be not sooner attained, the institution in your States will
be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion--by the mere incidents of
war. . . . Our common country is in great peril, demanding the loftiest
views and boldest action to bring it speedy relief. Once relieved
its form of government is saved to the world, its beloved history and
cherished memories are vindicated, and its happy future fully assured
and rendered inconceivably grand."(12)

He made no impression. They would commit themselves to nothing. Lincoln
abandoned his earlier policy.

Of what happened next, he said later, "It had got to be. . . . Things
had gone on from bad to worse until I felt that we had reached the end
of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had
about played our last card and must change our tactics or lose the game.
I now determined upon the adoption of the emancipation policy. . . "(13)

The next day he confided his decision and his reasons to Seward and
Welles. Though "this was a new departure for the President," both
these Ministers agreed with him that the change of policy had become
inevitable.(14)

Lincoln was now entirely himself, astute in action as well as bold in
thought. He would not disclose his change of policy while Congress was
in session. Should he do so, there was no telling what attempt the
Cabal would make to pervert his intention, to twist his course into
the semblance of an acceptance of the congressional theory. He laid the
matter aside until Congress should be temporarily out of the way, until
the long recess between July and December should have begun. In this
closing moment of the second session of the Thirty-Seventh Congress,
which is also the opening moment of the great period of Lincoln, the
feeling against him in Congress was extravagantly bitter. It caught at
anything with which to make a point. A disregard of technicalities
of procedure was magnified into a serious breach of constitutional
privilege. Reviving the question of compensated emancipation, Lincoln
had sent a special message to both Houses, submitting the text of a
compensation bill which he urged them to consider. His enemies raised
an uproar. The President had no right to introduce a bill into Congress!
Dictator Lincoln was trying in a new way to put Congress under his
thumb.(15)

In the last week of the session, Lincoln's new boldness brought the old
relation between himself and Congress to a dramatic close. The Second
Confiscation Bill had long been under discussion. Lincoln believed that
some of its provisions were inconsistent with the spirit at least of
our fundamental law. Though its passage was certain, he prepared a veto
message. He then permitted the congressional leaders to know what he
intended to do when the bill should reach him. Gall and wormwood are
weak terms for the bitterness that may be tasted in the speeches of the
Vindictives. When, in order to save the bill, a resolution was appended
purging it of the interpretation which Lincoln condemned, Trumbull
passionately declared that Congress was being "coerced" by the
President. "No one at a distance," is the deliberate conclusion of
Julian who was present, "could have formed any adequate conception of
the hostility of the Republican members toward Lincoln at the final
adjournment, while it was the belief of many that our last session of
Congress had been held in Washington. Mr. Wade said the country was
going to hell, and that the scenes witnessed in the French Revolution
were nothing in comparison with what we should see here."(16)

Lincoln endured the rage of Congress in unwavering serenity. On the
last day of the session, Congress surrendered and sent to him both the
Confiscation Act and the explanatory resolution. Thereupon, he indulged
in what must have seemed to those fierce hysterical enemies of his a
wanton stroke of irony. He sent them along with his approval of the bill
the text of the veto message he would have sent had they refused to
do what he wanted.(17) There could be no concealing the fact that the
President had matched his will against the will of Congress, and that
the President had had his way.

Out of this strange period of intolerable confusion, a gigantic figure
had at last emerged. The outer and the inner Lincoln had fused. He was
now a coherent personality, masterful in spite of his gentleness, with
his own peculiar fashion of self-reliance, having a policy of his own
devising, his colors nailed upon the masthead.




XXIII. THE MYSTICAL STATESMAN

Lincoln's final emergence was a deeper thing than merely the
consolidation of a character, the transformation of a dreamer into a man
of action. The fusion of the outer and the inner person was the result
of a profound interior change. Those elements of mysticism which were
in him from the first, which had gleamed darkly through such deep
overshadowing, were at last established in their permanent form. The
political tension had been matched by a spiritual tension with personal
sorrow as the connecting link. In a word, he had found his religion.

Lincoln's instinctive reticence was especially guarded, as any one might
expect, in the matter of his belief. Consequently, the precise nature of
it has been much discussed. As we have seen, the earliest current
report charged him with deism. The devoted Herndon, himself an agnostic,
eagerly claims his hero as a member of the noble army of doubters.
Elaborate arguments have been devised in rebuttal. The fault on both
sides is in the attempt to base an impression on detached remarks and
in the further error of treating all these fragments as of one time,
or more truly, as of no time, as if his soul were a philosopher of the
absolute, speaking oracularly out of a void. It is like the vicious
reasoning that tortures systems of theology out of disconnected texts.

Lincoln's religious life reveals the same general divisions that are to
be found in his active life: from the beginning to about the time of his
election; from the close of 1860 to the middle of 1862; the remainder.

Of his religious experience in the first period, very little is
definitely known. What glimpses we have of it both fulfill and
contradict the forest religion that was about him in his youth. The
superstition, the faith in dreams, the dim sense of another world
surrounding this, the belief in communion between the two, these are
the parts of him that are based unchangeably in the forest shadows. But
those other things, the spiritual passions, the ecstacies, the vague
sensing of the terribleness of the creative powers,--to them always
he made no response. And the crude philosophizing of the forest
theologians, their fiercely simple dualism--God and Satan, thunder and
lightning, the eternal war in the heavens, the eternal lake of fire--it
meant nothing to him. Like all the furious things of life, evil appeared
to him as mere negation, a mysterious foolishness he could not explain.
His aim was to forget it. Goodness and pity were the active elements
that roused him to think of the other world; especially pity. The burden
of men's tears, falling ever in the shadows at the backs of things--this
was the spiritual horizon from which he could not escape. Out of the
circle of that horizon he had to rise by spiritual apprehension in order
to be consoled. And there is no reason to doubt that at times, if not
invariably, in his early days, he did rise; he found consolation. But
it was all without form. It was a sentiment, a mood,--philosophically
bodiless. This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest
world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation,
a presence, not an idea. Before the task of expressing it, the forest
mystic stood helpless. Just what it was that he felt impinging upon him
from every side he did not know. He was like a sensitive man, neither
scientist nor poet, in the midst of a night of stars. The reality of his
experience gave him no power either to explain or to state it.

There is little reason to suppose that Lincoln's religious experience
previous to 1860 was more than a recurrent visitor in his daily life.
He has said as much himself. He told his friend Noah Brooks "he did not
remember any precise time when he passed through any special change of
purpose, or of heart, but he would say that his own election to office
and the crisis immediately following, influentially determined him
in what he called 'a process of crystallization' then going on in his
mind."(1)

It was the terrible sense of need--the humility, the fear that he might
not be equal to the occasion--that searched his soul, that bred in him
the craving for a spiritual up-holding which should be constant. And at
this crucial moment came the death of his favorite son. "In the lonely
grave of the little one lay buried Mr. Lincoln's fondest hopes, and
strong as he was in the matter of self-control, he gave way to an
overmastering grief which became at length a serious menace to his
health."(2) Though firsthand accounts differ as to just how he struggled
forth out of this darkness, all agree that the ordeal was very severe.
Tradition makes the crisis a visit from the Reverend Francis Vinton,
rector of Trinity Church, New York, and his eloquent assertion of the
faith in immortality, his appeal to Lincoln to remember the sorrow
of Jacob over the loss of Joseph, and to rise by faith out of his own
sorrow even as the patriarch rose.(3)

Although Lincoln succeeded in putting his grief behind him, he never
forgot it. Long afterward, he called the attention of Colonel Cannon to
the lines in King John:

"And Father Cardinal, I have heard you say That we shall see and know
our friends in heaven; If that be true, I shall see my boy again."

"Colonel," said he, "did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that
you were holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad
consciousness that it was not a reality? Just so, I dream of my boy,
Willie." And he bent his head and burst into tears.(4)

As he rose in the sphere of statecraft with such apparent suddenness out
of the doubt, hesitation, self-distrust of the spring of 1862 and in the
summer found himself politically, so at the same time he found himself
religiously. During his later life though the evidences are slight, they
are convincing. And again, as always, it is not a violent change that
takes place, but merely a better harmonization of the outer and less
significant part of him with the inner and more significant. His
religion continues to resist intellectual formulation. He never accepted
any definite creed. To the problems of theology, he applied the same
sort of reasoning that he applied to the problems of the law. He made a
distinction, satisfactory to himself at least, between the essential
and the incidental, and rejected everything that did not seem to him
altogether essential.

In another negative way his basal part asserted itself. Just as in all
his official relations he was careless of ritual, so in religion he was
not drawn to its ritualistic forms. Again, the forest temper surviving,
changed, into such different conditions! Real and subtle as is the
ritualistic element, not only in religion but in life generally, one may
doubt whether it counts for much among those who have been formed
mainly by the influences of nature. It implies more distance between
the emotion and its source, more need of stimulus to arouse and organize
emotion, than the children of the forest are apt to be aware of. To
invoke a philosophical distinction, illumination rather than ritualism,
the tense but variable concentration on a result, not the ordered mode
of an approach, is what distinguishes such characters as Lincoln. It was
this that made him careless &f form in all the departments of life. It
was one reason why McClellan, born ritualist of the pomp of war, could
never overcome a certain dislike, or at least a doubt, of him.

Putting together his habit of thinking only in essentials and his
predisposition to neglect form, it is not strange that he said: "I have
never united myself to any church because I have found difficulty in
giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated
statements of Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles of
Belief and Confessions of Faith. When any church will inscribe over its
altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior's condensed
statement of the substance of both Law and Gospel, 'Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my
heart and with all my soul."(5)

But it must not be supposed that his religion was mere ethics. It had
three cardinal possessions. The sense of God is through all his later
life. It appears incidentally in his state papers, clothed with language
which, in so deeply sincere a man, must be taken literally. He believed
in prayer, in the reality of communion with the Divine. His third
article was immortality.

At Washington, Lincoln was a regular attendant, though not a
communicant, of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. With the
Pastor, the Reverend P. D. Gurley, he formed a close friendship. Many
hours they passed in intimate talk upon religious subjects, especially
upon the question of immortality.(6) To another pious visitor he said
earnestly, "I hope I am a Christian."(7) Could anything but the most
secure faith have written this "Meditation on the Divine Will" which he
set down in the autumn of 1862 for no eye but his own: "The will of God
prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with
the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God can not be for
and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war
it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the
purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working
just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I
am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this
contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power
on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or
destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And,
having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day.
Yet the contest proceeds."(8)

His religion flowered in his later temper. It did not, to be sure,
overcome his melancholy. That was too deeply laid. Furthermore, we fail
to discover in the surviving evidences any certainty that it was a glad
phase of religion. Neither the ecstatic joy of the wild women, which
his mother had; nor the placid joy of the ritualist, which he did not
understand; nor those other variants of the joy of faith, were included
in his portion. It was a lofty but grave religion that matured in his
final stage. Was it due to far-away Puritan ancestors? Had austere,
reticent Iron-sides, sure of the Lord, but taking no liberties with
their souls, at last found out their descendant? It may be. Cromwell,
in some ways, was undeniably his spiritual kinsman. In both, the same
aloofness of soul, the same indifference to the judgments of the world,
the same courage, the same fatalism, the same encompassment by the
shadow of the Most High. Cromwell, in his best mood, had he been
gifted with Lincoln's literary power, could have written the Fast Day
Proclamation of 1863 which is Lincoln's most distinctive religious
fragment.

However, Lincoln's gloom had in it a correcting element which the old
Puritan gloom appears to have lacked. It placed no veto upon mirth.
Rather, it valued mirth as its only redeemer. And Lincoln's growth in
the religious sense was not the cause of any diminution of his
surface hilarity. He saved himself from what otherwise would have
been intolerable melancholy by seizing, regardless of the connection,
anything whatsoever that savored of the comic.

His religious security did not destroy his superstition. He continued
to believe that he would die violently at the end of his career as
President. But he carried that belief almost with gaiety. He refused to
take precautions for his safety. Long lonely rides in the dead of night;
night walks with a single companion, were constant anxieties to his
intimates. To the President, their fears were childish. Although in the
sensibilities he could suffer all he had ever suffered, and more; in
the mind he had attained that high serenity in which there can be no
flagging of effort because of the conviction that God has decreed one's
work; no failure of confidence because of the twin conviction that
somehow, somewhere, all things work together for good. "I am glad
of this interview," he said in reply to a deputation of visitors, in
September, 1862, "and glad to know that I have your sympathy and your
prayers. . I happened to be placed, being a humble instrument in the
hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am, and as we all are, to work out
His great purpose. . . . I have sought His aid; but if after endeavoring
to do my best in the light He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must
believe that for some purpose unknown to me He wills it otherwise. If I
had my way, this war would never have commenced. If I had been allowed
my way, this war would have been ended before this; but it still
continues and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose
of His own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited
understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we can not but
believe that He who made the world still governs it."(9)




XXIV. GAMBLING IN GENERALS

On July 22, 1862, there was a meeting of the Cabinet. The sessions of
Lincoln's Council were the last word for informality. The President
and the Ministers interspersed their great affairs with mere talk,
story-telling, gossip. With one exception they were all lovers of
their own voices, especially in the telling of tales. Stanton was the
exception. Gloomy, often in ill-health, innocent of humor, he glowered
when the others laughed. When the President, instead of proceeding at
once to business, would pull out of his pocket the latest volume of
Artemus Ward, the irate War Minister felt that the overthrow of
the nation was impending. But in this respect, the President was
incorrigible. He had been known to stop the line of his guests at a
public levee, while he talked for some five minutes in a whisper to an
important personage; and though all the room thought that jupiter was
imparting state secrets, in point of fact, he was making sure of a good
story the great man had told him a few days previous.(1) His Cabinet
meetings were equally careless of social form. The Reverend Robert
Collyer was witness to this fact in a curious way. Strolling through
the White House grounds, "his attention was suddenly arrested by the
apparition of three pairs of feet resting on the ledge of an open window
in one of the apartments of the second story and plainly visible from
below." He asked a gardener for an explanation. The brusk reply was:
"Why, you old fool, that's the Cabinet that is a-settin', and them thar
big feet are ole Abe's."(2)

When the Ministers assembled on July twenty-second they had no
intimation that this was to be a record session. Imagine the
astonishment when, in his usual casual way, though with none of that
hesitancy to which they had grown accustomed, Lincoln announced his
new policy, adding that he "wished it understood that the question was
settled in his own mind; that he had decreed emancipation in a certain
contingency and the responsibility of the measure was his."(3) President
and Cabinet talked it over in their customary offhand way, and Seward
made a suggestion that instantly riveted Lincoln's attention. Seward
thought the moment was ill-chosen. "If the Proclamation were issued now,
it would be received and considered as a despairing cry--a shriek from
and for the Administration, rather than for freedom."(4) He added
the picturesque phrase, "The government stretching forth its hands
to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the
government." This idea struck Lincoln with very great force. It was an
aspect of the case "which he had entirely overlooked."(5) He accepted
Seward's advice, laid aside the proclamation he had drafted and turned
again with all his energies to the organization of victory.

The next day Halleck arrived at Washington. He was one of Lincoln's
mistakes. However, in his new mood, Lincoln was resolved to act on his
own opinion of the evidence before him, especially in estimating men. It
is just possible that this epoch of his audacities began in a reaction;
that after too much self-distrust, he went briefly to the other extreme,
indulging in too much self-confidence. Be that as it may, he had formed
exaggerated opinions of both these Western generals, Halleck and
Pope. Somehow, in the brilliant actions along the Mississippi they had
absorbed far more than their fair share of credit. Particularly, Lincoln
went astray with regard to Pope. Doubtless a main reason why he accepted
the plan of campaign suggested by Halleck was the opportunity which it
offered to Pope. Perhaps, too, the fatality in McClellan's character
turned the scale. He begged to be left where he was with his base on
James River, and to be allowed to renew the attack on Richmond.1 But
he did not take the initiative. The government must swiftly hurry
up reinforcements, and then--the old, old story! Obviously, it was a
question at Washington either of superseding McClellan and leaving
the army where it was, or of shifting the army to some other commander
without in so many words disgracing McClellan. Halleck's approval of the
latter course jumped with two of Lincoln's impulses--his trust in Pope,
his reluctance to disgrace McClellan. Orders were issued transferring
the bulk of the army of the Potomac to the new army of Virginia lying
south of Washington under the command of Pope. McClellan was instructed
to withdraw his remaining forces from the Peninsula and retrace his
course up the Potomac.(6)

Lincoln had committed one of his worst blunders. Herndon has a curious,
rather subtle theory that while Lincoln's judgments of men in the
aggregate were uncannily sure, his judgments of men individually were
unreliable. It suggests the famous remark of Goethe that his views of
women did not derive from experience; that they antedated experience;
and that he corrected experience by them. Of the confessed artist this
may be true. The literary concept which the artist works with is often,
apparently, a more constant, more fundamental, more significant thing,
than is the broken, mixed, inconsequential impression out of which it
has been wrought. Which seems to explain why some of the writers who
understand human nature so well in their books, do not always understand
people similarly well in life. And always it is to be remembered that
Lincoln was made an artist by nature, and made over into a man of action
by circumstance. If Herndon's theory has any value it is in asserting
his occasional danger--by no means a constant danger--of forming in his
mind images of men that were more significant than it was possible for
the men themselves to be. John Pope was perhaps his worst instance. An
incompetent general, he was capable of things still less excusable. Just
after McClellan had so tragically failed in the Seven Days, when Lincoln
was at the front, Pope was busy with the Committee, assuring them
virtually that the war had been won in the West, and that only
McClellan's bungling had saved the Confederacy from speedy death.(7) But
somehow Lincoln trusted him, and continued to trust him even after he
had proved his incompetency in the catastrophe at Manassas.

During August, Pope marched gaily southward issuing orders that
were shot through with bad rhetoric, mixing up army routine and such
irrelevant matters as "the first blush of dawn."