Mary Agnes Hamilton

“ Could America hold together as one nation, half slave and half free? Could the Union be a real Union while there was this deep division, a division which it was now clear could not be got rid of, as the Northerners had hoped for so long, by the slow passage of time? Time alone would not induce the South to give up slavery. Slavery was a barbarous institution, degrading to the slaves and to those who owned them; the North could not accept it. If North and South were to hold together slavery must go. The great thing was to keep North and South united. ”

“ Lincoln and Grant always understood each other. Each was a man of intense strength of character, given to doing things rather than talking of them. Grant had not Lincoln’s tenderness of heart, or the beauty of his pure and generous nature; but he had his power of concentrating his whole mind upon the task in hand. He knew Lincoln’s secret: “Work, work, is the main thing.”
The battle of Chancellorsville, May 1863, was for the North the darkest moment of the war; things were never so dark again. Only Lincoln’s supreme faith and courage could have risen from such a series of defeats unshaken. ”

“ Any one who failed in courage, endurance, or devotion he condemned without sympathy.
When but a lad he won, for bravery in battle, the crown of oak leaves given to soldiers who saved the life of a comrade in action. In all the fighting of the hard years in which Rome was defending itself against the other Italian peoples, Marcius was ever to the fore. He shrank from no fatigue, no danger: he was always in the hottest of the fight: first as a simple soldier, then as a general. In the field his soldiers adored him because he shared all their hardships and always led them to victory. ”

“ Whereas both Tiberius and Caius Gracchus lived and died for an idea greater than themselves, Sulla’s was a mind incapable of idealism. He and Caius Marius, his great rival, are alike in nothing except the harsh cruelty that belongs to times of revolutionary upheaval. In all other respects they are as unlike as any two men that ever lived. Marius was a son of the soil, a soldier with a soldier’s merits—courage, rude good humour, careless generosity—and his faults—cruelty, coarseness, indifference to everything but the rudest of pleasures. His one big work was the reconstruction of the army. ”

“ In words like these, Lincoln inspired the people of the North to see the greatness of the cause for which they were fighting; they were fighting for liberty, for a free government of free men, for a United America that might be to the world a pattern of such a free government. If the South won, if America were a house divided for ever against itself, one half would have slavery; if [Pg 103] the North won, and America were a whole again, slavery was gone; the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the equal rights of all men to life and liberty, would be for the first time fully realised. ”

“ I have as much courage to die as I had to slay; a Roman should be ready for great deeds and great suffering. Nor have I alone been emboldened to strike this blow; behind me is a long line of comrades who seek the same honour. Therefore, if you choose, prepare for a struggle in which you will fight for your life every hour of the day and have the sword of an enemy at your palace door. Such is the war that we, the youth of Rome, proclaim against you. You need not fear armies and battles ”

“ Now in American politics there was one great question, more important than every other, the question of slavery. Cautious politicians, men with an eye to their own success, thought that this question had better be left alone. Really thoughtful men, men like Lincoln, saw that this question could not be left alone for ever. Some day, and the sooner the better, it must be settled. Anyhow, it was every honest man’s duty to say what he thought. It is difficult now to realise quite what slavery meant. ”

“ Despair What thou owest, Rome, to the house of Nero, let the Metaurus be our witness, and Hasdrubal’s overthrow, and that bright day that scattered the gloom of Latium, the first to smile with cheering victory since the dread African careered through the cities of Italy, like fire through a pine forest or Eurus over Sicilian waves. After this the manhood of Rome gained strength from continued and successful effort, and temples desecrated by the unhallowed violence of the Carthaginian saw their gods restored. ”

“ The attack on Sumter and its fall made war inevitable. Lincoln was no Buchanan. War was horrible; civil war—war between men of the same country, between friends, often between relations—most horrible of all. But he could not, at whatever cost, allow the Union, for which his countrymen had fought so heroically eighty-four years ago, which had stood so long for such a high ideal of freedom all over the world—he could not allow the Union to be destroyed without fighting to preserve it. ”

“ Pompeius was of an age already failing in decay, and during the long repose of peace and civil life had forgotten the practice of command; eager to be on the lips of all, lavish in his gifts to the mob, swayed by the breath of the people’s will, and flattered by applause in the theatre that he built. Careless, too, of gaining fresh stores of strength, and relying over much on earlier success, he stands the shadow of a mighty name; like an oak that, towering in some fertile field, bears spoils offered by the people of old and votive gifts of their leaders ”

“ The South, of course, was delighted with this verdict. What it meant was this. When the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are equal, and possess right to life and liberty, what was intended was not all men, but all white men, since black men are not legally men. And yet free negroes had fought in the War of Independence, and signed the Declaration.
To the North such reasoning was hateful. People like Mr. Seward of New York began to say, If slavery is part of the Constitution of America, there is a law that is higher than the Constitution—the moral law. ”

“ Yet despite the hideous losses and the extreme danger no one gave way to weakness or despair. The strife of parties died down. Men and women turned from weeping for their dead to working for their country. Rome still stood and to every Roman the city’s life was more important than his own. Not a reproach was uttered against Varro, even by those who before had distrusted and blamed him. After the battle he had done well. With great courage and energy he collected together and inspired with new faith the scattered units that remained, and at their head he marched back to Rome. ”

“ The mind of Scipio Aemilianus saw below the surface of things to the reality. He could act, but like all really first-rate men of action—Napoleon, Hannibal, Caesar—he was a thinker. Round his table there gathered the most interesting men in Rome. They talked of all the questions that have puzzled and perplexed men’s minds since men began to think at all. Closest of his friends was Polybius, the great Greek historian who wrote the history of the wars with Carthage. He lived in his house and accompanied him in his wars in Spain and Africa. ”

“ There was profound sorrow through the whole of America; sorrow that checked all rejoicings over the victory of the North. Thus, indirectly, Lincoln’s death helped the reconciliation between North and South, though nothing could counterbalance the loss of his wise guidance.
Washington was shrouded in black: even the poorest inhabitants showing their sorrow in their dress. The body was taken to Springfield, Illinois, to be buried; and all the towns on the way showed their deep mourning and respect. Now, and not till now, did Americans begin to understand what a man they had lost. ”

“ The power to set the will firmly, clearly, with knowledge, on some action to be done, of whatever kind it be; to sacrifice, for that end, one’s own wishes; to crush down the desire every 48 human being feels for rest, enjoyment, comfort at the moment, and go on when the chance of success seems far away; this power is the instrument by which extraordinary things are brought about. Because of this power behind him Hannibal was a real danger to Rome, and Rome knew it. If he could have made the people of Carthage feel as he did, he would have conquered. ”

“ Lincoln hated slavery but not slave-owners. He loved the South as much as the North. It was agony to him to know his country divided against itself. Well might he say, in the speech he made on leaving his old home at Springfield [Pg 81] for ever, “There is a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”
It was very natural that men who had not known Lincoln should fear to have the fate of their country at so critical a time entrusted to a man of so small experience. But any one who knew Lincoln felt absolute confidence in him. ”

“ Italy lay torn and exhausted by civil war. Agriculture had been ruined, thousands slain, and business of all kinds was at a standstill. The war in the East shook the very life of the Republic to its foundations. Rome lived, as London lives, on trade and supplies from overseas. They were stopped. There was a money panic. The danger was the greater that the revolt against Rome, both in Italy and in Asia, Greece, and elsewhere, had right on its side. The Roman Government, in the years that had passed since the defeat of Hannibal, had been bad: cruel, extortionate, and unjust. ”

“ In the North, even sensible people who did not like slavery thought it very unwise to say anything against it. Slavery was a fact—it was no good to discuss it. Several Northern States sent petitions to Parliament, declaring their opinion that it was very unwise to discuss Abolition.
In Illinois, this was the view taken by nearly all Lincoln’s friends. Lincoln did not agree with them. He thought the Abolitionists very often unwise; nothing, he saw, could be more dangerous than to rouse the feeling of the South: but nothing could make him seem to approve of slavery. ”

“ Centuries of dust lie over them. Their bones are crumbled to the dust. Yet in a sense they live still and move among us. Between them and us there lie not only centuries but the great tide of ruin that swept the ancient world away: destroyed it so that the men who came after had to build the house of civilization, stone by stone anew, from the foundation. ”

“ He made a series of great speeches in Illinois, in which he made it quite clear that Douglas and his followers, and the men of the South, might say that they wanted to leave States free to have slavery or not as they chose, but what they really desired was to force them to have slavery whether they chose or not. “This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate: I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself ... I say that no man is good enough to govern another man without that man’s consent. ”

“ And since Caesar was a statesman as well as a soldier his work was never wholly undone: the stamp of his genius and of Rome was set once and for all on North-western Europe.
As a soldier Caesar ranks among the greatest in the world. When he first went to Gaul his army was small—but four legions in all. The rest of his army he created, enlisting and training it on the spot. With his small forces he had to meet not Orientals, driven into battle by fear, but sturdy and fiercely warlike men with whom fighting was a natural passion. ”

“ Now of course it was absurd to call a country free where slavery existed, or to say that all men have rights when millions of black men had no rights at all.
To the Southerner a black man was not a man, but a piece of property. ”

“ By the autumn all Pontus was in Roman hands. Lucullus, again refusing to await orders from Rome, pushed on into Armenia and attacked Tigranes, with whom Mithridates had taken refuge. This campaign was brilliantly carried out. With his small army, hardly 20,000 in all, Lucullus inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Armenian forces. Armenia was under his feet. He had shown all the qualities of a great commander: clearness and steadiness of purpose, complete confidence, the boldness and unresting energy of genius. ”

“ Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth a new nation upon this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We meet to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. ”

“ Every part of the State was in disorder—the army, the navy, the treasury, the laws, trade, the whole business of government. He had to reconstruct the whole, and in the space of little more than a year he did much towards this. And besides these great tasks there were lesser ones—the reform of the calendar, of the system of weights and measures, of the language. Reforms are never popular. The change from bad to good is slow and gradual. Caesar’s followers were not made as rich as they had hoped. His measures were directed to filling, not private pockets, but the coffers of the State. ”

“ Lincoln threw all his energy into the task of getting ready an army, and in a short time the Northern soldier was as well trained and equipped as the Southern.
The battle of Bull Run roused the North: quickened by shame, the people were ready to fight to the bitter end. For the next two years, however, they were disheartened by continual disaster: army after army was destroyed, position after position lost: gloom descended on the nation. In the dark times of defeat men turned upon Lincoln and blamed him for everything. ”

“ In the history of the ancient world the Romans played the part that men of our race have played in the history of the modern world. They knew, as we claim to know, how to govern: how to govern themselves, and how to govern other people. To this day much in our laws and in our system of government bears a Roman stamp. They were great soldiers and could conquer: they could also hold and keep their conquests and impress the Roman stamp on all the peoples over whom they ruled. ”

“ Under these circumstances, when war was at hand, when half the nation was ready to take up arms against the other half, Lincoln took up the burden of office. It was a burden, indeed, which no ordinary man could have borne. Buchanan had simply looked on while rebellion was preparing itself; for Lincoln was the task of quelling it. But the fact of rebellion was not his greatest difficulty. This was the disunion of the North. One section—the Abolitionists—rejoiced at the secession of the South. “We shall no more be chained to the slave-owners.” ”

“ No Roman general drove him out, no Roman army could defeat him or the soldiers who stood by him with a matchless devotion only given to men who have, as Hannibal had, what we call the divine spark burning within them. ”

“ The South knew that if they were conquered slavery was gone. And however black things might look, Lincoln and the North were not going to give in till they did conquer. They had set their teeth; they were going to fight to the bitter end.
M’Clellan had been dismissed, but his successors were not much more successful. In December Burnside threw away thousands of lives in an attempt to scale Mary’s Heights. Men were shot down in heaps by the enemy, and the army fell into a panic; a battle against overwhelming odds ended in a complete defeat. ”

“ The independent husbandman, who had been the backbone of the Roman army, was vanishing. A few people began, in Scipio’s day, to be worried about this question of the land, because they saw that if the peasants and farmers disappeared, the best soldiers would disappear also.
All this was well known; it had been going on for long. People talked, but nothing was done. Sometimes, however, there comes a man who has the power to see and be moved to action by a thing which most people, out of habit or laziness, take as a matter of course. Tiberius Gracchus was such a man. ”

“ The dryness with which amazing feats of generalship, of endurance, of courage, are set down only makes them, in the end, more impressive. No mere talker, no one shifted this way and that by chance and by the opinion of others, could have written these books. They are the record of one who could both see and act.
In so far as we can judge a man from his face, the busts tell the same story. They show us Caesar in middle age, when firmly set to serious purposes, the idle impulses of youth left behind. The power to think, the power to act—these are the characteristics of the familiar bust. ”

“ The Last Phase: the ‘Shadow of a Mighty Name’ You fear, Magnus, lest new exploits throw past triumphs into the shade, and victory over the Pirates be eclipsed by the conquest of Gaul; your rival is spurred on by the habit of continuous enterprise and a success too proud to take the second place; for Caesar will no longer endure a greater nor Pompeius an equal. Which of them appealed more righteously to civil war, we are not permitted to know. Each has the support of a mighty judge; the gods approved the cause of the conqueror, Cato of the conquered. ”

“ More than two thousand years ago, at a time when the people in the British Isles and in most parts of Western Europe were living the lives of savages, occupied in fighting, hunting, and fishing, dwelling in rude huts, clad in skins, ignorant of everything that we call civilization, Rome was the centre of a world in many ways as civilized as ours is now, over which the Roman people ruled. ”

“ And the City of Rome stood to its citizens in the place of the paterfamilias. The first laws of a Roman’s life were his duty to his father and to the State. They had an absolute claim on him for all that he could give. The Roman’s code of honour, like the Englishman’s, rested on this sense of duty. A man must be worthy of his ancestors and of Rome. His own life was short, and without honour nothing; the life of Rome went on. ”

“ It had been a terrible crossing: men, horses, and animals fell ill and died. Hannibal himself lost an eye. But he had crossed the mountains and marched right past Flaminius, who was not strong enough to attack him, on the road to Rome. This was done on purpose to lure Flaminius on; for Hannibal knew that he longed to fight before the other consul, Servilius, could join him with his army and share the glory. Hannibal had learned a great deal about the country and he succeeded in misleading Flaminius as to his movements, drawing him on into a deadly trap. ”

“ It was too stiff and rigid to cope with the growing tasks of administering the great empire over which Rome had to rule. Bit by bit Sulla’s system broke down; his rules were swept aside. In the years between his death and that of Caesar the rule of Rome extended enormously; each extension made the need of a strong and efficient Government more pressing. The actual government of Rome through the Senate was neither strong nor efficient. Nothing was well managed. This growing mismanagement compelled men of active minds to look around and ask themselves what was wrong. ”

“ Such a man, all ignorant of the way to win a soldier’s life, has confused peace and war. Oh lost honour! Oh mighty Carthage, exalted by the shameful downfall of Italy!’ It is said that he put from him the lips of his virtuous wife and his little children, a free citizen no longer, and with grim resolution turned his eyes to the ground, till with the weight of advice never given by any before him he strengthened the wavering purpose of the Fathers, and amid the mourning of 16 his friends hurried into a noble exile. ”

“ It was easy to breed disorder; to spoil the things that had made Rome great; very hard to make alterations. The men who really served the Republic were not the politicians clamouring in the market-place, orating in the Assembly, or the idle dirty mobs who listened to them and were ready to shout for this to-day and the other thing to-morrow. Them Scipio scorned. The real workers and builders he thought were the silent soldiers fighting and working in all the dreariness and discomfort of camps in foreign countries. ”